The morality play is a genre of medieval and early Tudor drama. 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. The common story arc of these plays follows "the temptation, fall and redemption of the protagonist".King, Pamela M. "Morality Plays." In The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, edited by Richard Beadle and Alan J. Fletcher. 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2008: 235-262, at 235.
English morality plays
Hildegard von Bingen's Ordo Virtutum (English: "Order of the Virtues"), composed in Germany, is the earliest known morality play by more than a century, and it is the only medieval musical drama to survive with an attribution for both the text and the music. Because there are many formal differencesPotter, Robert. "The Ordo Virtutum: Ancestor of the English Moralities?" Comparative Drama, vol. 20, no. 1 (1986, at 203) between this play and later medieval moralities, as well as the fact that it only exists in two manuscripts,Fontijn, Claire. "The Vision of Music in Saint Hildegard's Scivias: Synthesizing Image, Text, Notation, and Theory." Music Word Media Group, 2012: 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).King, Pamela M. "Morality Plays." In The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, edited by Richard Beadle and Alan J. Fletcher. 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2008: 235-262, at 235. 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.Klausner, David N. "Introduction." In Two Moral Interludes: The Pride of Life and Wisdom. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2008 However, this textual record was incomplete. The play cut off mid-line, when the character Messenger, at the command of the King, called upon Death; the plot summary provided by the introductory banns, featured at the beginning of the play, indicated that the action continued.
The Castle of Perseverance, Wisdom, and Mankind are all part of a single manuscript called the Macro Manuscript, named after its first known owner, Cox Macro of Bury St Edmunds.King, Pamela M. "Morality Plays." In The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, edited by Richard Beadle and Alan J. Fletcher. 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2008: 235-262, at 238. A second copy of the first 752 lines of Wisdom is preserved in MS Digby 133. It is possible that the Macro version was copied from the Digby manuscript, but there is also the possibility that both were copied from elsewhere. 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.King, Pamela M. "Morality Plays." In The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, edited by Richard Beadle and Alan J. Fletcher. 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2008: 235-262, at 253. Two of these four sources were printed by Pynson and two were printed by John Skot. Pamela King notes how Everyman's status as a printed text pushes the boundaries of the medieval morality genre; she writes, "It was also one of the very first plays to be printed, and in some respects belongs more to the early Tudor tradition than that of the late Middle Ages."King, Pamela M. "Morality Plays." In The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, edited by Richard Beadle and Alan J. Fletcher. 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2008: 235-262, at 252.
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. Additionally, there are other sixteenth-century plays that take on the typical traits of morality plays as outlined above, such as Hickscorner, but they are not generally categorized as such. The characters in Hickscorner are personified vices and virtues: Pity, Perseverance, Imagination, Contemplation, Freewill, and Hickscorner.Everyman and Other Miracle and Morality Plays. Ed. Stanley Appelbaum and Candace Ward. New York: Dover Publications, 1995. 60. Print.
The French medieval morality play tradition is also quite rich: for an explanation of French medieval morality plays, visit the French Wikipedia page.
History of the term "morality play"
While scholars refer to these works as morality plays, the play texts do not refer to themselves as such; rather, the genre and its nomenclature have been retroactively conceived by scholarship as a way for modern scholars to understand a series of texts that share enough commonalities that they may be better understood together. 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." As for the history of the term itself in modern usage, premodern plays were separated into 'moralities' and 'mysteries' by Robert Dodsley in the 18th century; he categorized moralities as allegorical plays and mysteries as biblical plays, though nothing suggests that the moralities are not biblical or would not conceive of themselves as such.Solberg, Emma Maggie. "A History of 'The Mysteries.'" Early Theatre, vol. 19, no. 1 (2016): 9–36, at 12.
Although they do not explicitly label themselves with the genre title morality plays, some of the play texts self-reflexively refer to themselves with the term game. While the Middle English spelling of game varies, the noun generally refers to a joy, festivity, amusement, or play."game n." Middle English Dictionary. Ed. Robert E. Lewis, et al. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1952-2001. Online edition in Middle English Compendium. Ed. Frances McSparran, et al.. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Library, 2000-2021: 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 [How ou]re gam schal gyn and ende (l. 5-7, emphasis added).Klausner, David N., ed. "The Pride of Life". In Two Moral Interludes: The Pride of Life and Wisdom. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2008:
In the closing lines of The Castle of Perseverance, the character Pater (meaning The Father) tells the audience, "Thus endyth oure gamys" (l. 3645).Klausner, David N., ed. "The Castle of Perseverance". Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2010
While these plays appear to self-reflexively refer to their dramatic form, it is only Everyman that explicitly describes itself as a moral play, both in its incipit ("Here begynneth a treatyse... in maner of a morall playe") and when a character, Messenger, states that this literary work will communicate "By fygure [of] a morall playe" (l. 3). However, one should not interpret these self-reflexive lines as simply moments that identify the genre of morality plays. 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.Davidson, Clifford, Martin W. Walsh, and Ton J. Broos. "Introduction." In Everyman and Its Dutch Original, Elckerlijc. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007: The 1901 modern revival of the play, staged by Willian Poem, is the earliest record of the play's production. Additionally, Everyman is a translation of the Dutch Elckerlijc, and, therefore, is not originally an English literary work. Thus, due to the uncertainty regarding the play's status as a dramatic work, as well as the play's non-English origins, Everymans self-reflective identification as a "morall playe" cannot confirm that the medieval moralities explicitly name themselves as a cohesive medieval morality genre.
Characteristics
Morality plays typically contain a protagonist who represents humanity as a whole, or an average layperson, or a human faculty; supporting characters are personifications of abstract concepts, each aligned with either good or evil, virtue or vice.
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. Many, but not all, of the morality plays also encourage their audiences and/or readers to reflect upon the importance of penitential ritual.
Several academics have written upon these common thematic characteristics. Considering the plays' investment in staging the audience's/reader's relationship to God, Eleanor Johnson writes that Wisdom and Mankind, among several other medieval literary works, dramatically stage acts of contemplation to encourage the "cultivation of self-conscious participation in God and of awareness of God's participation in man," while "creating literary experiences that initiate work of spiritual contemplation."Johnson, Eleanor. Staging Contemplation: Participatory Theology in Middle English Prose, Verse, and Drama (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018): 6. 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."Paulson, Julie. Theatre of the Word: Selfhood in the English Morality Play (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019): 21. It is worth noting that Paulson, in making these summative comments, focuses her analysis on The Castle of Perseverance, the Macro plays, Everyman, and several moralities from the sixteenth century, and thus does not aim to characterize all moralities in her commentary.
Allegory and personification