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122-402: The Macro Manuscript is a collection of three 15th-century English morality plays , known as the "Macro plays" or "Macro moralities": Mankind , The Castle of Perseverance , and Wisdom . So named for its 18th-century owner Reverend Cox Macro (1683–1767), the manuscript contains the earliest complete examples of English morality plays. A stage plan attached to The Castle of Perseverance

244-418: A melodramatic manner, with mustache-twirling, eye-rolling , leering , cackling , and hand-rubbing . In 1895, Thomas Edison and Alfred Clark made The Execution of Mary Stuart depicting Mary, Queen of Scots being decapitated. It describes neither Mary nor her executioner as villains (though at the time, it was deemed so realistic that audience members believed an actual woman had been beheaded in

366-460: A convincing villain must be given a characterization that provides a motive for doing wrong, as well as being a worthy adversary to the hero. As put by film critic Roger Ebert : "Each film is only as good as its villain. Since the heroes and the gimmicks tend to repeat from film to film, only a great villain can transform a good try into a triumph." The actor Tod Slaughter typically portrayed villainous characters on both stage and screen in

488-434: A cumbersome Latin loanword. The first vice character on stage, Mischief, immediately picks up on Mercy's excessive Latinisms and continues with this end rhyme in order to mock Mercy's ornate speech: I beseche yow hertyly, leve yowr calcacyon. Leve yowr chaffe, leve yowr corn, leve yowr dalyacyon. Yowr wytt ys lytyll, yowr hede ys mekyll, ye are full of predycacyon (ll. 45-47). Shortly thereafter Mischief fully switches to

610-450: A drake. (As devil doughty, like a dragon on my sack.) I champe and I chafe, I chocke on my chynne, (I champ and I chew and I thrust out my chin;) I am boystous and bold, as Belyal the blake. (I am boisterous and bold as Belial the black!) What folk that I grope thei gapyn and grenne, (The folk that I grasp they gasp and they groan,) Iwys, fro Carlylle into Kent my carpynge thei take, (From Carlisle to Kent, my carping they take!) Bothe

732-467: A four stress line to a faster and more excited two stress line (ll. 610–646), before returning to the four stress line after a scene change. Alliteration is put to wonderful effect in The Castle of Perseverance . It appears in every stanza of more than four lines, though this is not evenly distributed, with later debate scenes employing less alliteration and the characters World, Belial, Flesh, and

854-534: A hideous monster who destroyed his family out of spite . Shakespeare also ensured that Iago in Othello and Antonio in The Tempest were completely void of redeeming traits. In an analysis of Russian fairy tales , Vladimir Propp concluded that the majority of stories had only eight " dramatis personae ", one being the villain. This analysis has been widely applied to non-Russian tales. The actions within

976-477: A human faculty; supporting characters are personifications of abstract concepts, each aligned with either good or evil, virtue or vice. The clashes between the supporting characters often catalyze a process of experiential learning for the protagonist, and, as a result, provide audience members and/or readers with moral guidance, reminding them to meditate and think upon their relationship to God, as well as their social and/or religious community. Many, but not all, of

1098-496: A literary form that unites the moralities, the Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms offers this definition: "Morality plays are dramatized allegories, in which personified virtues, vices, diseases, and temptations struggle for the soul of Man." The same book defines allegory as "a story or visual image with a second distinct meaning partially hidden behind its literal or visible meaning. The principal technique of allegory

1220-426: A literary form. The plays also resemble each other in regard to thematic content. They feature other common characteristics that are not necessarily common to all texts within the genre. Particularly notable thematic commonalities include: the transitoriness of life in relation to the afterlife, the importance of divine mercy, the use of misprision by vice characters, and the inevitable cycle of sin and penitence found in

1342-479: A medieval morality play, continue to pull at the genre's incohesive threading. There are points of distinction in morality plays, beginning with Everyman , which can generally be attributed to humanism. According to Thomas Betteridge and Greg Walker, the majority of English dramas were religious in some form. However, plays are increasingly divorced from religion, and in particular, the staging of God and priests. While drama continued to contain religious themes, it

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1464-426: A mohawk, and her nails painted bright red. Her goal throughout the film is to become queen and disrupt the coupling of Ariel and Prince Eric , both of which connect villainy to drag queens , suggesting that there is inherent evil in those who do drag. Villains in fiction commonly function in the dual role of adversary and foil to a story's heroes. In their role as an adversary, the villain serves as an obstacle

1586-488: A more direct way than live-action villains. That their character design is based on caricatures of racist, antisemitic, and/or homophobic stereotypes with exaggerated features. That female animated villains are portrayed in ways that feed into misogynistic ideas and traditional gender roles. Sattar Sharmin and Sanyat Tania have argued that animated villains frequently fall into two categories: women who exhibit societally undesirable traits, or men displaying feminine traits. In

1708-408: A much smaller generic portion of humanity, '"every merchant," in juxtaposition to Mankind's earlier, full representation of all humanity. In Skelton's Magnyfycence , Magnificence and the vices that corrupt him represent a particular person, King Henry VIII, and his court 'minions' who were expelled for their poor behaviour. Scholars have long noted that the medieval morality plays were written after

1830-460: A nonsense mixture of Latin and English to continue mocking Mercy's Latinizing, as well as to mangle Mercy's earlier reference to the parable of the wheat and tares: "Corn servit bredibus, chaffe horsibus, straw fyrybusque" (l. 57, translated: Corn serves bread, chaff horses, straw fires). The result of this is not only to show that the formal structures of Latin are nothing more than formal structures that can be spoofed and misused, but also to create

