"Workfare" and the Medicaid Morality Play.

Dramatic Allegory, or, Exploring the Moral Play Joanne Spencer Kantrowitz Most current writing on the morality play can be classified as products of two approaches developed during the early twen­ tieth century. While the work of the last fifteen years or so does reflect the critical categories developed since 1945 and, more recently, the mythic emphasis of Northrop Frye, the basic con­ ceptions still derive from the work of E. N. S. Thompson and Willard Famham. Thompson presents his categories in terms of motif or subject, an approach which easily dovetails into the creation of archetypes; Famham’s perception of a rise-fall-rise pattern extends a view of drama which has dominated the twenti­ eth century until fairly recently.1 Although these approaches linger on, recent scholarship shows some signs of other descriptions of the morality play.2 My own preliminary attempt, here, centers on a view of that genre as dramatic allegory. I coin the term to emphasize simi­ larities between the narrative and the theatrical which are two manifestations of allegorical art. While this essay is hardly a final statement, I see the morality play as not basically mimetic at all. Rather, it is a didactic, allegorical drama whose character lies in the exposition of a thesis. This thesis determines the selec­ tion, the ordering, and the emphasis of plot and character. While “morality play” is itself a cloudy term, I use it roughly as a vague description of the didactic drama which occurs in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries until that surprising change of emphasis took place in the latter’s closing decades.3 As an at­ tempt to reconstruct an aesthetic from the sources of the period itself, my approach emphasizes literary history. My inductive description is structural analysis, based on narrative and dramatic allegory during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; however, the 68 Joanne Spencer Kantrowitz 69 final section sketches a way to test these conclusions against the evidence of contemporary rhetoric. But before new formulations are developed, we should dis­ entangle ourselves from the hypotheses of the past. Because the morality play is usually studied as background for Elizabethan drama, current scholarship still refers back to authorities who sought the origins of the characterization and mimetic plot de­ veloped by Elizabethan playwrights. (This evolutionary ap­ proach was the literary analogy to Darwin’s origin of the species.) The central idea to emerge from these studies is the “psychomachia principle,” an idea which is adopted by Lewis in The Allegory of Love and by the current authorities on the morality play, Bernard Spivack and David Bevington. Since the idea has reached the point of mere repetition, we should examine one of its earliest statements, that oft-cited monograph, E. N. S. Thompson’s “The English Moral Play,” published in 1910.4 According to Thompson, Prudentius is the “father of the morality play” because “he established [in the Psychomachia] . . . the idea upon which all those plays were based.” Despite the difference between drama and narrative poem, and despite the substitution of the “realism of everyday life for the romance of the outworn epic,” the plays were “in spirit and in general plan . . . only a retelling of the fourth-century allegorical epic” (p. 333). Thompson rests his generalization on an analysis of The Castle of Perseverance as a psychomachia, a battle of vir­ tues and vices for the soul of man. Thus we have “the full-scope morality play,” a definition based on four extant texts (the Castle of Perseverance, Mankind, Wisdom, and Everyman), a fragment (Pride of Life), and passing references to lost Pater Noster plays.5 Thompson’s argument depends on assumptions which may be overlooked once a view becomes authoritative. Obviously, the definition generalizes only over the Macro Moralities. He treats the early Tudor drama after 1500 as a series of departures from his basic model. Such classification derives from the medieval-renaissance division of English history, a view which rightly is less authoritative today.6 Aside from this, other as­ sumptions cling to Thompson’s essay and continue to clog re­ cent discussion. Approaching the Castle of Perseverance, Thomp­ son cautions the reader, one “should remember that its author 70 Comparative Drama...

The article examines the main category of carnival - ambivalence based on the material of the novel of Barry Unsworth "Morality Play", which reveals the features of the carnival worldview, a characteristic feature of which is the idea of the dialogical nature of truth. In the novel by the English author Barry Unsworth "Morality Play", the main goal of the carnival is realized, which is to turn inside out the usual ideas about the world as a reasonable hierarchical system, to turn the usual order of things upside down, to ridicule everything familiar and frozen, in order to through denial, ridicule (symbolic death) contribute to the revival and renewal of the world. During the analysis of the character system of the novel by the English author Barry Unsworth "Morality Play", paired images characteristic of carnival thinking were identified: priest Nicholas Barber - confessor of Lord Simon Damian; Margaret Cornwall - a deaf-mute girl; Brendan - Thomas Wells. Scenes and characters paired by contrast and similarity have an impact on the figurative system and poetics of the novel. The findings suggest that the carnival tradition penetrates deeply into the structure of the novel, affecting the plot, forms a comic effect, preserving the uniqueness of ambivalent carnival laughter.

