As for the Vice, he commonly acted the part of a broad, rampant jester and buffoon, full of mad pranks and mischief-making, liberally dashed with a sort of tumultuous, swaggering fun.  He was arrayed in fantastic garb, with something of drollery in its appearance, so as to aid the comic effect of his action, and armed with a dagger of lath, perhaps as symbolical that his use of weapons was but to the end of provoking his own defeat.  Therewithal he was vastly given to cracking ribald and saucy jokes with and upon the Devil, and treating him in a style of coarse familiarity and mockery; and a part of his ordinary business was to bestride the Devil, and beat him till he roared, and the audience roared with him; the scene ending with his being carried off to Hell on the Devil’s back.  Much of the old custom in these two personages is amusingly set forth in Ben Jonson’s Staple of News, where, at the end of each Act, we have some imaginary spectators commenting on the performance.  At the end of the first Act, one of them expressing a fear that the play has no Fool in it, as the Vice was often called, Gossip Tattle delivers herself thus:  “My husband, Timothy Tattle, God rest his poor soul! was wont to say there was no play without a Fool and a Devil in’t; he was for the Devil still, God bless him!  The Devil for his money, he would say; I would fain see the Devil.”  It being asked, “But was the Devil a proper man?” Gossip Mirth replies, “As fine a gentleman of his inches as ever I saw trusted to the stage or anywhere else; and loved the commonwealth as well as ever a patriot of them all:  he would carry away the Vice on his back, quick, to Hell, wherever he came, and reform abuses.”  Again, at the end of the second Act, the question being put, “How like you the Vice in the play?” Widow Tattle complains, “But here is never a fiend to carry him away.  Besides, he has never a wooden dagger!  I would not give a rush for a Vice that has not a wooden dagger, to snap at everybody he meets.”  Whereupon Mirth observes, “That was the old way, gossip, when Iniquity came in, like Hocus-Pocus, in a juggler’s jerkin, with false skirts, like the knave of clubs."[3]

    [3] Shakespeare has several allusions to this old stage custom. 
    See the author’s Harvard Edition of Shakespeare, vol. v. page
    222, note 17; also, vol ix. pages 202, 203, notes 8 and 9.

The most ancient specimen of a Moral-Play known to have survived dates as far back as the reign of Henry VI., which closed in 1461.  It is entitled The Castle of Perseverance, and is opened by Mundus, Belial, and Caro descanting on their several gifts:  Humanum Genus, who represents mankind, then announces himself, just born, and naked; while he is speaking Good Angel and Bad Angel appear on his right and left, each claiming him as a follower.  He prefers Bad Angel, who leads him straight to Mundus; the latter orders his friends Voluptas and Stultitia to take him in hand.  Detractio, who calls himself Backbiter,