ABSTRACT
The audience for popular drama in the age of Shakespeare inherited from medieval drama its concept of what a play performance is fundamentally about. The Shakespearean characters, and dozens of other Elizabethan stage figures, inherit the functions of conventional morality characters: the central and mutable hero, the agent of sin and temptation, and the agent of repentance and good counsel. The convention and myth of the human predicament as a morality play seems to have occupied a place in the mind of Marlowe or Shakespeare very similar to the place which Scribe’s convention of the well-made play holds for Ibsen or Chekhov. The instrument of Richard’s correction, Henry Bolingbroke, becomes in his own turn a figure of royal morality. The morality play within the play in Hamlet is initiated insincerely, as a device of revenge, and it ends in failure, in the perception of incipient tragedy.
