Medieval Mystery and Morality Plays

Core Idea

English drama after the classical period grew up largely inside the medieval Church and town. Mystery plays, also called cycle plays, were sequences of short plays that staged biblical history from the Creation to the Last Judgment, and in towns such as York and Chester they were performed by craft guilds. Morality plays, such as *Everyman*, were allegories in which personified virtues, vices and abstractions struggle over the soul of a representative human being. Both forms shaped the English stage that Marlowe and Shakespeare inherited.

How It's Best Learned

Read *Everyman* and chart each character Everyman asks to go with him to his death, noting who refuses and why. Then read the Wakefield *Second Shepherds' Play* and set its comic sheep-stealing plot beside its Nativity scene. Finally, look for the medieval Vice figure in a later play, such as Shakespeare's *Richard III*, to see the tradition carry forward.

Common Misconceptions

• Medieval drama was solemn and humorless. (Many plays mix comedy with sacred story. Noah's quarrelsome wife and the sheep-thief Mak are comic roles, and the Vice in morality plays was often the most entertaining character on stage.)
• Mystery plays were performed by priests inside churches. (The great English cycles were civic productions staged by craft guilds, often outdoors on movable pageant wagons or fixed stages.)
• Mystery plays and morality plays are the same form. (Mystery plays dramatize episodes from the Bible. Morality plays use allegorical characters such as Death, Good Deeds and Mischief to teach how to live and die.)

Explainer

After the fall of Rome, organized theatre in Western Europe largely disappeared for centuries. When drama returned, much of it grew out of Christian worship. By the late fourteenth century, English towns were staging long sequences of short plays in English that told the whole story of the Bible, from the fall of Lucifer and the Creation to the Last Judgment. These are called mystery plays or cycle plays. Four major English cycles survive in some form: York, Chester, Towneley (often linked to Wakefield) and N-Town.

The cycles were civic events. Each craft guild took responsibility for one or more episodes, and in some towns the plays were performed on pageant wagons that moved through the streets so that crowds could watch each scene in turn. Many were performed around the feast of Corpus Christi in early summer. The plays mixed reverence with comedy. In the *Second Shepherds' Play*, from the Towneley manuscript, a thief named Mak steals a sheep and hides it in a cradle, pretending it is his newborn son. The shepherds discover the trick, toss him in a blanket, and are then called by an angel to see the real newborn, Christ, in Bethlehem.

A second form, the morality play, appeared by the early fifteenth century. Instead of biblical figures, its characters are abstractions. In *Everyman*, from the late fifteenth century, God sends Death to summon Everyman to his final reckoning. Everyman asks Fellowship, Kindred, Cousin and Goods to come with him, and each refuses. Only Good Deeds, at first too weak to stand, goes with him into the grave. The allegory is simple to follow and strong in effect.

Other morality plays gave large roles to vice figures. In *Mankind* (c. 1470), comic tempters with names like Mischief and Nought joke with the audience and lead the hero astray. This stock character, often called the Vice, influenced later villains. Shakespeare's Richard III compares himself to "the formal Vice, Iniquity," and Marlowe's *Doctor Faustus* gives its hero a Good Angel and an Evil Angel who argue for his soul.

The cycles faded during the Protestant Reformation, and most had stopped by the late sixteenth century. Their mix of comedy and seriousness, and their direct address to an audience, passed into the Elizabethan theatre.