Morality play
The term is used by scholars of literary and dramatic history to refer to a genre of play texts from the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries that feature personified concepts (most often virtues and vices, but sometimes practices or habits) alongside angels and demons, who are engaged in a struggle to persuade a protagonist who represents a generic human character toward either good or evil.
Because there are many formal differences[2] between this play and later medieval moralities, as well as the fact that it only exists in two manuscripts,[3] it is unlikely that the Ordo Virtutum had any direct influence on the writing of its later English counterparts.
Traditionally, scholars name only five surviving English morality plays from the medieval period: The Pride of Life (late 14th century), The Castle of Perseverance (c.1425); Wisdom, (1460–63); Mankind (c.1470); Everyman (1510).
[4] The Pride of Life was the earliest record of a morality play written in the English language; the text (destroyed by fire in 1922, but published earlier) existed on the back of a parchment account roll from June 30, 1343, to January 5, 1344, from the Priory of the Holy Trinity in Dublin.
[5] Unlike The Pride of Life and the Macro plays, all of which survive only in manuscript form, Everyman exists as a printed text, in four different sources.
"[8] Other English moralities include the fifteenth-century plays Occupation & Idleness and Henry Medwall's Nature, as well as an array of sixteenth-century works like The World and the Child and John Skelton's Magnificence.
Thus, as scholar Pamela King has noted, the morality plays' "absolute cohesion as a group" is "bound to be questioned in any attempt to define that form in its individual manifestations and theatrical contexts.
[11] In the opening lines of The Pride of Life, the Prolocutor uses the word game when asking his audience to listen attentively, stating, Lordinges and ladiis that beth hende, Herkenith al with mylde mode
Although the lines use the word "playe," scholarship remains unsure if Everyman was actually staged as a dramatic performance, or if the text was a literary work intended for reading.
The clashes between the supporting characters often catalyze a process of experiential learning for the protagonist, and, as a result, provide audience members and/or readers with moral guidance, reminding them to meditate and think upon their relationship to God, as well as their social and/or religious community.
"[15] Additionally, Julie Paulson explores the plays' investment in relating penitential ritual and community; she writes, "In the moralities, it is impossible to split an interior self from the exterior practices and institutions that define it [...] By dramatizing their protagonists' fall and recovery through penance, the plays suggest how the experience of penitential ritual shapes penitents' understandings of the social and moral concepts central to the formation of Christian subjects.
Additionally, Silk notes that "Various medievalists correctly insist that in antiquity and the Middle Ages the connection [between allegory and personification] is not made,"[20] indirectly complicating the notion that morality plays are allegorical constructions employing personified concepts.
"[23] Young notes that the play invites audience members to enter the dramatic space and consequently position themselves through both "their eyes and their bodies,"[24] through where they choose to look and move in relation to the staged characters.
King, Johnson, and Young indirectly show, without explicitly stating so, how the morality plays are not simply allegorical constructions, but rather fluid forms of personification that blur the distinctions between literal and metaphorical elements, characters and audience members/readers.
[1] King suggests that the plays employ an allegorical framework of personification to metaphorically parallel, and conceptually separate, "the ephemeral and imperfect world of everyday existence" from an abstract "eternal reality".
[28] As one can see, different authors employ the literary terms allegory and personification to argue various conclusions about the plays' separation or unification of abstract and concrete realities.
In early English dramas Justice was personified as an entity which exercised "theological virtue or grace, and was concerned with the divine pronouncement of judgment on man".
[30] This is the first instance where one may observe a direct divergence from the theological virtues and concerns that were previously exerted by Justice in the morality plays of the fifteenth century.
"[39] She uses Belyal's first speech as an example:Now I sytte, Satanas, in my sad synne, (Now sit I, Satan, steadfast in my sin,) As devyl dowty, in draf as a drake.
)[40]In this speech, many of the alliterated phonemes are "aggressively plosive" and the /tʃ/ of "I champe and I chafe, I choke on my chynne" "requires the speaker to part his lips and bare his teeth, bringing them together in an expression that resembles the clenched-tooth grimace of the devil in contemporary iconography.
While mostly written in Middle English, some of the plays employ Latin and French to wonderful effect, both thematically significant and just plain humorous.
For example, in Mankind, the character Mercy has a highly Latinizing manner of speech: in terms of vocabulary and meticulously tidy versification and sentence structure, all of which culminates in what one scholar calls "inkhorn and churchily pedagogical."
[42]Shortly thereafter Mischief fully switches to a nonsense mixture of Latin and English to continue mocking Mercy's Latinizing, as well as to mangle Mercy's earlier reference to the parable of the wheat and tares: "Corn servit bredibus, chaffe horsibus, straw fyrybusque" (l. 57, translated: Corn serves bread, chaff horses, straw fires).
"[44] Finally, a peculiar trait that one will likely notice while reading these plays is the tendency of characters to describe in speech the actions they are (presumably) simultaneously performing as a way of verbally encoding stage directions.
Particularly notable thematic commonalities include: the transitoriness of life in relation to the afterlife, the importance of divine mercy, the use of misprision by vice characters, and the inevitable cycle of sin and penitence found in the Macro plays and Henry Medwall's Nature (c. 1495).
John Watkins also suggests that the principal vices in medieval morality plays, avarice, pride, extortion, and ambition, throw anxieties over class mobility into relief.
[47]: at 1–2 That said, Everyman's straightforward focus on death, uninterested in the cycle of sin and penitence found in the Macro plays, resembles the Pride of Life.
[50] In Skelton's Magnyfycence, Magnificence and the vices that corrupt him represent a particular person, King Henry VIII, and his court 'minions' who were expelled for their poor behaviour.
The recent trend in scholarship of the period in which morality plays were written is to admit the great degree of continuity between late medieval and Renaissance cultures of Europe.
Whereas the didactic elements pre-Reformation morality plays usually reinforced the practices or doctrines of medieval Catholicism (often focusing on sacraments like penance), the post-Reformation morality plays—when they concerned themselves with religious doctrine, rather than more secular concerns about education or good living (as with John Redford's Play of Wit and Science) -- sometimes worked to destroy Catholic credibility and demonise the Catholic Church.
