Mankind as a Type-Figure on the Popular Religious Stage: an Analysis of the Fifteenth-Century English Morality Plays

Abstract

For the first and only time in dramatic history, ‘Man’ as a generalized type appears on the stage as the central character of the early fifteenth-century English morality plays. The morality play itself, in contrast to the earlier mystery plays, which presented the Biblical drama of world history, represents the story of the individual Christian from birth to death and final salvation.‘Mankind’ represents all social classes at their lowest common denominator, an emphasis reinforced by the marginal situation of the wandering players who performed these plays and who themselves belonged to no recognized class within the social order. The appearance of Mankind as central actor resulted partly from the individualist and voluntarist emphasis of nominalist thought and partly from the renewed emphasis on the individual associated with social changes of the time. In the earlier morality plays, Mankind was guided about the stage by overwhelming supernatural figures; in the later moralities, like Everyman, ‘Mankind’ lost his generalized characteristics after about 1530 and became a historical personage or a personification of only one social class. We shall attempt to describe some of the reasons for ‘Mankind's’ appearance at this point in dramatic history and his development as a character from 1420 to 1520.