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Dangerous Sport: The Audience's Engagement with Vice in the Moral Interludes

receptiveness to the dramatic vitality of the moralities actually accentuates an apparent problem noted by a generation of unamused scholars namely, that the bawdy, scurrilous vices tend to steal the show from the wholesome but tiresome virtues. Recent critical studies of these playsborne out by the increasing availability of performances have made us aware of their engaging theatricality and especially of their lively use of interactions with the audience. The characters who carry on most of that lively interaction are, of course, the comic vices. Hence the apparent conflict between theatrical attraction and moraL purpose that was implicit in the advertisements of the plays themselves when they lured their audiences with promises of the mirth and game to be provided by the vices: what engages the spectators is the representation of the very vices that it is the play's business to make them reject. My concern here, then, is with the ways in which the morality dramatists worked to resolve that conflict, and to reinforce rather than