Ineke Murakami. Moral Play and Counterpublic: Transformations in Moral Drama, 1465-1599. volume 18 of routledge studies in renaissance Literature and Culture. New York: routledge, 2011. 247 pages. $141.Reviewed by Jennifer R. RustIneke Murakami's Moral Play and Counterpublic: Transformations in Moral Drama, 1465-1599 testifies to vitality of tradition in fif- teenth and england. it is a significant contribution to schol- arship on pre-shakespearean drama, particularly in its attention to continu- ities between late-medieval drama (represented by initial chapter's analysis of fifteenth-century Mankind) and flourishing professional theater of later sixteenth century (addressed in concluding chapters on Marlowe and Jonson). Murakami argues that dramatic allegories of moral plays are so- phisticated discourses that enable new forms of consciousness. she elaborates this claim with ambitious theoretical forays, drawing upon Marx- ism, psychoanalysis, and biopolitics to explicate breadth of cultural and social work performed by these dramas. in addition to providing a new per- spective on english tradition of moral drama, Moral Play and Counterpublic makes a meaningful intervention in growing body of critical work on early modern spheres.In Murakami's introduction, interrelation between the genre of mo- rality and emergence of diverse sixteenth-century spheres is posited as unifying principle (4) of study. Murakami favors Michael warner's formulation of over Jurgen Habermas's much- critiqued account of public sphere as primarily an eighteenth-century bourgeois phenomenon. warner's concept of counterpublics originally the- orized relations between, on one hand, discourses produced by marginalized collectivities and, on other, a dominant discourse in contemporary American culture. Nonetheless, Murakami finds this concept to be apt to describe kinds of publics that emerge in conjunction with early modern theatrical performance, particularly their ephemeral, non- elite and often agonistic (12), anti-authoritarian characteristics. Murakami further builds on steven Mullaney's contention that early modern theater was a particularly fertile zone for producing publics: [a]s a particularly hybrid me- dium that partakes of several modes of publication at once . . . drama constitutes a mode of publicity that 'precipitates new forms of critical and aes- thetic thinking about . . . relation between theatre and commonwealth' (13). Murakami is particularly concerned to illuminate hybrid nature of moral play itself, as a discursive tradition that moved both within and outside authoritative institutions without collapsing into either propaganda or politically radical ideology (13). Moral plays were particularly adept at so- liciting counterpublics because they activated among their audiences a faculty for judgment-of not only aesthetic quality of play but also its po- litical and social dimensions (14). To further this interpretation, Murakami develops a versatile concept of allegory, which emerges as a polyvalent and dynamic discursive mode that enables moral drama to address political, so- cial, economic, and religious tensions in a flexible and sophisticated manner. Murakami argues that early modern moral plays are best understood through this multifaceted, fluid conception of allegory, which liberates these dramas from some of more stultifying homiletic interpretations to which they have been subjected in past.Acknowledging that legible evidence of counterpublics generated by early modern moral plays is often hard to discern, Murakami nonetheless in- sists that a careful analysis of historical and literary documents will allow one to extrapolate publics(15) that moral plays both invited and sum- moned into being. …

The first records of Morality plays, of which the most widely known is Everyman, occur at around the same time as the Mystery Cycles were being performed by the trade guilds. It is at first easier to see the differences between the two types of play rather than their similarities. The Morality is not concerned with Bible history and is not cyclical in form. Nevertheless, both forms are unashamedly didactic drama and both are deeply concerned for the spiritual welfare of man. Because the Morality was not tied to the static theology of the scriptures which shaped the Mystery play, it is in many ways a more flexible dramatic form. The driving force behind any Morality play was to teach — but the personal views of the author (most usually an unknown writer) towards social, political, religious or moral matters were incorporated into a set of conventions which that writer in turn both inherited and expanded. For this reason there is no such thing as a 'typical' Morality play — a fact which is at the same time both exhilarating and exasperating.

