These interludes bring us into acquaintance with a new comic character. The great part which folly acted in the social destinies of mankind, had become an acknowledged fact; and as the court and almost every great household had its professed fool, so it seems to have been considered that a play also was incomplete without a fool. But, as the character of the fool was usually given to one of the most objectionable characters in it, so, for this reason apparently, the fool in a play was called the _Vice_. Thus, in "Lusty Juventus," the character of Hypocrisy is called the Vice; in the play of "All for Money," it is Sin; in that of "Tom Tyler and his Wife," it is Desire; in the "Trial of Treasure" it is Inclination; and in some instances the Vice appears to be the demon himself. The Vice seems always to have been dressed in the usual costume of a court fool, and he perhaps had other duties besides his mere part in the plot, such as making jests of his own, and using other means for provoking the mirth of the audience in the intervals of the action. A few of our early English interludes were, in the strict sense of the word, farces. Such is the "mery play" of "John the Husband, Tyb the Wife, and Sir John the Priest," written by John Heywood, the plot of which presents the same simplicity as those of the farces which were so popular in France. John has a shrew for his wife, and has good causes for suspecting an undue intimacy between her and the priest; but they find means to blind his eyes, which is the more easily done, because he is a great coward, except when he is alone. Tyb, the wife, makes a pie, and proposes that the priest shall be invited to assist in eating it. The husband is obliged, very unwillingly, to be the bearer of the invitation, and is not a little surprised when the priest refuses it. He gives as his reason, that he was unwilling to intrude himself into company where he knew he was disliked, and persuaded John that he had fallen under the wife's displeasure, because, in private interviews with her, he had laboured to induce her to bridle her temper, and treat her husband with more gentleness. John, delighted at the discovery of the priest's honesty, insists on his going home with him to feast upon the pie. There the guilty couple contrive to put the husband to a disagreeable penance, while they eat the pie, and treat him otherwise very ignominiously, in consequence of which the married couple fight. The priest interferes, and the fight thus becomes general, and is only ended by the departure of Tyb and the priest, leaving the husband alone.