1952-491: A peculiar trait that one will likely notice while reading these plays is the tendency of characters to describe in speech the actions they are (presumably) simultaneously performing as a way of verbally encoding stage directions. For example, in Mankind , the character Mankind says, "Thys earth wyth my spade I shall assay to delffe" (l. 328); this line, meaning, "This earth with my spade I will attempt to dig," appears to serve as

2074-443: A printed text, in four different sources. Two of these four sources were printed by Pynson and two were printed by John Skot. Pamela King notes how Everyman's status as a printed text pushes the boundaries of the medieval morality genre; she writes, "It was also one of the very first plays to be printed, and in some respects belongs more to the early Tudor tradition than that of the late Middle Ages." Other English moralities include

2196-423: A pure villain. Folklore and fairy tale villains can also play a myriad of roles that can influence or propel a story forward. In fairy tales villains can perform an influential role; for example, a witch who fought the hero and ran away, and who lets the hero follow her, is also performing the task of "guidance" and thus acting as a helper. Propp also proposed another two archetypes of the villain's role within

2318-476: A reputation for being one-dimensional. In modern animation, animated villains that are more significant and fleshed out have become increasingly common as cartoons have begun to be favored by adults. Shows such as Adventure Time , Gravity Falls , and Rick and Morty range from child to adult cartoons, but are all watched by a largely older audience. It is sometimes alleged that villains in animated works, such as Disney movies, often embody stereotypes in

2440-485: A short film adaptation of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz . In 1914, Lois Weber made a film of The Merchant of Venice with Phillips Smalley as a villainous Shylock . The 1915 film The Birth of a Nation has "Northern carpetbaggers" inciting black violence as its villains. The 1916 film 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea has a man named Charles Denver as its villain. In the same year, Snow White had Queen Brongomar as

2562-689: A single manuscript called the Macro Manuscript , named after its first known owner, Cox Macro of Bury St Edmunds. A second copy of the first 752 lines of Wisdom is preserved in MS Digby 133. It is possible that the Macro version was copied from the Digby manuscript, but there is also the possibility that both were copied from elsewhere. Unlike The Pride of Life and the Macro plays, all of which survive only in manuscript form, Everyman exists as

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2684-606: A stage direction for Mankind's actor to literally dig. Besides simple actions, the same thing occurs in slapstick comedy or action scenes: when Mankind fights the vice-characters Nowadays, New Guise, and Nought, Mankind threatens to hit them with his shovel, saying, "Go and do yowr labur! Gode lett yow never the! / Or wyth my spade I shall yow dynge, by the Holy Trinyté!" (ll. 377–376); in response, New Guise says, "Alas, my jewellys! I shall be schent of my wyff!" (l. 381), directly indicating that Mankind has hit him as or right after he

2806-419: A tone shift from stuffy seriousness to an amusement that "is central to the contemplative logic of the play" by showing how even Latin can be "dragged from the reaches of the church and into the mess of everyday life." There are many such examples of amusing nonsense Latin throughout the play. In what is possibly most memorable of the vices' use of puns to twist good into bad, at one point in Mankind belt out

2928-514: A vibrant ditty on defecation that concludes, in a clear echo of 'holy holy holy,' with "Hoylyke, holyke, holyke! Holyke, holyke, holyke!", quite possibly a pun on 'hole-lick' or 'hole-leak'. Because of how this spoofs liturgical call-and-response worship as well as Nought's invitation, "Now I prey all the yemandry that ys here / To synge wyth us wyth a mery chere" (ll. 333–4), this is likely a moment of audience participation to highlight their own "susceptibilities to seduction by frivolity." Finally,

3050-416: A villain's game, but for a noble cause in a way that the audience or other characters can sympathize with. They may be more noble or heroic than an antihero, but the means to achieve their ends are often considered exploitative, immoral, unjust, or simply evil. Characters who fall into this category are often created with the intention of humanizing them, making them more relatable to the reader/viewer by posing

3172-523: A villain's sphere were: When a character displays these traits, it is not necessarily tropes specific to the fairy tale genre, but it does imply that the one who performs certain acts to be the villain. The villain, therefore, can appear twice in a story to fulfill certain roles: once in the opening of the story, and a second time as the person sought out by the hero. When a character has only performed actions or displayed traits that coincide with Vladimir Propp's analysis, that character can be identified as

3294-659: A villain. There were also villains in 1960s children's film. For instance, 101 Dalmatians and the 1966 Batman both had villains. The former having Cruella de Vil and the latter being the first time comic book supervillains were adapted to film. In the 1970s and early 1980s, the Star Wars films introduced Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine . 1980s films had villains like Khan in Star Trek , John Kreese in The Karate Kid and its sequels, Skynet in

3416-793: A villain. The 1923 film The Ten Commandments has the main character's brother be a villain due to his commitment to breaking all of the Ten Commandments . In 1937, Walt Disney 's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs had the Evil Queen as a villain. In 1939, The Wizard of Oz had Wicked Witch of the West as its villain. In the 1940s, serial films about superheroes introduced supervillains as characters like Dr. Dana in Batman . The 1949 film Samson and Delilah has Hedy Lamarr as

3538-459: Is a character who relies on their instincts and ability to cause destruction to achieve their ends. The evil intentions of their actions are often easily identified, as they act without concern for others (or their wellbeing ) or subtlety . The rampaging villain can take the form of a very powerful individual or a rampaging beast but is still one of the more dangerous villain archetypes due to their affinity for destruction. The authority figure

3660-549: Is also quite rich: for an explanation of French medieval morality plays, visit the French Misplaced Pages page . While scholars refer to these works as morality plays, the play texts do not refer to themselves as such; rather, the genre and its nomenclature have been retroactively conceived by scholarship as a way for modern scholars to understand a series of texts that share enough commonalities that they may be better understood together. Thus, as scholar Pamela King has noted,

