ABSTRACT
In the early decades of the sixteenth century the morality drama translates the individual problem of repentance and salvation into the collective problem of commonwealth and government. The central mankind figure emerges as an emblematic ruler and the auxiliary characters of the morality play assume their places easily in the microcosm of a courtly setting. A series of thematically related tableaux and speeches on stages along the route presented an appropriate political lesson, ‘an illustrated lecture in dramatic form on government and political philosophy.’ In the interim Lindsay apparently revised the play and greatly expanded it for presentation outdoors before a more general audience. The steady trend toward explicitly political drama which we have observed in the plays of Medwall, Skelton, and Lindsay reaches its early Tudor culmination in the political moralities of Nicholas Udall and John Bale.
