middle period, from Sejanus to The Devil is an Ass, show more restraint in the handling of character, as well as far greater care in construction. The figures are typical rather than allegorical, and the plot in general centres about certain definite objects of satire. Both plot and characterization are more closely unified.

The Devil is an Ass marks a return to the supernatural and allegorical. The main action, however, belongs strictly to the type of the later drama, especially as exemplified by The Alchemist. The fanciful motive of the infernal visitant to earth was found to be of too slight texture for Jonson’s sternly moral and satirical purpose. In the development of the drama it breaks down completely, and is crowded out by the realistic plot. Thus what promised at first to be the chief, and remains in some respects the happiest, motive of the play comes in the final execution to be little better than an inartistic and inharmonious excrescence. Yet Jonson’s words to Drummond seem to indicate that he still looked upon it as the real kernel of the play.[11]

The action is thus easily divisible into two main lines; the devil-plot, involving the fortunes of Satan, Pug and Iniquity, and the satirical or main plot. This division is the more satisfactory, since Satan and Iniquity are not once brought into contact with the chief actors, while Pug’s connection with them is wholly external, and affects only his own fortunes. He is, as Herford has already pointed out, merely ‘the fly upon the engine-wheel, fortunate to escape with a bruising’ (Studies, p. 320). He forms, however, the connecting link between the two plots, and his function in the drama must be regarded from two different points of view, according as it shares in the realistic or the supernatural element.

I. The Devil-Plot

Jonson’s title, The Devil is an Ass, expresses with perfect adequacy the familiarity and contempt with which this once terrible personage had come to be regarded in the later Elizabethan period. The poet, of course, is deliberately archaizing, and the figures of devil and Vice are made largely conformable to the purposes of satire. Several years before, in the Dedication to The Fox,[12] Jonson had expressed his contempt for the introduction of ‘fools and devils and those antique relics of barbarism’, characterizing them as ‘ridiculous and exploded follies’. He treats the same subject with biting satire in The Staple of News.[13] Yet with all his devotion to realism in matters of petty detail, of local color, and of contemporary allusion, he was, as we have seen, not without an inclination toward allegory. Thus in Every Man out of his Humor the figure of Macilente is very close to a purely allegorical expression of envy. In Cynthia’s Revels the process was perfectly conscious, for in the Induction to that play the characters are spoken of as Virtues and Vices. In Poetaster again we have the purging of Demetrius and Crispinus. Jonson’s return to this field in The Devil is an Ass is largely prophetic of the future course of his drama. The allegory of The Staple of News is more closely woven into the texture of the play than is that of The Devil is an Ass; and the conception of Pecunia and her retinue is worked out with much elaboration. In the Second Intermean the purpose of this play is explained as a refinement of method in the use of allegory. For the old Vice with his wooden dagger to snap at everybody he met, or Iniquity, appareled ‘like Hokos Pokos, in a juggler’s jerkin’, he substitutes ‘vices male and female’, ‘attired like men and women of the time’. This of course is only a more philosophical and abstract statement of the idea which he expresses in The Devil is an Ass (1. 1. 120 f.) of a world where the vices are not distinguishable by any outward sign from the virtues:

The New Inn and The Magnetic Lady are also penetrated with allegory of a sporadic and trivial nature. Jonson’s use of devil and Vice in the present play is threefold. It is in part earnestly allegorical, especially in Satan’s long speech in the first scene; it is in part a satire upon the employment of what he regarded as barbarous devices; and it is, to no small extent, itself a resort for the sake of comic effect to the very devices which he ridiculed.

Jonson’s conception of the devil was naturally very far from mediæval, and he relied for the effectiveness of his portrait upon current disbelief in this conception. Yet mediævalism had not wholly died out, and remnants of the morality-play are to be found in many plays of the Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. Rev. John Upton, in his Critical Observations on Shakespeare, 1746, was the first to point out the historical connection between Jonson’s Vice and devils and those of the pre-Shakespearian drama. In modern times the history of the devil and the Vice as dramatic figures has been thoroughly investigated, the latest works being those of Dr. L.W. Cushman and Dr. E. Eckhardt, at whose hands the subject has received exhaustive treatment. The connection with Machiavelli’s novella of Belfagor was pointed out by Count Baudissin,[14] Ben Jonson und seine Schule, Leipzig 1836, and has been worked out exhaustively by Dr. E. Hollstein in a Halle dissertation, 1901. Dr. C.H. Herford, however, had already suggested that the chief source of the devil-plot was to be found in the legend of Friar Rush.

1. The Devil in the pre-Shakespearian Drama

The sources for the conception of the devil in the mediæval drama are to be sought in a large body of non-dramatic literature. In this literature the devil was conceived of as a fallen angel, the enemy of God and his hierarchy, and the champion of evil. As such he makes his appearance in the mystery-plays. The mysteries derived their subjects from Bible history, showed comparatively little pliancy, and dealt always with serious themes. In them the devil is with few exceptions a serious figure. Occasionally, however, even at this early date, comedy and satire find place. The most prominent example is the figure of Titivillus in the Towneley cycle.

In the early moralities the devil is still of primary importance, and is always serious. But as the Vice became a more and more prominent figure, the devil became less and less so, and in the later drama his part is always subordinate. The play of Nature (c. 1500) is the first morality without a devil. Out of fifteen moralities of later date tabulated by Cushman, only four are provided with this character.

The degeneration of the devil as a dramatic figure was inevitable.