3782-756: Is also the earliest known staging diagram in England. The manuscript is the only source for The Castle of Perseverance and Mankind and the only complete source for Wisdom . The Macro Manuscript is a part of the collection at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. (MS. V.a. 354). For centuries, scholars have studied the Macro Manuscript for insights into medieval drama . As Clifford Davidson writes in Visualizing

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3904-470: Is defeated by their own greed, pride, or arrogance. The traitor is a villain who emphasizes the traits of trickery, manipulation and deception to achieve their goals, which is often to offer or supply information to the protagonist's opposition to halt them on their journey; often in exchange for their own freedom or safety. The traitor's goals are not always evil but the actions they commit to reach their goal can be considered inherently evil. Animation

4026-414: Is driven by an ambiguous motivation or is not driven by an intent to cause evil. Their intentions may coincide with the ideals of a greater good, or even a desire to make the world a better place , but their actions are inherently evil in nature. An anti-villain is the opposite of an antihero. While the antihero often fights on the side of good, but with questionable or selfish motives, the anti-villain plays

4148-528: Is during this transitional period where one begins to see Justice begin to assume more and more the qualities of a judge. The Justice in Respublica begins to concern himself with administering justice on "the criminal element", rather than with the divine pronouncement on a generic representative of mankind. This is the first instance where one may observe a direct divergence from the theological virtues and concerns that were previously exerted by Justice in

4270-434: Is effeminate men, sometimes referred to by subject experts as "sissy villains," where their mannerisms represent stereotypes relating to gay men. Another example is the depiction of masculine women, which emulates drag queens or butch lesbians. Adelia Brown makes a similar allegation about Ursula from The Little Mermaid . Ursula is closely modelled after the famous drag queen " Divine " with her heavy makeup, hair styled in

4392-633: Is home to several different villains. Winsor McCay in How a Mosquito Operates had a cartoon mosquito torment a human being and in 1925, Walt Disney created Pete as an antagonist for the Alice Comedies with Pete later becoming an antagonist of Mickey Mouse and his friends and the first Disney villain. Fleischer Studios later had Bluto as the antagonist of the Popeye cartoons. Hanna-Barbera created Tom as an antagonist of Jerry . Likewise,

4514-435: Is involved in or devoted to wickedness or crime ; scoundrel; or a character in a play , novel , or the like, who constitutes an important evil agency in the plot". The antonym of a villain is a hero . The villain's structural purpose is to serve as the opposite to the hero character, and their motives or evil actions drive a plot along. In contrast to the hero, who is defined by feats of ingenuity and bravery and

4636-432: Is not always the case. As seen often in animated films, female villains are portrayed with "ugly" appearances to contrast the beauty of the protagonist, in turn associating unattractiveness with evil. This paints female villains in a negative light compared to their heroine counterparts, and showcases the duality of the female villain character. The ethical dimension of history poses the problem of judging those who acted in

4758-413: Is one that has already attained a level of command and power but always craves more. They are often driven by their desire for material wealth , distinguished stature or great power and appear as a monarch , corporate climber or other powerful individual. Their end goal is often the total domination of their corporation, nation, or world through mystical means or political manipulation. Often this villain

4880-401: Is only Everyman that explicitly describes itself as a moral play, both in its incipit ("Here begynneth a treatyse... in maner of a morall playe") and when a character, Messenger, states that this literary work will communicate "By fygure [of] a morall playe" (l. 3). However, one should not interpret these self-reflexive lines as simply moments that identify the genre of morality plays. Although

5002-439: Is personification, whereby abstract qualities are given human shape [...] allegory involves a continuous parallel between two (or more) levels of meaning in a story." While the Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms uses the words allegory and personification in tandem with one another, the link between the two terms is a point of debate among scholars. Walter Melion and Bart M. Ramakers indicate that literary personifications are

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5124-420: Is roughly contemporaneous with the Macro plays, suggesting that humanist trends are traceable in the morality play much earlier than Everyman . There is also a general, continuous increase in the individuation and complexity of characters. In Nature , a prostitute is given a regular name rather than the name of a concept. In Everyman , Everyman's mercantile language suggests a generic protagonist that represents

5246-414: Is the universal term for characters who pose as catalysts for certain ideals that readers or observers find immoral, but the term "villainess" is often used to highlight specific traits that come with their female identity—separating them, in some aspects, from their male counterparts. The use of the female villain (or villainess) is often to highlight the traits that come specifically with the character and

5368-513: Is unambiguously evil. William Shakespeare modelled his archetypical villains as three-dimensional characters and acknowledged the complex nature that villains display in modern literature. For instance, he made Shylock a sympathetic character. However, Shakespeare's incarnations of historical figures were influenced by the propaganda pieces coming from Tudor sources, and his works often showed this bias and discredited their reputation. For example, Shakespeare famously portrayed Richard III as

5490-430: Is vulnerable; this is not an untouchable, impregnable Mercy [...] but rather a strikingly vulnerable and human one". Additionally, scholars complicate the notion that morality plays allegorically parallel the audience with the dramatic characters, indicating that the moralities actually incorporate the audience into the dramatic community. For example, writing on The Castle of Perseverance , Andrea Louise Young argues that

5612-1142: The Terminator films, Biff Tannen in the Back to the Future films, The Joker in Batman and Dark Helmet in Spaceballs . 1990s films had villains like General Mandible in Antz , Dennis Nedry in Jurassic Park , Edgar in Men in Black , Van Pelt in Jumanji , Rameses in The Prince of Egypt , Carrigan in Casper and Shan-Yu in Mulan . The Star Wars prequels also introduced several villains in addition to those

