morality play

1. A drama in the 15th and 16th centuries using allegorical characters to portray the soul's struggle to achieve salvation.
2. Something viewed as exhibiting a struggle between good and evil and offering a moral lesson.

morality play, a kind of religious drama popular in England, Scotland, France, and elsewhere in Europe in the 15th and early 16th centuries. Morality plays are dramatized allegories, in which personified virtues, vices, diseases, and temptations struggle for the soul of Man as he travelsfrom birth to death. They instil a simple message of Christian salvation, but often include comic scenes, as in the lively obscenities of Mankind (c.1465). The earliest surviving example in English is the long Castle of Perseverance (c.1420), and the best‐known is Everyman (c.1510). Most are anonymous, but Magnyfycence (c.1515) was written by John Skelton. Echoes of the morality plays can be found in Elizabethan drama, especially Marlowe's Dr Faustus and the character of Iago in Shakespeare's Othello, who resembles the sinister tempter known as the Vice in morality plays. See also interlude, psychomachy.

For more information on morality play, visit Britannica.com.

Medieval plays teaching a moral lesson through a drama involving personified abstractions; they were a major genre of the 15th and 16th c. and reflect the contemporary taste for allegory. Some are short and light, and have much in common, in terms of style, versification, and stage requirements, with the soties; others are much longer and closer to mystery plays, e.g. L'Homme juste et l'homme mondain (30, 000 lines, 84 characters). Plots are based on a conflict between two opposing sets of virtues and vices, who may be fighting over the soul of Everyman, Le Monde, or Povre Peuple. These satirical plays are comic in two senses; virtue normally triumphs, and the actions and eventual discomfiture of the vices provoke laughter. Moralities can be classified according to their subjects. Some attack universal sins, like greed (in La Condamnation de Banquet, Gourmandise, Friandise, and Bonne Compagnie gorge themselves with Dîner, but soon meet Apoplexie and Paralysie; later, Banquet is executed by Sobriété and Diète), or more topical issues, like fashions in education (Les Enfants de maintenant), social injustice (Povre Peuple), ecclesiastical disputes (Le Concile de Basle), and politics (La Paix de Péronne). There are also some moralités religieuses, which are allegorizations of material more typical of mystery plays, e.g. La Vendition de Joseph. The performances of these plays, of which about 80 have survived, were organized by societies devoted to the purpose, like the Enfants Sans Souci and the Basoche.

[Graham Runnalls]

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)