This book centers on the uses and abuses of language in early English drama. It examines a
number of plays alongside classical and sixteenth-century rhetorical treatises and focuses on
the appearances of one stock character the Vice figure to determine how he uses language to
dupe implicate and control others in the plays. The Vice figure is usually very skilled in
the use of rhetoric and in many cases seems to be so persuasive and entertaining that the
moral aims of the drama appear to be jeopardized. Douglas W. Hayes investigates the moral and
rhetorical ambivalence of the Vice figure not only in Medieval morality plays and Tudor
interludes but also in the language of later characters related to the Vice such as Marlowe's
Mephastophilis and Shakespeare's Falstaff and Iago.