5734-643: The Looney Tunes had villains like Elmer Fudd , Yosemite Sam , Marvin the Martian and Blacque Jacque Shellacque . In 1937, Disney made the movie Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and it had the Evil Queen as its antagonist. Since then, Disney made a lot of animated movies with villains based on fairy tale villains. Disney Villains became a major part of that franchise. Saturday-morning cartoons also had villains like Dick Dastardly , Muttley and Snidely Whiplash . Since then cartoon villains have had

5856-430: The banns (an advertisement for the coming performance that begins the play) and certain sections of the play text lead to the argument that the play may have had two or three authors. The play's full performance would have required about three and a half hours and upwards of twenty actors. The large size of the cast required suggests that the play was performed by traveling players in the speaking roles with locals acting

5978-461: The evil queen and Lady Tremaine , are influenced by jealousy/vanity whereas only 4% of male villains are driven by these same factors. Rather the men, such as Hades and Captain Hook , have motives grounded in wealth and power, giving in to masculine stereotypes and signifying an attachment to the patriarchy . Additionally, in animation there is a history of mothers and grandmothers being posed as

6100-557: The rhyme scheme ABABBCBC whereas "Lucifer prefers a tripping measure with two to five stress and only two rhymes." Other characters speak like Wisdom when under his influence and like Lucifer when under his. This system of contrastive verse is further refined in Mankind (Ramsay cxxxix). This is not the only use of variation in meter. For example, even without having to contrast with a good character's manner of talking, when Mankind ascends to World's scaffold in The Castle of Perseverance , Mundus, Voluptas, and Stultitia briefly switch from

6222-555: The "cultivation of self-conscious participation in God and of awareness of God's participation in man," while "creating literary experiences that initiate work of spiritual contemplation." Additionally, Julie Paulson explores the plays' investment in relating penitential ritual and community; she writes, "In the moralities, it is impossible to split an interior self from the exterior practices and institutions that define it [...] By dramatizing their protagonists' fall and recovery through penance,

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6344-408: The Macro plays and Henry Medwall's Nature (c. 1495). The emphasis on death in these plays underscores how to live a good life; in the medieval moralities and Medwall's Nature in particular, virtue characters encourage the generic human protagonist to secure a good afterlife by performing good deeds, practicing penitence, or asking for divine mercy before their death. John Watkins also suggests that

6466-507: The Macro plays, show not only a mastery of language but also a light-hearted delight therein. All of the plays are written in some sort of end-rhymed verse, but with much variation, not only between the plays but in individual plays as well. Often verse is used to contrast the personalities of good and evil characters. For example, in Wisdom the characters Wysdom and Anima speak in "dignified, regular rhythm, almost always with four stresses" and

6588-493: The Moral Life , "in spite of the fact that the plays in the manuscript are neither written by a single scribe nor even attributed to a single date, they collectively provide our most important source for understanding the fifteenth century English morality play." Although the manuscript is now considered a single artifact, its three plays were composed as separate manuscripts. Along with certain place names scattered throughout

6710-523: The Prolocutor uses the word game when asking his audience to listen attentively, stating, Lordinges and ladiis that beth hende, Herkenith al with mylde mode [How ou]re gam schal gyn and ende (l. 5-7, emphasis added). In the closing lines of The Castle of Perseverance , the character Pater (meaning The Father) tells the audience, "Thus endyth oure gamys" (l. 3645). While these plays appear to self-reflexively refer to their dramatic form, it

6832-478: The Protestant Reformation and more broadly changes in theatre as an industry in England. Villain A villain (also known as a " black hat " or " bad guy "; the feminine form is villainess ) is a stock character , whether based on a historical narrative or one of literary fiction . Random House Unabridged Dictionary defines such a character as "a cruelly malicious person who

6954-602: The Virtues"), composed c. 1151 in Germany, is the earliest known morality play by more than a century, and it is the only medieval musical drama to survive with an attribution for both the text and the music. Because there are many formal differences between this play and later medieval moralities, as well as the fact that it only exists in two manuscripts, it is unlikely that the Ordo Virtutum had any direct influence on

7076-444: The abilities they possess that are exclusive to them. For example, one of the female villain's greatest weapons is her alluring beauty, sexuality or emotional intelligence. The perversion of inherently female traits in storytelling also alludes to the demonic display of the succubus and their affinity for utilizing their beauty as a weapon—a trait utilized by many female villains throughout modern fiction and mythology. However, this

7198-867: The antiquarian firm Bernard Quaritch for £1,125 (approximately $ 5,625). The manuscripts had been purchased by Quaritch earlier in 1936 at a Sotheby's auction on March 30 for £440. As drama, the Macro plays remained in relative obscurity until 1823, when William Hone mentioned The Castle of Perseverance in Ancient Mysteries Described . The first intensive critical analysis came in 1832 from John Payne Collier in The History of English Dramatic Poetry . The three plays were first published together in Furnivall 's edition of 1882. References in The Castle of England to " crakows " (an early 15th-century shoe fashion with pointed toes) indicate that

7320-486: The audiences and readers of the play. As one can see, different authors employ the literary terms allegory and personification to argue various conclusions about the plays' separation or unification of abstract and concrete realities. In early English dramas Justice was personified as an entity which exercised "theological virtue or grace, and was concerned with the divine pronouncement of judgment on man". However, as time progressed, more moralities began to emerge; it

7442-692: The back of a parchment account roll from June 30, 1343, to January 5, 1344, from the Priory of the Holy Trinity in Dublin. However, this textual record was incomplete. The play cut off mid-line, when the character Messenger, at the command of the King, called upon Death; the plot summary provided by the introductory banns, featured at the beginning of the play, indicated that the action continued. The Castle of Perseverance , Wisdom , and Mankind are all part of

