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29 - The allegorical theatre: moralities, interludes, and Protestant drama

from V - BEFORE THE REFORMATION

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
John Watkins
Edited by
David Wallace
David Wallace
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania
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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.

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Chapter
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The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature , pp. 767 - 792
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1999

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