In Like Will to Like (1562-8), (21) Nichol Newfangle the Vice offers Tom Tosspot and Rafe Roister lands of St.
By doing this as part of the joke he is playing on them, Nichol Newfangle acts out justice, and the audience will laugh together with the Vice at the stupidity of the ruffians.
At the end of the same play, Nichol Newfangle is carried out on the Devil's back, and he bids merry farewell to the audience, and speaks of his return: "Farewell, my masters, till I come again, / For now I must make a journey into Spain." (23) The beauty of these lines I see as the way the Vice makes the play open-ended and at the same time presents himself as somebody who transcends the confines of a single play.
He stresses the miseries Nichol Newfangle has brought on the characters of the play in order to remove him from the merely jovial side of his role.
This measure of music is syllabically set and brings to mind the setting of the jingle tune assigned to the Vice Nicol Newfangle in Ulpian Fulwell's contemporary interlude Like Will to Like.
In Ulpian Fulwell's Like Will to Like (printed 1568), the Vice Nicol Newfangle sings a scored jingle ('Trim Merchandise, Trim, Trim').