Questions: Medieval Mystery and Morality Plays

Question 1

What is the main difference between a mystery play and a morality play?

• A. Mystery plays are about crimes, while morality plays are about saints
• B. Mystery plays stage biblical episodes, while morality plays use personified abstractions to show a representative person's moral struggle
• C. Mystery plays are in Latin, while morality plays are in Greek
• D. Mystery plays have no comedy, while morality plays have no serious content

Answer: (B)

The mystery cycles dramatized Bible history from Creation to Doomsday. A morality play such as Everyman or Mankind puts virtues, vices and figures such as Death on stage. Both forms were performed in English and both include comedy.

Question 2

In Everyman, Fellowship, Kindred and Goods all stay with Everyman to the end and enter the grave with him.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: False

Each of them abandons him. Only Good Deeds goes with him into the grave. The allegory teaches that friends, family and wealth cannot help the soul at its judgment.

Question 3

Who usually produced the great English mystery cycles in towns such as York and Chester?

• A. Traveling professional acting companies paid by the king
• B. Craft guilds, each responsible for one or more plays in the cycle
• C. University students performing in Latin
• D. Monks performing in private for their own community

Answer: (B)

Each guild took charge of a pageant, sometimes one linked to its trade. The productions were public civic events. Professional companies became the main producers of English drama only later, in the sixteenth century.

Question 4

In the Second Shepherds' Play, the thief Mak hides a stolen sheep in a cradle and pretends it is his newborn child. The play then ends with the shepherds visiting the infant Christ. Why might the playwright have placed these two scenes together?

Model answer: The fake baby in the cradle is a comic parody that prepares for the true child in the manger. The contrast moves the audience from rough comedy and human trickery to wonder, and it shows the sacred entering ordinary rural life.

The doubling is deliberate. Medieval drama often set the holy beside the everyday, and here the parody helps the audience feel the meaning of the Nativity.