_Godly Queen Hester_, published 1561,[82] is exactly described as a "newe enterlude drawen out of the Holy Scripture." According to Fleay, it is the latest "scriptural morality" extant to be acted on the English stage.[83] But it is much more than a scriptural morality. Not only by its fusion of biblical characters, like Assuerus and Hester, with allegorical types, like Pride and the half-moral, half-native Vice, does the play give evidence of its polytypic nature, but by its atmosphere, which is charged with local and personal allusions and ironical references to the economic abuses of the day. In nervous energy of style and in forthright dramatic movement, the play is an improvement upon its predecessors; and as a satirical drama of political purpose, it should have had a numerous progeny. Strange to say, however, this kind of scriptural satire has had no great success in the field of English drama. Its bloom, as in Dryden's _Absalom and Achitophel_, has been in the by-paths of poetry. Of a peculiar historical importance is the character of Hardy-dardy. Mr. Fleay regards him as a domestic fool, and remarks that this interlude and the _Misogonus_ are the only two early plays in which the Vice is replaced by such a personage. But neither of these statements is correct, for Hardy-dardy and Cacurgus do not totally abandon the quality of Vice, and various other plays yet to be mentioned have characters closely resembling them. Hardy-dardy is, indeed, a professed jester dressed in a fool's coat; in his assumption of stupidity and his proffer of service to Aman, he resembles Slipper in Greene's _James the Fourth_; and in his shrewd simplicity, repartee, and indirection he anticipates some of Shakespeare's fools. But he still retains characteristics of his ancestry. He stands, in conception, half-way between the minor Vices of the play, Ambition, Adulation, and Pride, to whose jocosities and deviltries he succeeds,--for he appears only when they have departed,--and the waggish weathercocks of later interludes, Haphazard and Conditions.