Morality play
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".[1]
For the book by Barry Unsworth, see Morality Play (novel).English morality plays[edit]
Hildegard von Bingen's Ordo Virtutum (English: "Order of the Virtues"), composed c. 1151 in Germany, is the earliest known morality play by more than a century, and the only medieval musical drama to survive with an attribution for both the text and the music. 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] 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.[6] 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.[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.[7] Two of these four sources were printed by Pynson and two were printed by John Skot.[7] 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."[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. 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.[9]
The French medieval morality play tradition is also quite rich: for an explanation of French medieval morality plays, visit the French Wikipedia page.
Historical background[edit]
Arundel's Constitutions[edit]
Scholars have long noted that the medieval morality plays were written after the creation of Arundel's Constitutions in 1407, whereby the Archbishop Thomas Arundel and his legislation sought to limit the preaching and teaching of religious matters, and outlawed any biblical translations into the vernacular.[52] His Constitutions were written in explicit response to the threat of Lollardy. Since the morality plays do contain aspects of religious doctrine, such as the importance of penance and the salvation of the soul, scholars have questioned how it is that morality plays, in both the play-text and play form, continued to thrive throughout the fifteenth century. While scholars have not arrived at a satisfying conclusion, they nonetheless agree the morality plays were not seriously affected by the Constitutions, which suggests that either Arundel's Constitutions, the divide between Lollardy and orthodoxy, or the role that morality plays themselves played in society, continue to be somewhat misunderstood.
Decline[edit]
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. Nevertheless, although morality plays reach their apogee in the sixteenth century, religious drama of this sort and in general all but disappeared thereafter.[48]: at 15 The cause of this change can be traced to both changes in religious sensibilities related to the Protestant Reformation and more broadly changes in theatre as an industry in England.
Mid-Tudor Protestants continued writing religious plays that were recognizably different from their Catholic predecessors. For example, whereas earlier plays emphasize the importance of sacraments, plays by Protestants emphasize justification by faith alone, and even cast vice characters as Catholic.[53]
The relationship between theatricality and doctrine was also found more troubled by Protestants. Earlier plays were criticized for their embellishments to biblical material, to which Protestant religious drama tried to adhere more closely. However, in many ways they were formally quite similar to their predecessors in ways that sat beside the tendencies they wished to resist, thus challenging any attempts by scholars to place the development of theater in the period in an evolutionary model.[48]: at 3–4
With the opening of permanent and professional playhouses that were producing plays full time in the late sixteenth century, drama became "unmistakably an integral and compromised part of that same commercial culture" which earlier religious drama had criticized, and therefor "it could no longer seriously be maintained that it was primarily a pious activity."[48]: at 10 Thus, by the start of the seventeenth century a play like Everyman would be regarded "as at best a waste of time and at worst a sinful, 'popish' excess."[48]: at 1–20 However, this change "had the positive effect of creating the space for the artistic and commercial speculation of the public stage as it emerged at the end of the Tudor period."[48] It is in this space that the now better-known William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe would do their work.
Pre-Reformation versus Post-Reformation[edit]
The outward purpose of all morality plays is to instruct listeners on the means of receiving redemption: a purpose that some plays adhere to relatively consistently, while others delight so extensively in their vices that broad entertainment establishes itself as an equally dominant raison d'etre. However, morality plays after the Protestant Reformation are of a distinctly different didacticism than the morality plays before the Reformation.
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. Although many post-Reformation morality plays were often like their predecessors in that they also were concerned with the salvation of its audience (and in their tendency to allow playful depictions of vice to eclipse those concerns), they differed in that they believed that the theology promoted by pre-Reformation plays was antithetical to salvation. Thus, a major shift in focus, from concern for the individual's moral behaviour to concern for the individual's theological practices, occurred with the post-Reformation morality plays. The wave of Protestantism which fuelled the content of these plays dictated that more attention should be given to warning people against the Catholic Church than of their sinful nature. The means of redemption, according to the philosophy embedded in post-Reformation morality plays, is dependent upon the audience understanding the truthfulness of Protestant theology and verses and also the deceptiveness and wickedness of Catholic theology, whose best example is the secular play of Calderón.[54]
The Vices in post-Reformation morality plays are sometimes depicted as being Catholic. At times this depiction is achieved through their physical appearance. For example, Vices in post-Reformation morality plays could be dressed as cardinals, friars, monks, or the pope. Other times, the Vice comes out and states he is a Catholic, or elucidates that he is Catholic by swearing a Catholic pledge. To deceive the victim of post-Reformation morality plays, the Vice typically assumes a new name to disguise what actual Vice he is.
Notes
Bibliography