Medieval Drama

Non-classical: was born out of liturgy.

Though in this sense similar in origins to that in ancient Greece when celebrations of a community
praying to a god appears to have been soon frame worked into theatrical performance.

The content of medieval drams: human fate represented in metaphorical and metaphysical terms.

Mystery Plays

A major form of popular medieval religious drama: representing a scene from the Old or New
Testament.

Mystery plays – also known as Corpus Christi plays or pageants – were performed in many towns
across Europe from 13th – 16th century.

Originally developed from liturgy and liturgical drama and designed to recreate part of the church
service, etc.

Usually enacted on Corpus Christi, a holy feast from1311 onwards.

In terms of pageant: several English towns had cycles of mystery plays, in which Wagons stopped at
different points in the town were used as stages for various episodes, each presented by a guild
(then known as a ‘mystery’ (e.g., cobblers guild, etc.) – the cycle might take you all the way from The
Creation to Doomsday, for example.

A full cycle, like the 48 plays enacted at York would represent the whole Christian cosmology from
Creation to Doomsday. Other such cycles survive from Chester and Wakefield.

These plays are usually anonymous, e.g., The Wakefield Master who wrote the Second Shepherd’s
play (the most celebrated).

Miracle plays:

A kind of medieval religious plays representing non-scriptural legends of saints or the virgin mary.

Unfortunately, due to the book-burning zeal of the reformation no significant miracle plays survive
in English.

French cycle of forty Miracles de Notre-Dame (circa 1400s).

Morality play:

(Late Medieval) Dramatised allegory, in which personified virtues, vices, diseases and temptations
struggle for the soul of Man as he travels from birth to death. They introduce a simple message of
Christian salvation, but often include comic scenes. The best-known is Everyman. Most are
anonymous.
Psychomachia: a struggle between opposite values (taking the form of a battle for the soul), i.e.,
good and evil represented emblematically (e.g. Good an evil angel whispering into an individual’s
ear).

Dance Macabre: Everybody’d equal in front of death

The trappings or framework of the Morality play are use in one of the finest and most famous
renaissance plays: The Tragedy of Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe