Talk:Morality play

Moved from the article itself: Thank you to those who contributed to this article.

Positive/negative

I disagree with the element of the article which claims that in a morality play, personificaions of moral attributes attempt to persuade a man towards a more 'Godly' life rather than an evil one, as in actual fact, there will be personifications of both positive and negative (e.g the seven deadly sins) moral values, which will battle to claim the mans soul.

A better example of why there is an NPOV criterion was never seen. Unless you can back your claim for disagreeing with authorities, this comment had better been kept to yourself - you are entitled to your opinions, but they are not part of the historical record unless you are a dictator affecting the history of a significant part of the world population. The simple fact is that as a descendant of the religious mystery plays and within the socio-cultural framework of the time, they WERE used as a premonitory argument in support of the dogma of the time, which is specifically why they were subsequently suppressed by Puritans a century later on grounds functionally identical to those of the Taliban in recent times, for carrying dogmatically offensive payload. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.136.17.249 (talk) 11:47, 28 November 2010 (UTC)

Change in Meaning

Perhaps something could be mentioned about the usage of "morality plays" to mean socially-conscious allegories and not just religious plays. The old EC Comics would be a good example, also film noir. I agree with the above, the article leaves out the dialectics involved, the contradictions and the struggles. JBDay 19:01, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

Not in the sense of the meme. The morality plays were functionally lost in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, only reentering the performance repertoire following the reactivation of the York Cycle mystery plays from 1951. There may, however, be an American sub-genre hidden within the racial stereotyping of American plays in the nineteenth century which in turn fed the McCarthy enquiry's disporportionate focus on the theatre arts, and that could be a hook for your thinking. You would have to add a lot of detail to make the bridge, though: simply because it uses a similar dialectic does not place it in an unbroken lineage, not least because the study of historical allegory became resurgent at the very time you are talking about in works like The Crucible - the distinguishing element being the exclusion of the graeco-roman metaphore. Indeed, in works like Oh! What a Lovely War this was deliberately hidden within the class dynamic - unfortunately I speak from first-hand knowledge as a very minor part of the production team, precluding me from posting. More detailed source of the thinking is to be found in the French theatre of the 1950s in works of Anouilh, Cocteau and Sartre in the Antigone tradition. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.136.17.249 (talk) 11:32, 28 November 2010 (UTC)

Double Negative

There's a line in this articles that says: "the discrediting of the Catholic belief that during holy communion the sacramental bread does not actually become Jesus’ physical body". Paring this out: "discrediting the belief that it does not become". By this line alone, it would seem that Catholics believe the bread does not become the physical body, whereas Protestants believe that the bread does become the physical body. Since my understanding of these two is exactly backwards of this line (Catholics believe it does become the body, Protestants believe it doesn't), I think the line needs to be rewritten to accurately show the idea it is meant to convey. Maybe using Transubstantiation as a link would help. Kilyle (talk) 02:02, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Timelines

A historical meme so lacking in dates is also lacking in credibility, not least because a number of dogmatic changes in this area occurred. The term mediaeval, for example, is now generally taken a preceding 1400, although a certain amount of latitude into the fifteenth century to butt up to the rise of the Renaissance is recognised by the term Late Mediaeval, running from the end of feudalism in the Black Death to the rise of the Renaissance. I focus on this period as also being that of the rise of a more morbid sense of sin and evil, expressed in forms such as the Dance of Death. The heyday of the Morality play strictly speaking is the tail end of the fifteenth century running into the sixteenth. The sense is very Renaissance, having abandoned much of the pre-Christian symbolism of the Mystery plays. The term mediaeval is therefore a serious misnomer, semantically, culturally, and chronologically. Some specific dates for specific works might help: permit me to float 'Mankind' whose references to certain coinage make it after 1470, and 'Everyman' dating from around 1520. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.136.17.249 (talk) 11:03, 28 November 2010 (UTC)

The TEAMS Midle English Texts Series 2010 edition of Mankind convincingly dates it as 1465-70. The 2007 TEAMS edition of Everyman dates its first printing as early as 1510, which may suggest it is even older. And while Everyman may be called a "Tudor" piece chronologically (even though most scholarship has intentionally distanced it from other works for which that descriptor is applied), Castle of Perseverance and Mankind are certainly pre-Tudor. To avoid needless and purely academic elaborations of "Medieval" vs. "Late Medieval" vs. "Renaissance," I suggest this article treat pre-playhouse interludes as just that, listed more or less chronologically (since many dates aren't clear) and without unnecessary/inaccurate labels like "Tudor," etc.

Additionally, an article on morality plays in English should at least mention the two other accepted examples: Wisdom (ca. 1460?) and Pride of Life (ca. 1350-80?). Geoffr111 (talk) 20:15, 19 February 2012 (UTC)

Pre- and Post-

After reformation, all authors became protestants? Or is it about British literature only? 79.117.89.149 (talk) 21:54, 19 August 2013 (UTC)

Calderon

"The means of redemption, according to the philosophy embedded in post-Reformation morality plays, is dependent upon the audience understanding the truthfulness of Protestant theology and verses and also the deceptiveness and wickedness of Catholic theology, whose best example is the secular play of Calderón. [15]"

This last clause is rather obscure or even cryptic. Does it eventually mean that Calderon's secular plays are best examples of the "deceptiveness and wickedness of Catholic theology"? (And then why just his secular plays? And why this digression? It would of course be useful in case the Protestant morality plays and their public knew Calderon's works and referred to them, but does the author want to maintain this?)

Or does it, on the contrary, mean that Calderon, a pious Catholic in his autos sacramentales, used his secular plays as a means to reveal the "deceptiveness and wickedness of Catholic theology"? This would need a far more detailed explanation! Does the author know that "probabilism" was in no way un-Catholic but was a mainstream position in Catholic moral theology? Rheinvolk (talk) 09:46, 8 November 2015 (UTC)

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A range of edits/additions

New to editing Wikipedia here; apologies for any breaches of etiquette. I taught a university graduate seminar on morality plays this past spring and I assigned my graduate students to offer a series of changes and edits to this page, in order to bring the Wikipedia entry up to date with current research in the field. The changes may seem sweeping and sudden, but they are the summation of seven different contributors' work over three months... we gathered all of the students' work here: https://premodernity.net/morality-plays