The English Morality Play

Origins, HIstory, and Influence of a Dramatic Tradition

Robert A Potter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781032553009
• eBook ISBN: 9781000928624
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: British Drama
• Index: Literature

First published in 1975, The English Morality Play is the extended history of the English morality play, its persistence and flourishing as a dramatic tradition. The book sheds light on the intellectual and social origins of the morality play, its relationship to the medieval Corpus Christi cycle plays, its subject, purpose, conditions of original staging, and the abstract characters of its dramatis personae. The changing tradition is revealed within Renaissance drama, in the works of Skelton and Medwall, and the Reformation plays of Lindsay, Bale and Udall, as the morality play altered under the pressure of political events, escaped from the general suppression of religious drama, and in complex ways came to influence the dramatic conceptions of Marlowe, Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. Contemporary parallels to the English morality tradition in European drama are investigated, as is the rediscovery of the texts of the plays by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century critics. In the final chapter, Dr. Potter examines the revival of the morality tradition on the twentieth-century stage and its influence on such dramatists as Bernard Shaw, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats and Bertolt Brecht. This book will be of interest to students of literature and drama.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Prologue
• I The idea of a morality play
• II Medieval plays: the repentance drama of early England
• III Renaissance plays: Skelton, Medwall, and the morality of state
• IV Reformation plays: Lindsay, Bale, Udall, and the political morality
• V Early Elizabethan plays in the morality tradition
• VI Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson: the apotheosis of the morality play
• VII European plays: the morality tradition from the Middle Ages to Calderón
• VIII Rediscovering the evidence: 1660-1914
• IX Everyman in the Twentieth Century
• Notes
• Index