Book contents
- Frontmatter
- I AFTER THE NORMAN CONQUEST
- II WRITING IN THE BRITISH ISLES
- III INSTITUTIONAL PRODUCTION
- IV AFTER THE BLACK DEATH
- V BEFORE THE REFORMATION
- Introduction
- 24 Hoccleve, Lydgate and the Lancastrian court
- 25 Lollardy
- 26 Romance after 1400
- 27 William Caxton
- 28 English drama: from ungodly ludi to sacred play
- 29 The allegorical theatre: moralities, interludes, and Protestant drama
- 30 The experience of exclusion: literature and politics in the reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII
- 31 Reformed literature and literature reformed
- Chronological outline of historical events and texts in Britain, 1050–1550
- Bibliography
- Index of manuscripts
- Index
- References
29 - The allegorical theatre: moralities, interludes, and Protestant drama
from V - BEFORE THE REFORMATION
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
- Frontmatter
- I AFTER THE NORMAN CONQUEST
- II WRITING IN THE BRITISH ISLES
- III INSTITUTIONAL PRODUCTION
- IV AFTER THE BLACK DEATH
- V BEFORE THE REFORMATION
- Introduction
- 24 Hoccleve, Lydgate and the Lancastrian court
- 25 Lollardy
- 26 Romance after 1400
- 27 William Caxton
- 28 English drama: from ungodly ludi to sacred play
- 29 The allegorical theatre: moralities, interludes, and Protestant drama
- 30 The experience of exclusion: literature and politics in the reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII
- 31 Reformed literature and literature reformed
- Chronological outline of historical events and texts in Britain, 1050–1550
- Bibliography
- Index of manuscripts
- Index
- References
Summary
The allegorical drama written in England during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is one of literary history’s most static genres. Though performed decades apart, plays like The Castle of Perseverance (c. 1400–25), Mankind (c. 1450), Magnyfycence (c. 1519) and Wyt and Science (c. 1531–47) tell similar stories of temptation, fall and regeneration. In every extant morality and most surviving interludes, personified virtues and vices contend over passive protagonists incapable of understanding or ameliorating their predicaments. Precisely because this drama privileges abstract types over sharply particularized examples, it resists formalist attempts to distinguish one play from another. One morality may feature more exuberant vices than another, or one may exhibit an unusually Latinate syntax, but their overall dramatic conception remains constant. This chapter interprets this constancy itself in relation to the interactions of economic, demographic, political and religious developments in late medieval society. Allegorical entertainments could serve widely varying ends depending on the audiences for whom they were performed and the values they were supposed to uphold.
Morality plays
In general, plays like The Pride of Life, Perseverance, Wisdom, Mankind and Everyman critique English society from a conservative perspective. Their principal vices are avarice, ambition, greed, extortion, and other sins associated with class mobility. The morality playwrights adopted allegory as their basic mode because its subordination of the particular to the universal mirrored the hierarchies of an imagined feudal polity that equated social aspiration with pride. They did not portray isolated instances of corruption but an entire society, Mankind writ large, infected by the profit motive.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature , pp. 767 - 792Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999
References
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