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7564-456: The bak and the buttoke brestyth al on brenne, (Both the back and the buttocks burst burning unbound,) Wyth werkys of wreche I werke hem mykyl wrake. (With works of vengeance, them wretched I make.) In this speech, many of the alliterated phonemes are "aggressively plosive " and the /tʃ/ of "I champe and I chafe, I choke on my chynne" "requires the speaker to part his lips and bare his teeth, bringing them together in an expression that resembles

7686-446: The building blocks for creating allegory: arguing for "personification as a mode of allegorical signification," Melion and Ramakers state, "As narrative, dramatic, or pictorial characters [personifications] develop a distinct reality," specifically, a reality that connects the literal and metaphorical interpretations of an allegory. However, Michael Silk insists that there is a fundamental difference between personification and allegory, as

7808-433: The case of men with feminine traits, this may stem from both a homophobic and misogynistic point of view which is further discussed below. As for female villains who are portrayed with "displeasing" characteristics, not only are they crafted to look unattractive, but their motivations for becoming evil are rooted in very trivial matters. Debra Bradley's survey on Disney films discovered that 28% of female villains, such as

7930-401: The character Mercy in Mankind , Pamela King notes, "Mercy the character begs God for the quality he represents, which is, strictly speaking, allegorical nonsense; he stands more for the human aegis by which mercy may be obtained, than for the quality itself." Similarly, Eleanor Johnson explains Mercy's humanity, implying his status as a personified concept: "Mercy suffers, Mercy trembles, Mercy

8052-547: The clenched-tooth grimace of the devil in contemporary iconography." While mostly written in Middle English , some of the plays employ Latin and French to wonderful effect, both thematically significant and just plain humorous. Latin, of course, as the language of the Roman Catholic Church , was naturally important for the sort of religious discourse these plays engaged in. That does not mean that

8174-666: The connotations worsened, so that the modern word villain is no unpolished villager, but is instead (among other things) a deliberate scoundrel or criminal. At the same time, the mediaeval expression "vilein" or "vilain" is closely influenced by the word "vile", referring to something wicked or worthless. As from the late 13th century, vile meant "morally repugnant; morally flawed, corrupt, wicked; of no value; of inferior quality; disgusting, foul, ugly; degrading, humiliating; of low estate, without worldly honor or esteem", from Anglo-French ville , Old French vil , from Latin vilis "cheap, worthless, of low value". In classical literature,

8296-510: The context of a flamboyant style originating in Franco-Burgundian culture. But that is not all the playwright does with the effect. Clare Wright argues convincingly that alliteration among other formal structures encourages the actors to perform with a "devilish corporeal register." She uses Belyal's first speech as an example: Now I sytte, Satanas, in my sad synne, (Now sit I, Satan, steadfast in my sin,) As devyl dowty, in draf as

8418-403: The contrast between serious theological material and comic moments in Mankind . The play is interested in the humor of transgression – five out of seven speaking roles are comic villains , making Mankind the lightest and most colloquial of the Macro plays. In his introduction to Furnivall's edition, Pollard writes that the "low tone" of the play is due to its nature as an economic venture, since

8540-499: The creation of Arundel's Constitutions in 1407, whereby the Archbishop Thomas Arundel and his legislation sought to limit the preaching and teaching of religious matters, and outlawed any biblical translations into the vernacular. His Constitutions were written in explicit response to the threat of Lollardy . Since the morality plays do contain aspects of religious doctrine, such as the importance of penance and

8662-467: The detection, arrest, and punishment of Prodigality for the robbery and murder of Tenacity, a yeoman in the country of Middlesex. Virtue states, So horrible a fact can hardly pleaded for favour: Therefore go you, Equity, examine more diligently The manner of this outrageous robbery: And as the same by examination shall appear, Due justice may be done in presence here. ( Liberality and Prodigality 377) The meta phases that Justice undergoes during

8784-474: The early 18th century. Macro bound them together somewhat arbitrarily, along with three other non-dramatic manuscripts. Early 19th-century owner Henry Gurney separated The Castle , Wisdom , and Mankind from the other manuscripts and bound them together as a collection in a separate volume. In August of 1936, Joseph Quincy Adams , the Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library , purchased this manuscript from

8906-414: The early-fifteenth-century moralities as a performer playing the role of a theological virtue or grace, and then one sees him develop to a more serious figure, occupying the position of an arbiter of justice during the sixteenth century. It is a journey of discovery and great change on which Justice welcomes one to embark as one leafs through the pages of morality plays. All of the morality plays, especially

9028-502: The embodiment of national political cultures that may collude or collide against one another. The usage of villain to describe a historical figure dates back to Tudor propaganda, pieces of which ended up influencing William Shakespeare 's portrayal of Richard III as a spiteful and hunchback tyrant . The sympathetic villain or anti-villain is one with the typical traits of a villainous character but differs in their motivations . Their intention to cause chaos or commit evil actions

9150-400: The false donor will pose as a benevolent figure or influence on the protagonist (or those associated with them) to present them with a deal. The deal will present a short-term solution or benefit for whoever accepts it and, in return, benefit the villain in the long term. During the story's climax, the hero often has to find a way to rectify the agreement in order to defeat the villain or achieve

9272-693: The fifteenth-century plays Occupation & Idleness and Henry Medwall's Nature , as well as an array of sixteenth-century works like The World and the Child and John Skelton's Magnificence . Additionally, there are other sixteenth-century plays that take on the typical traits of morality plays as outlined above, such as Hickscorner , but they are not generally categorized as such. The characters in Hickscorner are personified vices and virtues: Pity, Perseverance, Imagination, Contemplation, Freewill, and Hickscorner. The French medieval morality play tradition

