Plot
Ordo Virtutum is about the struggle for a human soul, or Anima, between the Virtues and the Devil. The piece can be divided as follows:
Part I: Prologue in which the Virtues are introduced to the Patriarchs and Prophets who marvel at the Virtues.
Part II: We hear the complaints of souls that are imprisoned in bodies. The (for now) happy Soul enters and her voice contrasts with the unhappy souls. However, the Soul is too eager to skip life and go straight to Heaven. When the Virtues tell her that she has to live first, the Devil seduces her away to worldly things.
Part III: The Virtues take turns identifying and describing themselves while the Devil occasionally interrupts and expresses opposing views and insults.
Part IV: The Soul returns, repentant. Once the Virtues have accepted her back, they turn on the Devil, whom they bind, and then God is praised.
Part V: A procession of all the characters.
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“The plot! The plot! What kind of plot could a poet possibly provide that is not surpassed by the thinking, feeling reader? Form alone is divine.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
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—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)