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"Take example, all ye that this do hear or see..." The Morality Play was popular in England between 1400 and 1600. It offers moral instruction and spiritual teaching with personal abstractions representing good and evil. Surviving plays from that period number about sixty and the three in this edition were among the first ten. Mankind is a plain, honest farming man who struggles against worldly and spiritual temptation. The bawdy humour and violent action in the play serve to make the moral point and instruct by example. Everyman portrays a man's struggles in the face of death to raise himself to a state of grace so that he may experience everlasting life. It is exceptional among the Moralities for this narrow focus on the last phase of life, and conveys its message with awe-inspiring seriousness. Mundus et Infans is more typical of the Morality genre. It shows an arrogant, bullying protagonist led astray by a single evildoer into a life of debauchery, before the inevitable conversion to virtue. In showing the whole of man's life it is the antithesis of Everyman, the action of which seems to take place in a single day.
Written in Middle English during the Tudor period, "Everyman" is the most famous example of the medieval morality play. Popular in Europe during the 15th and 16th century, morality plays were allegorical dramas in which the protagonists are met with the personifications of personal attributes and tasked with choosing either a good and godly life or evil. "Everyman" is the archetypal morality play, as the main character, Everyman, represents all of mankind. God, frustrated with the wicked and greedy, sends Death to Everyman and summons him to account for his misdeeds and sins. It was believed that God tallied all of one's good and evil deeds in life and then one must provide an accounting before God upon one's death. During Everyman's pilgrimage to God, he meets many characters, such as Fellowship, Good Deeds, and Knowledge. Everyman asks them all to join him in his journey so that he may improve his reckoning before God. In the end, it is only Good Deeds that stays with him before God and helps Everyman find salvation and eternal life. This edition is printed on premium acid-free paper.
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A New York Times Notable Book In medieval England, a runaway scholar-priest named Nicholas Barber has joined a traveling theater troupe as they make their way toward their liege lord’s castle. In need of money, they decide to perform at a village en route. When their traditional morality plays fail to garner them an audience, they begin to stage the “the play of Thomas Wells”—their own depiction of the real-life drama unfolding within the village around the murder of a young boy. The villagers believe they have already identified the killer, and the troupe believes their play will be a straightforward depiction of justice served. But soon the players soon learn that the details of the crime are elusive, and the lines between performance and reality become blurred as they discover, scene by scene, line by line, what really happened. Thought-provoking and unforgettable, Morality Play is at once a masterful work of historical fiction, a gripping murder mystery, and a literary work of the first order.
The drama of the English Middle Ages is perennially popular with students and theatre audiences alike, and this is an updated edition of a book which has established itself as a standard guide to the field. The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, second edition continues to provide an authoritative introduction and an up-to-date, illustrated guide to the mystery cycles, morality drama and saints' plays which flourished from the late fourteenth to the mid-sixteenth centuries. The book emphasises regional diversity in the period and engages with the literary and particularly the theatrical values of the plays. Existing chapters have been revised and updated where necessary, and there are three entirely new chapters, including one on the cultural significance of early drama. A thoroughly revised reference section includes a guide to scholarship and criticism, an enlarged classified bibliography and a chronological table.
When it comes to Christian morality tales, most people think of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. Before Pilgrim's Progress, there was The Summoning of Everyman (more commonly known as Everyman); much like Bunyan's classic work, Everyman uses allegorical characters to examine the question of salvation and how man can receive it. The text is present with both the original translation and a modern translation. Please note, this story is also included in the collection “Everyman and Other Old Religious Plays In Plain and Simple English.”
In Signifying God, Sarah Beckwith explores the most lavish, long-lasting, and complex form of collective theatrical enterprise in English history: the York Corpus Christi plays. First staged as early as 1376, the plays were performed annually until the late 1500s and involved as much as a tenth of the city in multiple performances at a dozen or more locations. Introducing a radical new understanding of these plays as "sacramental theater," Beckwith shows how organizing the plays served as a political mechanism for regulating labor, and how theater and sacrament combined in them to do important theological work. She argues, for instance, that the theology of Corpus Christi in the resurrection plays can only be understood as a theatrical exploration of eucharistic absence and presence. Beckwith frames her study with discussions of twentieth-century manifestations of sacramental theater in Barry Unsworth's novel Morality Play and Denys Arcand's film Jesus of Montreal, and the connections between contemporary revivals of the York Corpus Christi plays and England's heritage culture.
With the METS editions of Everyman (2008), Mankind (2010), and The Castle of Perseverance (2010), this volume completes the presentation of the five surviving Middle English morality plays. In addition to the texts of The Pride of Life (the earliest of the surviving morality plays) and Wisdom (which is unusual for the size of its cast and the fact that it survives in multiple copies), Klausner's edition includes two appendices which provide the texts of primary sources for the two plays as well as appropriate music (liturgical music, song, and dances) which may have accompanied performances, especially Wisdom.
Seminar paper from the year 2001 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1 (A), Justus-Liebig-University Giessen (Instiute anglisitc linguistics), course: The Medieval Drama - Texts and Cultural Backgrounds, language: English, abstract: There are some obvious differences between the morality and the miracle plays. The latter did stress moral truths besides teaching facts of the bible, but on the whole did not lend themselves to allegorical formulation except when there was no well – defined Bible story to be followed. A good example in this case is the life of Maria Magdalen, before she was converted. The miracle play dealt with what were believed to be historical events and its main characters were for the most part ready- made for the playwright by the Bible and inherited tradition. The morality play on the other hand, stood by itself, unconnected to a cycle, and the plots were extremely stereotyped. “They afforded less scope for original creation than those of the miracles, which were crowded with major and minor characters, Herold, Pilate, Pharaoh, Noah’s wife, Satan, Adam and Eve,” (Kinghorn 1968: p.116) and a host of others, both scriptural and non-scriptural. As far as the characters in the morality plays are concerned one could say that these characters, like for instance the Seven Deadly Sins, did only offer very limited opportunities for development. “Gluttony could hardly be other than a fat lout, Sloth a half- awake lounger, Luxury an overdressed woman, Avarice a grasping old man and Anger continually in a rage”( Kinghorn 1968: p.116). As far as allegorical formulations are concerned it has to pointed out that the morality play characters were always personified vices and virtues, producing a conflict of sorts and providing enough material for a plot. The Christian Virtues, the Seven Deadly Sins, Pride of Life, World, Flesh Youth, Age, Holy Church, Wealth, Health, Mercy, Learning and, of course, Mankind are just a few examples for personages which were made to behave as though they were human by the didactic aim of the author ( Kinghorn 1968: p.116), but all these characters are always contained within their own narrow definition. Since these allegorical personages were not characters but walking abstractions, they provided the playwright only very limited opportunities for development. Everything that was said and done by these characters showed clearly the moral truth which was of course the subject of the plot. The late medieval morality plays mark a well - defined movement away from the religious drama towards the completely secular drama in England. [...]