9394-417: The film Spartacus had Marcus Licinius Crassus as its villain. In the same year, the film Psycho had Norman Bates as a villainous protagonist. The 1962 film To Kill a Mockingbird , like the book, had Bob Ewell as its villain. Other 1960s films like The Guns of Navarone and The Great Escape had Nazis as their villains. Beginning with Dr. No in 1962, every James Bond film has had

9516-775: The franchise already had. Early 2000s films like the Spider-Man trilogy , The Dark Knight Trilogy , the Harry Potter films, The Lord of the Rings films and Avatar all had villains like, Green Goblin , Two-Face , Lord Voldemort , Saruman and Miles Quaritch . In the 2010s, the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the DC Extended Universe have had several notable supervillains such as Thanos and General Zod . The term villain

9638-401: The happy ending. Similarly, the devil archetype is one that also makes an offer to the protagonist (or someone associated with them) and appeals to their needs and desires. However, the devil archetype does not hide their intentions from the protagonist. The subsequent story often follows the protagonist's journey to try and annul the agreement before any damage can be done. The beast

9760-424: The hero must struggle to overcome. In their role as a foil, they exemplify characteristics that are diametrically opposed to those of the hero, creating a contrast distinguishing heroic traits from villainous ones. Other have pointed out that many acts of villains have a hint of wish-fulfillment, which makes some readers or viewers identify with them as characters more strongly than with the heroes. Because of this,

9882-556: The implied staging of the play (which includes the positioning of characters, as well as the placement of scaffolds and banners) encourages audience members to actively engage with the drama in a physical manner: "In moving around the play space, spectators can change the meaning of the drama for themselves and the other spectators." Young notes that the play invites audience members to enter the dramatic space and consequently position themselves through both "their eyes and their bodies," through where they choose to look and move in relation to

10004-403: The judiciary duties previously performed by Justice. This changing of rulers, or preceding justices, is done when Equity declares that his brother Justice has been banished from the country and that he (Equity) will from now on take on the duties of the former monarch, Justice. This change of ruling heads is portrayed in the morality play, Liberality and Prodigality , where Equity serves Virtue in

10126-500: The lines use the word "playe," scholarship remains unsure if Everyman was actually staged as a dramatic performance, or if the text was a literary work intended for reading. The 1901 modern revival of the play, staged by Willian Poem, is the earliest record of the play's production. Additionally, Everyman is a translation of the Dutch Elckerlijc , and, therefore, is not originally an English literary work. Thus, due to

10248-517: The making of that film.) In 1896, Georges Méliès made a horror film titled The House of the Devil which had The Devil as an antagonist. Edison's The Great Train Robbery , released in 1903 had the bandits who rob the train as its villains. In 1909, there was a feature length adaptation of Les Misérables with Javert as a villain and in 1910, Otis Turner had a Wicked Witch as the villain of

10370-478: The moralities are not biblical or would not conceive of themselves as such. Although they do not explicitly label themselves with the genre title morality plays, some of the play texts self-reflexively refer to themselves with the term game. While the Middle English spelling of game varies, the noun generally refers to a joy, festivity, amusement, or play. In the opening lines of The Pride of Life ,

10492-432: The morality plays also encourage their audiences and/or readers to reflect upon the importance of penitential ritual. Several academics have written upon these common thematic characteristics. Considering the plays' investment in staging the audience's/reader's relationship to God, Eleanor Johnson writes that Wisdom and Mankind, among several other medieval literary works, dramatically stage acts of contemplation to encourage

10614-483: The morality plays of the fifteenth century. The Justice in Respublica is personified as a "civil force rather than a theological one". An evolution of sorts takes place within the morals and agendas of Justice: he begins to don the Judicial Robe of prosecutor and executioner. Another change envelops in the character of Justice during the sixteenth century in morality plays; Equity replaces Justice and assumes

10736-441: The morality plays' "absolute cohesion as a group" is "bound to be questioned in any attempt to define that form in its individual manifestations and theatrical contexts." As for the history of the term itself in modern usage, premodern plays were separated into 'moralities' and 'mysteries' by Robert Dodsley in the 18th century; he categorized moralities as allegorical plays and mysteries as biblical plays, though nothing suggests that

10858-469: The morality plays' formal depiction of the relationship between the abstract realm of concepts and everyday circumstances of human life. Pamela King notes the "broadly allegorical" form unifying the moralities. King suggests that the plays employ an allegorical framework of personification to metaphorically parallel, and conceptually separate, "the ephemeral and imperfect world of everyday existence" from an abstract "eternal reality". While King indicates that

10980-772: The motherly stereotypes in their villains. Other female villains are portrayed as hyper-sexual and powerful beings that are used to juxtapose the beauty or physical characteristics of the heroine ; for example, the Lady Tremaine and stepsisters in Cinderella . Male villains also hold several traits that are characteristically feminine. Characters like Jafar ( Aladdin ) and Hades ( Hercules ) have features such as shaded eyelids and accentuated facial features, similar to those typically associated with femininity. Zachary Doiron has argued that animated villains are based on homophobic stereotypes. As an example, he brings up

11102-480: The mute minor roles. Through references to contemporary coinage, Mankind has been dated to 1465–1470. Thirteen extant leaves make up the manuscript. The play was performed by groups of traveling players for a paying audience; Eccles notes that Mankind is the first English play to "mention gathering money from an audience". The cast is considerably smaller than that of The Castle or Wisdom , requiring as few as six players to perform. Scholars have been interested by

11224-425: The narrative forward and influence the hero's journey. These, while not as rounded as those that appear in other forms of literature, are what is known as archetypes . The archetypal villain is a common occurrence within the genre and come under different categories that have different influences on the protagonist and the narrative. The false donor is a villain who utilises trickery to achieve their ends. Often

11346-434: The narrative through another character. The legacy of the villain is often transferred through that of bloodlines (family) or a devoted follower. For example, if a dragon played the role of a villain but was killed by the hero, another character (such as the dragon's sister) might take on the legacy of the previous villain and pursue the hero out of revenge. The fairy tale genre utilises villains as key components to push

11468-544: The narrative, in which they can portray themselves as villainous in a more general sense. The first is the false hero : This character is always villainous, presenting a false claim to be the hero that must be rebutted for the happy ending . Examples of characters who display this trait, and interfere with the success of a tale's hero, are the Ugly Sisters in Cinderella who chopped off parts of their feet to fit in

11590-455: The other plays in the genre. That said, Everyman ' s straightforward focus on death, uninterested in the cycle of sin and penitence found in the Macro plays, resembles the Pride of Life . These two plays are less like the Macro plays than Medwall's Nature , which is not traditionally considered as a medieval morality play. Scholars such as Katherine Little, who claims that Everyman is not

11712-741: The past, and at times, tempts scholars and historians to construct a world of black and white in which the terms "hero" and "villain" are used arbitrary and with the pass of time become interchangeable. These binaries of course are reflected to varying degrees in endless movies, novels, and other fictional and non-fictional narratives. As processes of globalization connect the world, cultures with different historical trajectories and political traditions will need to find ways to work together not only economically, but also politically. In this evolving framework of globalization, tradition, according to political theorists like Edmund Burke , historical figures perceived and evaluated as either positive or negative become

11834-572: The play are preserved in a Digby Manuscript at the Bodleian Library (MS Digby 133). Unlike the other Macro plays, Wisdom splits the incarnation of man into nine different characters: Anima (the soul of man), the three faculties of the soul (Mind, Will, and Understanding), and the five senses. Scholars disagree on the number of players required to perform the play, varying from over twenty to as few as twelve. Morality play Hildegard von Bingen 's Ordo Virtutum (English: "Order of

11956-579: The play was written between 1400 and 1425, making it the earliest complete extant English morality play. The Macro manuscript's Castle was transcribed around 1440. Despite being chronologically first, the play is bound third in the Macro manuscript, in folios 154–191. The play has 38 extant leaves , with two gatherings of 16 leaves and a third gathering of six leaves, with nearly 3,700 lines in total. Evidence of two missing leaves suggests that there are around 100 lines that have been lost. Stylistic differences in dialect, rhyme scheme and stanza pattern between

12078-600: The plays show the dramatic action to merely parallel and imitate eternal, abstract concepts, Julie Paulson argues that the moralities use personification allegory to reunite the concrete and the abstract. Paulson writes, "in giving a word such as 'wisdom' or 'mankind' a body and a voice, personification allegory instead returns us to the lived experiences and particular circumstances that give those words their meanings". Additionally, Paulson underscores that plays such as The Castle of Perseverance and Everyman employ protagonists that personify humankind in an allegorical parallel to

12200-471: The plays suggest how the experience of penitential ritual shapes penitents' understandings of the social and moral concepts central to the formation of Christian subjects." It is worth noting that Paulson, in making these summative comments, focuses her analysis on The Castle of Perseverance , the Macro plays, Everyman , and several moralities from the sixteenth century, and thus does not aim to characterize all moralities in her commentary. Working to pinpoint

12322-540: The plays, the particular dialects in which the three are written suggest that they originated in the East Midlands or East Anglia , particularly around Norfolk and Suffolk . The monk Thomas Hyngman transcribed Mankind and Wisdom between 1460 and 1475. Along with The Castle of Perseverance , Hyngman's Mankind and Wisdom were acquired by the Reverend Cox Macro of Bury St Edmunds , Suffolk in

12444-431: The playwrights were unwilling to play with Latin. For example, in Mankind , the character Mercy has a highly Latinizing manner of speech: in terms of vocabulary and meticulously tidy versification and sentence structure, all of which culminates in what one scholar calls " inkhorn and churchily pedagogical." (Johnson 172). Mercy ends his first speech saying "I besech yow hertyly, have this premedytacyon" (l. 44), ending with

12566-489: The principal vices in medieval morality plays, avarice, pride, extortion, and ambition, throw anxieties over class mobility into relief. Fifteenth-century plays like Occupation and Idleness and later morality plays (commonly considered Tudor interludes, like John Skelton's Magnyfycence ) portray class-mobility positively. Whether for or against class mobility, morality plays engage with the subject. Other, smaller commonalities include audience participation, elaborate costuming,

12688-524: The pursuit of justice and the greater good, a villain is often defined by their acts of selfishness, evilness, arrogance, cruelty, and cunning , displaying immoral behavior that can oppose or pervert justice. The term villain first came into English from the Anglo-French and Old French vilain , which in turn derives from the Late Latin word villanus ,. This refers to those bound to

12810-837: The representational figures within literary works are personifications that retain allegorical qualities. Additionally, Silk notes that "Various medievalists correctly insist that in antiquity and the Middle Ages the connection [between allegory and personification] is not made," indirectly complicating the notion that morality plays are allegorical constructions employing personified concepts. While an allegorical literary form implies that literal and metaphorical elements must "continuously parallel" one another, these plays do not always allegorically parallel theological qualities/concepts and concrete action, but rather humanize abstract concepts—thereby emphasizing characters as personifications, but not allegorical constructions. For example, examining

12932-537: The role that morality plays themselves played in society, continue to be somewhat misunderstood. The recent trend in scholarship of the period in which morality plays were written is to admit the great degree of continuity between late medieval and Renaissance cultures of Europe. Nevertheless, although morality plays reach their apogee in the sixteenth century, religious drama of this sort and in general all but disappeared thereafter. The cause of this change can be traced to both changes in religious sensibilities related to

