The Idea of a Person in Medieval Morality Plays

Abstract

The Idea of a Person in Medieval Morality Plays Natalie Crohn Schmitt In 1914, W. Roy Mackenzie explained that "A Morality is a play, allegorical in structure, which has for its main object the teaching of some lesson for the guidance of life, and in whiCh the principal characters are personified··abstractions or highly universalized types."1 By and large critics of medieval morality plays have continued to work within the limitations of Mackenzie's description, refining our understanding of the object of the lesson, and of the concepts "allegory," "personified ab­ straction," and "universalized type." There has.been no substan­ tial change in our understanding of these plays. In this paper I argue that while the object of the plays is didactic, their effect is mimetic; that, more literally than the analyses have allowed, the plays provide a phenomenological account of existence, and that the concepts "allegory,'' "personi­ fied abstraction,'' and "universalized type" do not account for the whole of the medieval experience of the plays, nor for the whole of our experience of them either. My starting point is Geoffrey Bullough's observation that "it has not yet been adequately realized how continuously Eng­ lish literature has been affected, both in matter and in form, by changes in men's notions of the human mind and of its relation to the body and the world about it."2 This paper is an attempt to begin to recover the psychology inherent in the medieval morality plays. It shows that a number of things which have heretofore been dismissed as literary weaknesses can be under­ stood as representation of the human experience. The paper has four parts: 1 . Mimesis, in which I explain, in general, the view of man in the world which the plays express, and 2. Allegory, 3. Personified Abstractions, and 4. Universalized Type, in which 23 24 Comparative Drama I explore the difficulties these concepts present in our under­ standing of these plays. I Mimesis: Mind, Body, and World. The war between Good and Evil was the profoundest reality of life, since upon the issue hung the eternal destiny of the soul. The salvation of the hard-pressed soul was the supreme prize of existence, and mortal life became subject to a single evaluation-the soul's progress toward God or its defection away from Him. The adventure of life was, in our sense, inward and spiritual. God created the earth and the heavens and all things therein so that man might work out his life and destiny. Man was at the center of the universe and everything possessed significance not in itself but for man's pilgrimage. The Devil and his demons indeed were very real and very close, and the powers of God and his angels needed constantly to be drawn upon to combat them. What we call external reality was subordinate to the central conflict. The observer was himself in the picture at the center, and the world was more like a garment man wore about him than a stage on which he moved. The internal and external world were identi­ fied in a state of fusion and wholeness.3 Robert Potter believes the events which occur in the course of a morality play to be not mimetic representations of life, but analogical demonstrations of what life is about.4 The distinction, however, does not seem medieval. The world itself was a great analogy making manifest the otherwise invisible and only reality of God. The medieval artists were Realists;S they believed that the world was to be understood not in terms of operations and causes, but in terms of its meaning. The part of man which is the nearest image of God is his mind. Those activities which seem to belong to man as an organic creature but do not proceed from his will are reckoned as outside his "self." The automatic functions of the body are grouped together as "lower functions"; they become dissociated from the self, which is increasingly thought of as limited to activities of the mind. Self-expression, then, becomes associated with what we would think of as self-repression.6 This picture of mind, body, and world and...