Acts old Iniquity, and in the fit
Of mimicry gets th' opinion of a wit."
In the Staple of Newes, acted A.D. 1625, it is said, "Iniquity came in like Hokos-pokos in a jugler's jerkin, with false skirts like the knave of clubs;" and afterward, "Here is never a fiend to carry him, the Vice, away; besides, he has never a wooden dagger: I'd not give a rush for a Vice that has not a wooden dagger to snap at every one he meetes:" in another part, the Vice is described, "in his long coat, shaking his wooden dagger." Hence it appears this character had a dress peculiar to himself. Philip Stubs, in his Anatomie of Abuses, printed A.D. 1595, says, "You must go to the playhouse if you will learne to play the Vice, to sweare, teare, and blaspheme both heaven and hell:" and again, "Who can call him a wise man, who playeth the part of a Foole or a Vice?" I remember to have seen a stage direction for the Vice, to lay about him lustily with a great pole, and tumble the characters one over the other with great noise and riot, "for dysport sake." Even when regular tragedies and comedies were introduced upon the stage, we may trace the decendants of this facetious Iniquity in the clowns and the fools which so frequently disgraced them. The great master of human nature, in compliance with the false taste of the age in which he lived, has admitted this motley character into the most serious parts of one of his best tragedies. The propensity to laugh at the expense of good sense and propriety, is well ridiculed in the "Intermeane" at the end of the first act of the Staple of Newes, by Jonson, and again in the Preludium to the Careless Shepherdess, a pastoral tragi-comedy by Thomas Goffe, in 1656, where several characters are introduced upon the stage as spectators, waiting for the commencement of the performance. One of them says:
Why, I would have a fool in every act,
Be 't comedy or tragedy: I've laugh'd
Until I cr'yd again, to see what faces
The rogue will make. Oh! it does me good
To see him hold out's chin, hang down his hands,
And twirle his bawble. There is nere a part
About him but breaks jests. I heard a fellow