Medieval Drama

Medieval Drama is mostly based on religion and struggles or portraying the

life of a holy figure. Medieval Drama became famous around the 15th Century and
became more professional. The three types of Medieval Drama both have similarities
and differences. They are performed in front of an audience and give out a message.
Medieval Drama is the building blocks in Drama and without it in the timeline Drama
would be different.

In book “Jhon Peek and Martin Coyley” The two basic types of medieval
drama are the miracle plays and morality plays of the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries.

The miracle plays deal with the Christian history of mankind from the
Creation to the Last Judgement. Each play focuses on one major event from the
Bible, such as the fall of Adam and Eve or the birth of Christ, and forms part of a
scries or cycle of plays named after the town where they were performed: York,
Chester, and Wakefield or Towneley are the most important. Such plays can be seen
as diaaccic drama intended to explain the mysteries of Christianity, yet there is
always a gap in the plays between the ideal of God's divine order and the violent,
often grotesquely comic actions of the characters. For.example, what we remember
most from the York play of The Crucifixion is the contrast between Christ's silent
suffering and obedicnce to God and the noisy, bungling workmanship of the soldiers
as they try to nail him to the cross. This gap between religious ideals and worldly
disorder is also present in the morality plays.

Unlike the miracle plays, the morality plays focus on the moral dilemmas that
confront man as he journeys from birth to death. They are allegorical plays (for
allegory, see p. 127), in which both plot and character are used to illustrate an abstract
moral lesson. In Everyman, for example, thc most famous of the morality plays, God
instructs eith to tell the hero he must dic. Everyman looks for someone to accompany
him, but only Good Deeds will do so. The moral of the play is that every man should
be prepared for death and look to his good deeds, but what strikes us most is the sheer
confusion and panic of Everyman, and how difficult religious ideals are to live up to.

This is From bible “Everyman”