In Malory's tale of the Grail Quest, Sir Lancelot comes to a castle courtyard guarded by two lions. He draws his sword:

Lancelot, faced with wild beasts, understandably takes practical steps to defend himself. He is a knight and we have seen his prowess in Malory's earlier narratives. But Lancelot is now well advanced in the Grail-quest and should surely know that he is situated in a different kind of narrative which moves to rhythms whose cause is concealed and offers signs whose meanings must be sought beyond the evidence of the senses. These lions will not respond as natural lions do, because they represent tests of Lancelot's faith; he finally passes them by making the sign of the cross upon himself. In literary terms, Lancelot has not identified the genre that he is in. This confrontation with lions is also a confrontation of literary modes.

If we compare Malory's version with the French Grail, we notice a significant difference. As Lancelot draws his sword there, he sees:

The intervention and the voice are one. They come from the hidden controller of the narrative and force Lancelot back into the appropriate mode. Malory replaces the "flaming hand" by the textually disruptive entry of the dwarf. A literal dwarf could not disarm an armed knght with a single blow, but dwarf running in presents a comically reductive reorking of divine intervention. Malory intensifies our awareness of the disjunction between two kinds of narative, causatively or ideologiclally ordered, and confusess our sense of narrative control. When Lancelot approaches the French lions:

whereas Malory's lions become more naturalistic and

Though reworking an existing symbolic narrative, Malory persists in stubbornly endorsing Lancelot's physical presence and courage in a world that professes allegorical organisation.

This problematising interaction of the literal -- or in dramatic terms the mimetic -- with the allegorical lies at the centre of this paper. I take as my example a play which, rather like Malory's short episode, foregrounds these tensions and seems self-consciously to realise the gulf between allegorical clarity and the challenge presented by human experience, mimetically presented, to that imposed order.

Judging by the fact that it is extant in two printed editions, of 1560 and 1565, Nice Wanton seems to have been a comparatively popular play at that time. But its composition antedates the extant texts; a reference to the king (8) and a failed rhyme, of "queens/things" (553-5) where "kings " is needed, in the final patriotic prayer for the monarch indicates that it was originally written for a male monarch, either Edward or Henry VIII. It is therefore usually dated c1535-53, with the probability being Edward's reign (1549-1553).

Our play belongs to the sub-genre of educational interludes, taking as its motto "He that spareth the rod, the child doth hate" (2) and thus represents the influence of post-Reformation humanism. While we have no evidence of its performers or performance, it is usually held to have been written for performance by children; Parry suggests it was for one of the London companies, the Children of the Chapel Royal or the Children of St. Paul's, but Shapiro believes it more appropriate to a provincial grammar school. It dramatises the exemplum of a family of three children and their easy-going mother who indulges two of the children; both resort to truancy, fall into criminal ways and die in consequence, while the third, who by some miracle escapes that corruption, follows his education and is able not only to lead a socially responsible existence but also to save his mother from suicide when she realises the shame that finally attaches to her irresponsible parenting. It has been pointed out that the play falls into two distinct and equal parts, the period of joyful fall (1-253) and that of mature retribution, which suggests the possibility of performance in two parts, perhaps at a banquet.

In itself the play seems little more than a heavily programmed curiosity; it is difficult to share David Parry's view that it is "well-written". It presents obvious problems of tone and effect arising from its mixed modes. Shapiro excludes it from the generic parodies which he finds characteristic of children's theatre; Levin mocks the "deliberately-bad-therefore-good" approach, citing specifically an unidentified critic's comment on Nice Wanton as "a piece of debunking of parental, scholastic and judicial authority." Both Wickham and Parry consider it a theatrical challenge: how best to manage for a contemporary audience its mixture of mimesis and didacticism. For Wickham, the answer lies "within the 'game' conventions of the medieval stage" using "the double image of actor and character". For Parry the play demands "a sensitive approach to characterization" with careful gradations both among the characters and also in their progressive realisation.

