Christian drama

By the end of the 15th century, the tradition of acting these plays in cycles on festival days (such as the Feast of Corpus Christi) was established across Europe.

These were allegories, in which the protagonists met personifications of various moral attributes, the net effect being the encouragement to live a virtuous life.

In the United States, condemnation of the theatre was widespread in the eighteenth century; in 1794, President Timothy Dwight IV of Yale College in his "Essay on the Stage" declared that "to indulge a taste for playgoing means nothing more or less than the loss of that most valuable treasure: the immortal soul."

In Britain in the early twentieth century, it was illegal for any human actor to portray a divine personage on stage, placing severe restrictions on Christian theatre.

The groundbreaking 1941-1942 radio drama The Man Born to Be King shattered this taboo, by not only including Jesus as a character, but giving him 'ordinary' speech rather than 'biblical' language.