ABSTRACT
William Shakespeare having marvelously exploited his affinity with the comic aspects of the Vice. The comic hyperbole describing Vice as 'That villainous abominable misleader of youth' does not actually function in his dramatic life, but it creates the illness of which he dies. The Elizabethans, habituated by their transitional stage to hybrids of this sort, were completely at home with the double image and the double sentiment. The shadow of a serious moral judgment hovers about him, disturbing us as it disturbed Maurice Morgann, and when it finally closes in on him Falstaff succumbs to the moral severity which is always present in the traditional stage image of the Vice. The Elizabethan poets of the secular drama took him as they found him and reworked him gradually, his traditional status and rooted popularity more authoritative for them than the sort of psychological analysis that troubles us today.