Reviewed by: Theater of the Word: Selfhood in the English Morality Play by Julie Paulson Matthew Sergi Julie Paulson. Theater of the Word: Selfhood in the English Morality Play. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019. Pp. x, 229. $100.00 cloth; $45.00 paper. While morality plays "are regularly described as didactic or instructional dramas that dispatch easily discerned moral truths using 'flat' abstract types and predictable stories of temptation," Julie Paulson's excellent Theater of the Word: Selfhood in the English Morality Play argues, convincingly, that "the opposite is true" (2). The engine of that argument is Paulson's application to the morality plays of Wittgenstein's work on language and consciousness: "there appears to be little exploration in the morality play of the interior life or mental processes of its characters" (33), not because the playmakers failed to understand the inner workings of human consciousness, but rather because "[h]uman subjects have no a priori identity that exists outside human exchange" in the first place (123). The medieval morality plays, Paulson writes, "imagine a self that is first and foremost performed: constructed, articulated, and known through communal performances" (6, emphasis hers), which are central to and instrumental to the very "formation of Christian subjects" (7, 86). For Paulson, the definitive communal performance, a ritual through which the self takes form (rather than only being revealed or discovered), is penance: "the plays illustrate how penance provides penitents with a particular kind of training that shapes their understanding of the meanings of moral and ethical words central to a conception of a Christian self" (33). Starting from a user-friendly primer on Wittgenstein, interwoven with premodern writing about the soul and being (20–33), Theater of the Word demonstrates that morality play characters emerge gradually, through "sensible and communal processes of generating meaning" (66) in which "words are redefined through human interactions" (139), into the fullness of what they allegorize. Paulson's Wittgensteinian interpretation not only fuels the book's major theses, but also produces some gorgeous close readings along the way, notably of Caro in The Castle of Perseverance (48–49), Anima in Wisdom (which "stages the processes through which its protagonist learns the meaning of her own name" [65–66, 79–85]), Mercy in Mankind (throughout Chapter 3, articulated especially well at 111–12), Goods and Good Deeds in Everyman (126–29, 132–35), and Adulation in Respublica (138–39). [End Page 434] Chapter 1 finds in Castle "a case for the essential role of penance … in defining what it means to be 'humankind' … a version of human selfhood produced by, and utterly dependent upon, the institutions and social performances in which it participates" (40). For Paulson, Castle's version of penance deflects Lollard heterodoxy, both by asserting the necessity of the sacrament and by "decentraliz[ing] the priest's role" (47) in its communal ritual: "repentance is both an interior and a social process" (52, emphasis hers). She points out that Shrift's priestly absolution of Humankind, as pivotal as it is in Castle, still fails—"Shrift's warning does not hold" (60)—without social and experiential learning. Andrea Louise Young's Vision and Audience in Medieval Drama: A Study of "The Castle of Perseverance" (2015) might be read productively alongside this chapter, particularly where Paulson discusses physical space and audience interactions. Similarly, Chapter 2's interpretation of Wisdom, which touches often on medieval contemplation and participation, might be read as a complement to Eleanor Johnson's Staging Contemplation: Participatory Theology in Middle English Prose, Verse, and Drama (2018). In this chapter, Paulson establishes a strong foundation for her broader thesis that moralities demonstrate "the role of penitential ritual in shaping [the] interior" of the medieval self "and the impossibility of splitting the interior from the exterior practices that define it" (71). In Wisdom, "in the same moment penance reforms the soul to God's image, the soul learns what a soul is" (86): the play is thus "less an attempt to demonstrate that the soul is defiled through sin and purified through penitential ritual than an attempt to reveal how the formation of the Christian soul takes place through … visible ritual practices...

The “morality play” is one of the most recognizable medieval European dramatic genres, yet much about this term, including the form’s status and influence, remains contested. While the label morality play is a useful one for modern scholars, its origins lie in 18th-century antiquarianism rather than in medieval categorizations. The idea of a distinct morality play genre or tradition is further challenged by the vast array of staging and dramaturgical conventions and techniques displayed by extant playtexts; in the range of different audiences, occasions, and spaces for which they were designed; and in the extent to which they overlap with other dramatic and performance modes (saints’ plays, biblical plays, sotties, debates, mummings, and interludes, for example). Nevertheless, a distinct collection of plays from premodern Europe share characteristics and conceptual and dramaturgic frameworks, justifying their analysis as a group. What links these plays, whether they are written in Latin or in the vernacular, is their sustained use of personification allegory and the clear exposition of a moral sentence. At the core of any morality play sits a central figure, a personification of, say, a universalized concept of “mankind” (Humanum Genus, Everyman, Mankind), an aspect of human nature (Man’s Desire in Menschen Sin en Verganckeljcke Schoonheit), or a specific stage in life (like Youth or the Child). Such figures often also act as a mirror or an avatar for the audience. French moralités often have two central figures who represent opposing moral paths. The plays’ central figures are accompanied by an array of abstract personifications representing virtues, sins, vices, temptations, moral distractions, bad and good advice, and facts of life. These could be faculties or qualities of humankind, such as Flesh, Raison, Wit, or Ignorance; temptations and forces in the external world, such as New Guise, Custom, or Goods; facts of human existence, such as Life, Death, and Kinship; human behaviors, such as Flattery or Deceit; social groups, such as Nobility and Clergy; personifications of God’s qualities, such as Mercy; as well as supernatural beings, such as God and the Devil or Good and Bad Angels. Every part of the performance is enlisted into the allegory, from staging, props, and costumes to the actions of and between performers. Whether the protagonist is saved at the end of the play varies, but often an alignment is explicit between the life journey of the mankind figure and that of Adam, connecting the life of the individual with the great scheme of cosmic history.

