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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
A comparison of Henry Medwall's Morality Nature and John Lydgate's poem, Reson and Sensuallyte, makes it plain that the two works exhibit remarkable coincidences of character, situation, and language. The general resemblance is obvious enough. In each of the works the plot is allegorical, and in each the hero, who is entitled “Man” in the Morality and, impersonally, “I” in the poem, is a type figure representing mankind. This representative of humanity is in each case approached by the lady Nature, who, after giving him a careful explanation of herself and a thorough list of admonitions, finally sends him away to travel through the world. The allegory which follows is of the familiar type in which the life of man is represented by a journey; but the manner in which this journey is undertaken is carefully specialized in the poem, and in this special form is so strikingly reproduced in the play that one may readily conclude that the former supplied much of the material to be found in the latter.
1 Edited by J. S. Farmer in “Lost” Tudor Plays, London, 1907. The play is assigned to a date between 1486 and 1500.
2 Edited by Ernest Sieper in the Publications of the Early English Text Society.
3 These apparently inconsequential remarks become rational as soon as one considers that the person addressed represents mankind in general.
4 There is here, as is usual in allegory, a curious mixture of allegorical and literal language. Nature first likens Reason and Sensuality to two roads, then speaks of the conflict in man's nature between his reason and his sensuality, and finally advises her disciple to start out in the company of the guide and adviser Reason and to ignore the advice of the false guide Sensuality.
5 Here the world is personified.
6 In both poem and play sensuality is explained by Nature as an essential quality in man, one which enables him to receive many necessary and worthy sensations, but which may easily degenerate into a vice if it is not kept under the control of reason.
7 The explanation of celestial control is in the play much simplified, and very obviously adapted to the needs of the humble playgoer. The constant tendency of the Moralities was to simplify and rationalize the material drawn from sources.