Of moral plays written before 1520 that contributed to the comedy of real life and critical intent we still have three or four. _Mankynd_--somewhere between 1461 and 1485--is of prime importance to the comedy of the actual, for practically its only claim to consideration as an allegorical or didactic production is that it maintains the plan and purpose of the moral play. Its dramatic tendency is altogether away from the abstract. In spite of its stereotyped Mercie and Myscheff, its minor Vices, and its Devil, it is a somewhat coarse but amusing portrayal of the manners of contemporary ne'er-do-weels. Attach no more meaning to the names Newgyse, Nowadays, and Nowte than the chuckling audience did, or change them to Huntyngton of Sanston, Thuolay of Hanston, and Pycharde of Trumpyngton, and you perceive at once that the individuality, conversation, and behaviour of these characters, and even of the hero, when he is not "holyer than ever was ony of his kyn," are hardly less natural and concrete than those of Englishmen immortalized by Heywood, Udall, and William Stevenson. The plot, to be sure, is dramatically futile, the incidents farcical, the merriment anything but refined; but there are few merrier successors of the Wakefield Tutivillus than his namesake here, who, coming "invysybull," cometh for all that "with his legges under him" and "no lede on his helys" to inform the sanctimonious hero that "a schorte preyere thyrlyth hewyn" and the audience that "the Devil is dead." Like the devil-judge of the _Nigromansir_ and the devil-sailor of the _Shipwrights' Play_, he has shaken off his biblical conventions (if he ever had any), he associates familiarly with characters of all kinds, and is marked by his grotesque devices as a wilful worker of confusion, the marplot of the play. The dog-Latin of the Vice Myscheff stands half-way between that of the Wakefield plays and that of _Roister Doister_ and _Thersytes_; and the Sam Wellerisms of Newgyse are a fine advance in the reproduction of the vulgar. His "Beware! quod the goode-wyff, when sche smot of here husbondes hede," and his "Quod the Devill to the frerys," and other gayeties perilous to quote--there is something Rabelaisian in all this. So Nowte and Nowadays, with their racy idioms, their variegated oaths, and "allectuose ways," are to the manner born, neither new nor old; they are of the picaresque drama that finds a welcome in every age and land. It is worth while to notice also the parallelism of crudity and progress in the technical devices of the action: on the one hand, the exchange of garments by which a change of motive is symbolized, a ruse that only gradually yields to the manifestation of character by means of action; and on the other hand, the legitimate and dramatic parody of a scene in court.