In this study, Murakami overturns the misconception that popular English morality plays were simple medieval vehicles for disseminating conservative religious doctrine. On the contrary, Murakami finds that moral drama came into its own in the sixteenth century as a method for challenging normative views on ethics, economics, social rank, and political obligation. From its inception in itinerate troupe productions of the late fifteenth century, "moral play" served not as a cloistered form, but as a volatile public forum. This book demonstrates how the genre’s apparently inert conventions—from allegorical characters to the battle between good and evil for Mankind’s soul—veiled critical explorations of topical issues. Through close analysis of plays representing key moments of formal and ideological innovation from 1465 to 1599, Murakami makes a new argument for what is at stake in the much-discussed anxiety around the entwined social practices of professional theater and the emergent capitalist market. Moral play fostered a phenomenon that was ultimately more threatening to ‘the peace’ of the realm than either theater or the notorious market--a political self-consciousness that gave rise to ephemeral, non-elite counterpublics who defined themselves against institutional forms of authority.

Dr. Faustus's tragic history embodies a play by Christopher Marlowe, in which a man sells his soul to the evil spirit for power and knowledge. The play begins with the hero at the height of his arrival and ends with his falling into grief, death and curse. Faust entered into a contract with Lucifer, 24 years of life on Earth will be allocated, during which time he will have Mephistopheles as his personal servant and attached to the use of magic; however, in the end, he will give his body and soul to Lucifer as a push and spend the rest of his time as a cursed man in hell. This transaction must be sealed in the form of a contract written in the blood of Faustus. After cutting off his arm, the wound heals divinely and the Latin words Homo, fuge! ("Man, run!") Then he shows up on it. Faust ignores the inscription while asserting that he has already cursed his actions so far, thus leaving nowhere to escape. Faust seems to repent in the end and regret his actions, yet it may be too late or irrelevant, because Mephistopheles takes his soul together, so Faust obviously goes to hell with him. The current research addressed "Dr. Faustus" as a morality play after explanation the importance of "morality play", and then its connection through this tragic drama.

The author examines the features of the narrative structure of the novel of English postmodernism "Morality Play" (Unsworth "Morality Play"). The purpose of this article is to identify the features of the construction of the novel of postmodernism. Postmodern writers tend to transform genres of high literature, making them accessible to mass reading. Moralite is a special kind of dramatic performance in the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance. A detective novel is a phenomenon of mass literature. The detective genre is based on three main elements that form the plot: crime, investigation and solution. In the article, these three elements are considered on the example of the novel "Moralite". Despite the fact that the plot-forming element is a detective component, the author does not fulfill all the genre strategies of the detective. In the presented work, the detective influence of the construction of a postmodern novel will be considered, in which readers are involved in the active process of reconstructing the incident, and the main character finds a solution to all the mysteries and riddles. The relevance of the work is due to the lack of full–fledged Russian-language research on the designated topic - dissertations, collections of articles, monographs. In the novel moralita, the identity of the murderer is not important, the victims are not important. The author is interested in the effect produced by the "performance" played out on the stage. Barry Unsworth demonstrates his vision of creating a new Medieval genre, he shows how this transition to everyday themes took place. One person can change the usual way of life by taking a risk and leading. Wandering comedians, who are the main characters, appear to readers as naive amateur detectives. They are passionate about the process and improve their "Thomas Wells Game", but not for the sake of punishing and exposing the killer. In the process of research, it can be concluded that two main genre layers can be distinguished in the novel – detective and historical. In addition to these genres of features, it can be argued that this is a novel about the genre.

