ABSTRACT
The medieval morality plays, which flourished in England at the same time as the Corpus Christi cycles, took many theatrical guises, from the cosmic pageantry and spectacle of The Castle of Perseverance (1405–25) and Wisdom (1450–1500) to the barnyard scurrilities of Mankind (1465–70), from the topical satire of Hickscorner (1513) to the universality of Everyman. A morality play sees life as a sequential process through which every human being passes, by virtue of being human. The human drama of a morality play is an analogous, but crucially different, presentation of the life cycle. In the social rituals of primitive man, the life of the individual is brought into significant relationship with the totality of the society. The mixture of doctrine and realism in the morality play has its origins in this preaching tradition, and the immediate sources of allegory in the morality play are almost invariably found in medieval sermon literature.