Perhaps a more fruitful starting-point, however, is Tennenhouse's claim that in Nice Wanton and Impatient Poverty "an emergent secular viewpoint is inscribed within an older and well-worn literary motif." The playwright works within the traditions of didactic dramatic allegory which has a deterministic force but his them, is the educative and reforming power of firm discipline in home and school and of a moral education. While Tennenhouse ably defines the theological and philosophical tensions within the play, I wish to suggest that the play is also a meeting point of two different concepts of theatre, mimetic and allegorical, and that the tensions between those different modes lie at the root of the philosophical contradictions that Tennenhouse identifies. The playwright's resources were not professional or adult actors, but children, and their potential audience both their peers and their parents. Mimesis dominates the early part of the play, giving place progressively to allegory.

Allegory is a mode more suited to the page than the stage. We can access imaginatively an allegorical text, such as Piers Plowman of Pilgrim's Progress, but when an allegorical figura assumes human form on a stage, the audience's latent visual literalism readily intervenes. Allegory provides the writer with a useful form of shorthand; characters do not have to be established, they come ready labelled, without internal complexity or conflict, incapable of change. Technically, these figures have both subjective and objective aspects; they externalise the inner impulses of the individual, so that the outcome of the battles for Man's soul between Virtues and Vices is recognised to be determined ultimately by the will of the individual. But allegorical drama inevitably finds expression in the forms of the experienced world. Considered on a mimetic level, allegorized figures, such as the Vices in the Mankind, acquire the character of the comic obsessive, various and attractively energetic in their manifestations but comically bewildered when confronted by the limitations of their power.

The surface syntax of allegorical plays is deceptively simple, essentially picaresque and linear. The audience follows at an informed distance the chronological progress of an allegorised "Everyman" figure from fall to reform. But the underlying syntax is more complex. As Paul de Man notes:

Classical notions of mimesis prove distracting. As Fletcher puts it:

Accordingly. preconceptions of naturalistic causation have to be suspended; the plays may have "dramatic action" but they have no "plot", as commonly understood. Discussing Lyndsay's Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis, Joanne Spencer Kantrowitz observes:

Within these parameters the form is dynamic, manifested in many was, from the deterministically allegorical, through a more ambivalent realisation of personal-social interplay, to an allegorically informed but essentially mimetic action.

Perhaps the closest we come to what one might term "pure allegorical drama", my first 'benchmark', in the English tradition is The Castell of Perseverance, which achieves an almost ritualistic or heroic quality in its formal patterning of forces around the figure of Humanum Genus. Our modern title, deriving from the famous stage-plan, gives primacy to the set with its scaffolds surrounding the central playing area and the castle at the mid-point as the key to the play. This seemingly extensive set, prepared for a large cast and open-air performance, must have helped determine the style of the play. From the start, the action is formalised, utilising a declamatory mode of delivery and extended and repetitive speeches. Allegorical figurae reveal and define themselves and establish their physical and moral domination of the playing space, producing an allegorical action which transmits a deterministic moral. The human figure is escorted, almost in arrest, between his good and bad angels and acknowledges his own inability to exercise positive choice without external aid:

Driven by necessity to the World, he falls into a life of indulgence, led round the seven deadly sins under Man's three foes -- World, Flesh and Devil -- and resists the entreaties of Confessio to repent. Unable to read the genre he occupies, Humanum Genus know less than the audience who have a God-like overview of the cosmic battle. The structure of the action itself, around the inevitable chronological progression of Humankind through his/her life-cycle, continues that determinism.

The realisation of that determinism on stage is seen in Humanum Genus's repentance. After his wilful resistance, Penitencia enters with a lance:

The externalisation of the inner impulse to repentance makes Man appear to the audience as the object rather than the agent of his fate. Once safely inside the castle, Man becomes merely the site of an allegorically cosmic, and literally comic, battle in whose outcome he takes no dramatic part, though it is his will that theoretically determines the outcome. His sole independent dramatised choice comes when he succumbs to the temptations of Covetyse and leaves the security of the castle, dying in sin and in disillusion as he realises that he cannot pass on his wealth to an heir. Here he literalises the allegorized castle as his own real-estate, and his cry to God results from mercenary disillusionment, nothing more. As the Devil drags his soul towards Hell, the daughters of God debate and God intervenes on the side of mercy to rescue Man from what the play seems to have demonstrated was his appropriate wilful end.

The play's interest lies in the allegorical figurae within the formal structures -- literary and physical -- not in the fate of our human representative, in whom we have no part. He has gained no self-knowledge because he has been allowed no "self". And in that realisation, the humanised representation of the sins bears out Fletcher's comment on the comic obsessive as they are comically defeated by the roses thrown upon them by the Virtues.

Compared with what I have termed "deterministic allegorical drama", the author of Everyman makes Humankind the producer and product of his/her own decisions. The play requires a limited cast, seems designed for indoor performance, and adopts a plain style. The Everyman-figure journeys through a variety of allegorical modes, but the first set of friends that he encounters after warning of his imminent death and judgement are the ostensibly external corrupting figures of the domestic and social world -- Fellowship, Kindred and Cousin, and Goods -- seemingly like the objective Foes and Sins of the Castell. His instinct is to blame them as one by one they reject him.

But they are also the projection of his choices, as much subjective representations of character as objective temptations. Everyman cannot evade his responsibility and will not be saved by external forces alone. Goods functions even-handedly as the means of Christian charity and the object of inordinate worldliness (429-34), according to projected human values. He can say appropriately: "Marry, thou brought thyself in care" (454). Through progressive disillusion, Everyman is educated to an understanding of his own responsibility and hence prepared for a meaningful submission to the allied processes of his own mortality, represented in the allegory of the senses and faculties, and the authorised spiritual preparation which he must make for judgement, represented by the allegory of the Church. The action appropriately moves from mimetic to ritualistic and deterministic as the play proceeds. Unlike Humanum Genus in the Castell, Everyman learns to read his genre rightly, changes, and comes to a willing renunciation of the world;

Shakespeare's Henry IV Part I offers a mimetic drama, allegorized rather than allegorical, which was written for professional players and performed in the public theatre. The central figure, Hal, stands in relation to three characters -- to Falstaff, the tavern-knight, apparently his close friend; Hotspur, the wild romantic who rebels against the King and is finally killed by Hal; and his father Bollingbroke, the politic king who usurped the throne and is concerned for the future of his son and the realm. These three can be read also as external manifestations of Hal's character; as potential roles for him to occupy; and as forces bearing down upon him, seeking to move him to their various positions. Hal himself appears both as a youth and as the Will, defined by his ability to choose. From the outset we are made conscious that Hal is constructing himself in the role of the prodigal and enacting a prodigal-son drama reminiscent of the Youth interlude, in preparation for his emergence as a popular leader:

Hal is agent, not victim, and also author of his own play.

Those around him manifest the obsessive characteristics, vitality and often comic energy, as figures in allegorical drama.

Hal even signals the generic link by referring to Falstaff as "that reverend vice, that grey iniquity" (2.4). Like the Vice, Falstaff's hope is through Hal to dominate the realm with his values:

But these figures are not allegorical, despite their obvious roots in that tradition. They share a stage with other, more naturalistic beings, show a capacity for self-reflexion and self-parody, a degree of self-consciousness which at least raises the potential for change. Moreover, there is a dramatic price to pay. The direct openness of these allegorized characters casts Hal's exploitative deviousness in a cynical light. Hal's harsh comment:

and his reductive conclusion to Hotspur's dying speech:

Hal For worms, brave Percy. Fare thee well, great heart!

reflect the triumph of considered pragmatism over impetuous idealism, no less than the sudden "resurrection" of the apparently deceased Falstaff recalls the defiant indestructibility of the Vice. The rejection of Falstaff at the end of Part 2 reads as an allegorical expulsion of the forces of social disorder at the start of the new realm and the emergence of the new Hal. But it goes against the naturalistic appeal of the character and casts a critical light on Hal's calculating approach. Unsurprisingly, popular opinion seems to have demanded the return of Falstaff in a more central comic role.

