MORALITY PLAYS

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Growing quite naturally out of the mystery plays were the morality plays that first began to appear around 1375. A morality play, unlike the mystery play which is concerned with specific Biblical stories, may be defined as dramatized allegory with didactic intent. It is wholly concerned with the behavior and final destiny of humankind. Indeed, the morality play fastened upon the homily or sermon (the actors were clergy, not guilds) with their ethical and didactic purposes as sources of inspiration and utilized entertaining anecdote and dramatic dialogue. Like the sermon, the morality play aimed to strengthen the believer in his warfare against the sins that so easily beset mankind.

The use of allegory for the moralities can be traced to early Christian writers like Prudentius who in the fourth century A.D. wrote Psychomachia, a work that represents the conflict of spiritual forces for the soul of humankind. From him comes the conception of the Seven Deadly Sins which came to be generally regarded as Pride, Lust, Sloth, Envy, Anger, Avarice, and Gluttony, and to which were opposed the Seven Cardinal Virtues of Faith, Hope, Charity, Justice, Prudence, Temperance, and Fortitude. The writers of the moralities devised plays in which characters were no longer scriptural personages like the mysteries, sheer abstractions, and the action took in one way or another the form of a struggle of Good and Evil for the possession of Man, who is himself, under one name or another, the central figure.

The earliest morality of which we know anything is a Pater Noster (Lord's Prayer) play, dating from perhaps 1384. Other moralities were: The Pride of Life, The Castle of Perseverance, Wisdom (or Mind, Will and Understanding), Everyman (the best by far), and Mankind, the latter dating from 1475 and indicating the morality in its decadence. Themes in these early moralities include: 1) the anti­Christ, 2) the conflict of vices and virtues, and 3) death. However, as has already been mentioned, the central theme of most was the deadly contest between good and evil for the soul of man. This contest, invariably ending in the defeat of evil, gave the plays a certain uniformity if not monotony. In order to combat such monotony and subsequent boredom, writers began to use more and more comic elements. As a matter of fact, while comedy was only incidental in the early mystery plays, in the morality plays it came to occupy an essential and even dominating role. A chronological survey of these plays will show the increasing tendency to subordinate the original purpose of ethical edification to a frank effort to entertain the audience by an increasing emphasis upon the comic.

Morality plays use the same comic techniques they inherited from the mysteries, only expanded and extended. Rough­and­tumble action scenes are still present, but the language of the plays begins to be more sophisticated and playful. There is plenty of "flyting" or comic shouting matches, puns, malaprops, distortions of foreign languages, rural dialects, and songs. Perhaps the most distinctive mark of the morality plays was their use of the character Vice, often a devil or Satan himself, but always a evil force. Vice could be nothing more than the typical melodramatic villain or he could be a more prankish figure, using all kinds of tricks and devices to thwart the hero of the play.