Morality play

The morality play is a genre of medieval and early Tudor drama. The term is used by scholars of literary and dramatic history to refer to a genre of play texts from the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries that feature personified concepts (most often virtues and vices, but sometimes practices or habits) alongside angels and demons, who are engaged in a struggle to persuade a protagonist who represents a generic human character toward either good or evil. The common story arc of these plays follows "the temptation, fall and redemption of the protagonist." Hildegard von Bingen's Ordo Virtutum (English: "Order of the Virtues"), composed c. 1151 in Germany, is the earliest known morality play by more than a century, and the only medieval musical drama to survive with an attribution for both the text and the music. Because there are many formal differences between this play and later medieval moralities, as well as the fact that it only exists in two manuscripts, it is unlikely that the Ordo Virtutum had any direct influence on the writing of its later English counterparts. Traditionally, scholars name only five surviving English morality plays from the medieval period: The Pride of Life (late 14th century), The Castle of Perseverance (c.1425); Wisdom, (1460–63); Mankind (c.1470); Everyman (1510). The Pride of Life was the earliest record of a morality play written in the English language; the text (destroyed by fire in 1922, but published earlier) existed on the back of a parchment account roll from June 30, 1343 to January 5, 1344, from the Priory of the Holy Trinity in Dublin. However, this textual record was incomplete. The play cut off mid-line, when the character Messenger, at the command of the King, called upon Death; the plot summary provided by the introductory banns, featured at the beginning of the play, indicated that the action continued. The Castle of Perseverance, Wisdom, and Mankind are all part of a single manuscript called the Macro Manuscript, named after its first known owner, Cox Macro of Bury St Edmunds.