I offer these three examples as benchmarks. They represent not a chronological development, but examples of different ways of handling allegory in drama. In each case, the staging and acting resources contribute to that solution. And each has its strengths and limitations.It is against these benchmarks that I wish to measure Nice Wanton.

Allegory informs the underlying structure of Nice Wanton. It realises the impact of Man's three foes on three individuals -- the Flesh, represented in Dalila, the daughter, who becomes a prostitute; the World, represented in Ismael, the son, who becomes a thief; and the Devil, who is represented in Eulalia, the mother, who attempts the unforgivable sin of despair in seeking to kill herself because of her shame. The primary focus of the play is, however, upon the worldly consequences of undisciplined conduct and the practical benefits of education to society. "Education" here is means both learning and "discipline", a fear of the punishment that will follow from disobedience. The Messenger says at the start:

The learning outcomes of this education are both spiritual and social:

Respect for hierarchy is primary -- fear of God, obedience to parents. Knowledge and "qualities" -- we might paraphrase as "character" -- equip the adult for a life of conformity; humanity can be schooled to virtues social and spiritual. This concern predicates the converse. Humanity is deterministically programmed by Original Sin:

The "Three Foes" structure is translated into contraventions of the three laws -- natural, civil and spiritual -- each of which produces its own logical consequences. Dalila is punished in the flesh, contracts syphilis, the disease of her trade, and dies. Ismael is caught, judicially condemned according to the law of the land, and hanged. Xantippe, the mother who refused to coerce her children into obedience, is reduced to suicidal despair at their fate and the blame that people attach to her. Unlike the allegorical drama, the action follows a clear pattern of causation; human-beings work out their own fates. This play-world has its own rationale and metes out appropriate justice, an exemplary narrative heavily underlined in Prologue and Epilogue and voiced within the play by Xantippe's neighbour, Eulalia, and by the dutiful brother, Barnabas. If discipline is not applied at school and in the home, it will be supplied later, and in more terrible form.

The dominant style at the outset is mimetic. The child-actors, probably aged 9-10 years. playing Ismael and Dalila enact the darker side of childhood -- the verbal insults (43, 48, 103) and physical bullying (44, 102); the playground smut (51-2); the rebellious disrespect for authority in teachers (60) and in adults (100-1). It is difficult to agree with Parry's assessment of them as "quite delightful and charming". Their rich costume reflects the indulgence of their mother:

The speeches of Xantippe capture the authentic tones of defensive motherhood, ironically unable to believe wrong of her children:

producing a satire on the indulgent parent.

In contrast, the figure of Barnabas comes straight from the allegorical tradition, and is clearly ill at ease in this mimetic mode. Versed in Biblical quotation (26,Ecclesiasticus; 33, St. Paul), and pious prayers for divine intervention to effect reform (37-8), he echoes from within the play the Messenger's moral:

Learning bringeth knowledge of God, and honest living to get (47)

and supplies the ideal of virtue, praised by Eulalia (137). As Janette Dillon has pointed out, both Ismael and Dalila, and Barnabas "recognise the other's discourse as representative, and perhaps also productive, of a moral position". But because Barnabas moves within a mimetic rather than an allegorical action, he takes on a mimetic role as the humourless swot who creates himself as victim, understandably the butt of his siblings' bullying and ridicule. The result is confusing. The tedious diligence of

sounds pompous -- that "did he say" suggesting a degree of self-satisfaction in the parroting of a text which Barnabas then promptly applies, assuming the role and voice of moral superior. Against this the racy vulgarity and reckless singing of the other children does become dramatically more effective and the victimisation of Barnabas naturalistically intelligible. The child-actor here is in tension with the role.