The article examines the features of the concept of the historical novel by Walter Scott on the example of Barry Unsworth's novel "Morality Play". The purpose of this article is to identify the features and principles of the historical method. The great merit of the outstanding Scottish writer Walter Scott (1771-1832) is that he introduced the principle of historicism into literature and wrote a number of brilliant historical novels. In them, readers see a picture of the struggle of contradictory and complex interests of various social groups, parties, and religious sects. His historical novels provided a better understanding of contemporary issues. He combined historical truth with fiction, explaining the validity of such a connection by saying that “the most important human passions in all their manifestations, as well as the sources that feed them, are common to all classes, states, countries and epochs; hence it invariably follows that although this state of society affects opinions, way of thinking and the actions of people, these latter are extremely similar in their very essence. Walter Scott was the founder of the historical novel in its modern sense. In the XIX century, he developed the principles of the historical method, which made it possible to create fascinating novels, freed from excessive archaization of language and at the same time fully conveying the originality and recognizable imprint of the described epoch. In the 19th century, along with the tradition dating back to Walter Scott, another form of aesthetic insight into the past also asserted itself. Real historical characters in such works are optional, although their presence is not excluded. The "hero" for the writer is not a historical event, but an "epoch". The author of such a work creates his own self-sufficient world, achieves credibility not by more or less accurately following historical material, but by the reality of the psychological experience of the characters, the reality (often illusory) of everyday life. The novel "Morality Play" is a historical detective novel by British writer Barry Unsworth, was published in 1995, and was first published in Russian in 2005. The novel is an example of a fruitful combination of two updated genres: new historical fiction and metaphysical detective.

In 1997 Claire Sponsler argued that, contrary to conventional interpretations, the anarchic, disruptive bodies of sin in medieval morality plays do not “unproblematically and unilaterally lead to the ratification of virtue over vice.” Instead, “the memory of the pleasures of misbehavior, of the satisfactions that come from unruly bodies allowed free rein” lingered with spectators to the extent that any “attempts made by these plays to bring misbehavior to a halt look highly unsatisfactory and incomplete.” For Sponsler, the powerful allure of vice performed was such that morality plays would have been unable fully “to negate the charms of misgovernance” they enacted. In this article, however, I want to argue against Sponsler's assumption and investigate how one English morality play,The Castle of Perseverance, understood very well the allure of performed sin and actively cultivated it as part of its dramaturgical and didactic strategies. All morality plays, as Sponsler observes, use representations of “disorderly behavior grounded in the misuse of bodies and commodities,” investing these figures of sin “with remarkable energy, interest, and vitality, so much so that the vices are … very seductive.”The Castleis no exception, and the vast majority of its roughly three thousand lines are spoken by the Three Enemies of Man and their affiliated Sins. In addition, the playtext also provides unusually rich, detailed descriptions of how these spiritual enemies and sins should move around the performance space. Drawing on the theory of kinesthetic empathy, I examine the kinesic dimension of these “unruly bodies” and argue, contrary to Sponsler, that it is their presence, and the audience's own embodied responses to them, that deepens and enhances, rather than detracts from, the play's moral message.

The primary purpose of this article is to convey, through a liberal translation, the amusing and pedagogical aspects of Jean Gerson (1363-1429) morality plays L’ecole de la raison, commonly known as the Dialogue of the heart and five senses in English, and L’ecole de la conscience, both written for his young students. Focusing on the notion of six senses, expressed in both of his morality plays, with the sixth sense identified with the heart, the study will apply to Gerson’s texts various theoretical approaches to humour, such as the perceived superiority model and the incongruity-resolution theory, as well as Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of grotesque realism.