13054-486: The salvation of the soul, scholars have questioned how it is that morality plays, in both the play-text and play form, continued to thrive throughout the fifteenth century. While scholars have not arrived at a satisfying conclusion, they nonetheless agree the morality plays were not seriously affected by the Constitutions, which suggests that either Arundel's Constitutions, the divide between Lollardy and orthodoxy, or

13176-438: The seven sins alliterating nearly all of their lines, a habit the character Mankind learns from them. This is not to imply that alliteration is purely the mark of an evil character, for the bad angel alliterates very little and the neutral flag bearers who provide a summary of events at the beginning of the play script make extensive use of alliteration. At many points this is for ornamental effect: Michael R. Kelley places this in

13298-434: The shoe. Another role for the villain would be the dispatcher, who sends the hero on their quest . At the beginning of the story, their request may appear benevolent or innocent, but the dispatcher's real intentions might be to send the hero on a journey in the hopes of being rid of them. The roles and influence that villains can have over a narrative can also be transferred to other characters – to continue their role in

13420-402: The sixteenth century in morality plays, from "Justice" to "Equity" further illustrates the evolution of Justice; not only did Justice change from a "theological abstraction to a civil servant", but he experienced a corporeal change as well. One may readily observe the evolutionary progression of Justice as portrayed in the plays of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. One encounters Justice in

13542-526: The soil of the villa , who worked on the equivalent of a modern estate in Late Antiquity , in Italy or Gaul . Vilain later shifted to villein , which referred to a person of less than knightly status, implying a lack of chivalry and courtesy . All actions that were unchivalrous or evil (such as treachery or rape ) eventually became part of the identity of a villain in the modern sense of

13664-444: The staged characters. King, Johnson, and Young indirectly show, without explicitly stating so, how the morality plays are not simply allegorical constructions, but rather fluid forms of personification that blur the distinctions between literal and metaphorical elements, characters and audience members/readers. Still, scholarship generally adopts the literary labels allegory , personification , and personification allegory to explain

13786-415: The tone appealed to the largely uneducated common audiences for whom players performed. Also known as Mind, Will, and Understanding , Wisdom dates from the mid-1460s. The manuscript contains two quires of twelve leaves each. Like Mankind , it belonged to (and was possibly transcribed by) the monk Thomas Hyngman. While the play in its complete form is known only through the Macro Manuscript, fragments of

13908-399: The uncertainty regarding the play's status as a dramatic work, as well as the play's non-English origins, Everyman ' s self-reflective identification as a "morall playe" cannot confirm that the medieval moralities explicitly name themselves as a cohesive medieval morality genre. Morality plays typically contain a protagonist who represents humanity as a whole, or an average layperson, or

14030-400: The villain character is not always the same as those that appear in modern and postmodern incarnations, as the lines of morality are often blurred to imply a sense of ambiguity or affected by historical context and cultural ideas. Often the delineation of heroes and villains in such literature is left unclear. Nevertheless, there are some exceptions to this such as Grendel from Beowulf who

14152-502: The villainous Delilah and George Sanders as the villainous Prince of Gaza . In 1953, Byron Haskin made a film of The War of the Worlds . Like the book, it has Martians as villains. Cecil B. DeMille 's 1956 remake of The Ten Commandments had two main villains. Ramesses II , played by Yul Brynner and Dathan played by Edward G. Robinson . (It also had Nefertari be a Lady Macbeth figure egging Ramesses on.) In 1960,

14274-489: The villains of many stories. Neil Gaiman 's Coraline presents this phenomenon through the idea of the other-mother. In Coraline , the Other Mother is a loving, caring parent who welcomes Coraline to a new life, helping in the face of troubles back home. By glorifying this other mother, the story paints Coraline's real mother as negligent, in turn causing her to be the villain of the story. Disney films also take on

14396-421: The virtue of labour, and the governance of the body/passions by the soul/reason in the service of Catholic virtue, money management, or the proper methods of governing a state. The cohesion of the medieval morality play genre in particular is questionable as their family resemblances are loose in some instances. Despite being treated as the archetypal morality play, Everyman ' s plot has little in common with

14518-425: The word. Additionally, villein came into use as a term of abuse and eventually took on its modern meaning. The landed aristocracy of mediaeval Europe used politically and linguistically the Middle English descendant of villanus meaning "villager" (styled as vilain or vilein ) with the meaning "a person of uncouth mind and manners". As the common equating of manners with morals gained in strength and currency,

14640-519: The writing of its later English counterparts. Traditionally, scholars name only five surviving English morality plays from the medieval period: The Pride of Life (late 14th century), The Castle of Perseverance (c.1425); Wisdom , (1460–63); Mankind (c.1470); Everyman (1510). The Pride of Life was the earliest record of a morality play written in the English language; the text (destroyed by fire in 1922, but published earlier) existed on

14762-547: Was less and less often the case that religion was expressed directly. Betteridge and Walker also note that morality plays began to focus on the importance of education, specifically in regard to classical literature. In Medwall's Nature , the opening speech prompts readings of Ovid and Aristotle . However, a strong focus on education can be found in Occupation and Idleness as well, which stages an errant schoolboy being taught to respect and learn from his teacher—this play

14884-572: Was threatening. This is not a trait restricted in the period to morality plays: a reason for the existence of this trait suggested by one scholar while discussing the Chester plays is that "A spectator who could see the action without hearing the lines would not have a significantly different experience from someone who could hear them." What binds morality plays together as a genre are the strong family resemblances between them. These resemblances are most strong in regard to personification allegory as

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