sleep, and Titivillus whispers to him that Mercy is dead. Through his scene, Titivillus implores the audience to keep silent and watch him, which makes the audience complicit in his actions. Thus deluded, Mankind rejects Mercy and goes to join New Guise, Nowadays and Nought. But now their full evil is revealed. Mischief has been in jail, and has escaped, robbed the jailer, and raped his wife. New Guise has narrowly escaped hanging. Nowadays has robbed a church. The three have Mankind swear vows to join their gang, vows which also show their depravity—to be a highway robber, to seduce women, to 'rob, steal, and kill as fast as you may go' (708). When they leave, Mercy returns to plead with the audience about the unreliability of Mankind, and to pray for his redemption. The three reveal to Mankind that Mercy is not really dead, and tempt him to kill himself rather than face Mercy. But Mercy chases them away. The final struggle for Mankind's redemption is with himself. Mercy tells him all that he must do to be forgiven is to ask, but Mankind finds this difficult and raises a series of objections. The theology of the ending focuses on perseverance, on living as a Christian even while continuing to sin, even while trying not to, and having to repeatedly ask for mercy for those offences. Mankind finally accepts Mercy, and then promptly tries to blame the devils for his problems, but Mercy reminds him that he warned Mankind about them. For the play ends with Mercy addressing the audience again, exhorting them to repentance. Themes Like other moralities, Mankind dramatizes the struggle over humanity between the forces of good and evil. Within this larger thematic structure, scholars have been fascinated by the comedic and potentially subversive tone of the play. The play is interested in the humour of transgression – five out of seven speaking roles are comic villains, making Mankind the lightest and most colloquial of the Macro plays. At the same time, the play places a remarkable emphasis on language. Greene argues that Titivillus and the vices under his command reduce Mankind to the level of a dumb beast, lost and on the brink of damnation, by drawing him into their perverse, topsy-turvy distortions of language. In his introduction to Furnivall's edition, Pollard writes that the "low tone" of the play is due to its nature