As the two children move towards into crime,they bring in a social allegory, akin to the False Friends section of Everyman. Although the figures of Iniquity, who instructs the truanting children in idle ways, and Worldly Shame, who brings despair upon Xantippe, are distinguished nominally, they seem to be the same character, and the same actor could double the parts. Wickham points to the fact that Worldly Shame's references to "Dalila my daughter" (457) and "my son" (458), and his boast that

makes sense only in terms of the work of Iniquity. Like the False Friends of Everyman, these two figures have both subjective and objective aspects. Iniquity is both the product of the activities of the children, who call him up, and the force of corruption which society brings to bear upon them. The play widens its reference as the children, now perhaps played by the older child-players, are seen paying dies in a tavern. The world of academic education and discipline that lies offstage at the start yields to a different "education", a different schoolroom, and a different instructor, no less forceful than the schoolmaster who beats his unruly pupils:

The ubiquity of the Vice is seen when he appears as court-bailiff at Ismael's trial. Ismael is condemned but redeems himself somewhat by informing on Iniquity, whose corrupting influence he blames for his life of crime, apparently not having yet learned to accept his own responsibility:

The despatch of Iniquity by the honest judge represents the purging of the realm, but only temporarily so, as Iniquity reminds the audience that he is indestructibly both agent and product of the collective ills of society:

Worldly Shame embodies the double aspect of "shame", both subjective -- "the painful emotion arising from something dishonouring, ridiculous or indecorous in one's own conduct..." (OED shame 1); and objective -- "disgrace, ignominy, loss of esteem or reputation" (OED shame 3). Like Iniquity, this figure is collective, gathering together the combined gossip of society and suggesting the ultimate force of public opinion whose origins can be seen in Eulalia's admonitions earlier which Xantippe defiantly rejected, but also the sense of shame that drives Xantippe towards spiritual death.

With the coming of retribution, Barnabas confidently assumes his allegorical role as voice of God. At one level he is the model of active Christian good works, offering charity to his disfigured and dying sister. But at the same time he sternly reminds her that she should be grieving not for her physical sickness but for her sins:

He takes a similarly stern line with his mother, whom he prevents from suicide:

These are not the consoling words of brother to sister or of son to mother; that confident admonitory style signifies the voice of God: "For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth" (Hebrews 12, v.6). Barnabas projects the disciplined ethos of education as the human counterpart to divine methodology; God is the great Tutor, the faithful His diligent pupils. Where human will fails, a different ordering force takes over, and the action passes from human control.

In this juxtaposition of allegorical and mimetic modes raises the awkward question of why, given their common backgrounds, Barnabas was from the outset different from his siblings is implicit. The playwright chooses to foreground that question at the end of the play, offering an explanation:

This assertion of the determinism which is a feature of pure allegory forces us to recognise not only the inconsistency of dramatic mode, but also the challenge that Barnabas offers to the very theme that he purports to support, the educability of fallen Man to virtue and service. Allegory takes us towards the concept of the elect. And the inability of Barnabas to do anything other than protect Dalila and Xantippe from the worst consequences of their failings suggests that without that election, we are irredeemable. This has led David Bevington to suggest that the play has "a Calvinistic slant"; I would rather point to that elective theme as a by-product of authorial self-awareness and artistic integrity.

Summing up Paul de Man's essay on 'Pascal's Allegory of Persuasion', Stephen J. Greenblatt comments:

This statement seems to me borne out by the meeting of mimesis and allegory in Nice Wanton. From one standpoint this is an artistically flawed play in comparison with the benchmark examples that I offered. But from another point of view it is more honest in its self-evidently flawed structures and internal contradictions. The foregrounding of the paradox of the allegorical Barnabas within the mimetic world, both dramatically and explicitly, acknowledges that the simplifications of the play's surface cover a question that defies simple answer. Despite the programmed neatness with which justice is dispensed to the sinners, we detect a deeper uncertainty and questioning of such a purposively ordered play-world.

David Mills

University of Liverpool

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