264Comparative Drama tive and independent investigation. This is only one way in which the ideas contained in a bibliography like Brandt's could be used in classroom teaching as well as in personal research. For instance, students in courses on critical theory might read the section on Doctor Faustus with an eye not only for the different specific arguments each critic makes but also for the different theoretical assumptions each one takes for granted. To read Brandt's book is to be reminded that there are not only different arguments but different ways of arguing—not only, that is, different specific interpretations but different ways of reading. To be exposed to such differences in such rapid-fire fashion can be exhilarating or frustrating, but in either case it is enlightening. Not the least value of such a book is that it makes it easy to listen to many more voices, and consider many more possibilities, than one might otherwise seek out on one's own. Plowing through a work such as Brandt's can help keep a reader both current and alert, both honest and humble. The worth of a work like this depends mainly on its breadth, depth, and index. Brandt's work is strong in all three respects. All of Marlowe 's works are covered, and the annotations are almost always helpfully full and are usually very lucid. In addition, as Constance Brown Kuriyama notes in her "Foreword," "Professor Brandt has also been remarkably conscientious in sifting through works which do not take Marlowe as their primary subject, thus helping his colleagues locate pertinent material in places where they do not normally expect to find it" (p. ix). An intelligent introduction outlines the volume's scope and methods, and if the index inevitably misses some subjects covered in particular entries, such oversights are hard to fault. One might wish that dissertations were briefly described rather than simply listed; often some of the best work on any topic never finds its way into "permanent " print. But nit-picking is always easy; doing the kind of solid, lasting work that Brandt has accomplished is difficult. We owe him thanks. ROBERT C. EVANS Auburn University at Montgomery Peter Happé. Song in Morality Plays and Interludes. Medieval Theatre Monographs, 1. Lancaster: Medieval English Theatre, 1991. Pp. iv + 121. £12.00. If the importance of song in early drama needed verification, Peter Happé's Song in Morality Plays and Interludes would provide ample evidence. The author has studied sixty-one plays from 1425 to 1590, finding "219 occasions for song . . . , 147 texts or titles of songs, and a further 59 cues," along with the possibility of other songs that may Reviews265 have been performed. The number of songs suggests the wide repertoire available in dramatic productions; their uses range from expressing emotion, underlining plot, identifying characters (broomsellers, ratcatchers, barbers, among others) to accompanying the stage business of exits and entrances. The variety of songs indicates that music was one of the pleasures expected and provided in theatrical performances and that the players were accomplished and "versatile enough to sing frequently, in many different moods, and in many different combinations of voices." In fact, over twice as many part as solo songs can be distinguished, and the verse forms of the texts are of an "astonishing variety." All of this material is discussed in an introduction and organized in an alphabetical Index of songs, burdens, and titles and a chronological list by play of song texts and cues. One appendix provides a chronological list of plays, a second the texts of songs from Bèze's Tragédie of Abraham's Sacrifice, translated by Arthur Golding. The alphabetical Index and the two chronological lists are cross-indexed. Each entry in the Index of songs gives, where the information is known, the play's title, date, cues, singers, name of tune, surviving music, and other sources/analogues. Despite the seemingly methodical presentation, however, the book is in no way user-friendly. For instance, a reader wishing to study the songs in a particular play must know the date (drawn primarily, but with some puzzling and unexplained differences, from the 1964 edition of Annals of English...

This thesis will examine intensively 'The Tower of Babel: A Morality' a significant work of Thomas Merton, a major spiritual writer of the 20th Century, entitled. In order to explore this play three other works which impacted significantly on the development of the drama will also be examined. These three works are: A poem also called 'Tower of Babel'; a second poem entitled 'A Responsory' and a musical work titled 'The Tower of Babel: An Oratorio'. Even though Victor Kramer, a Merton scholar, noted the significance of the Morality, the existing literature has all but ignored the impact of 'The Oratorio' and the drama. Until this author requested a copy of 'The Oratorio' from the Merton Centre in Louisville, Kentucky the work had been known by name only and had never been analysed. Yet this work was a major development from the poem 'A Responsory' and led to the creation of the Morality Play. This work argues that 'A Morality' was pivotal in contributing to personal and spiritual change in Merton as well as developing a greater depth of social understanding in him. It will also argue that the work contained the seeds of future Merton writings. Writing the drama moved Merton towards a contemplative maturity based on communion not simply community. While many studies have alluded to the play none of them have studied it with this particular focus. This new focus is the discovery of the ways Merton attempted to resolve the dilemma he experienced between the paths of monk and poet and how, in doing so, he created for spiritual seekers a fresh inner significance for the Babel story. This work is opening up new ground for an understanding of the importance of Merton's insights in the contemporary world. The methods used in this thesis are: 1. Contextualising, that is establishing the historical, social, spiritual and literary framework in which the poems and plays were written, and 2. Literary analysis.;Part A of the thesis examines the monastic, spiritual, social, literary and academic contexts which brought Merton to the moment of writing the Morality. Part B is organised chronologically and is an intensive analysis of the poems, the Oratorio and the Morality Play. Part C identifies the seeds of future growth contained within the Morality play and points to some of the directions in which these seeds developed in later Merton works.

It has been generally recognized by students of the mediæval drama, that certain of the moral tales found in collections of exempla and in commonplace books influenced indirectly the morality play. This inference seems to be drawn as much from evidence of the dramatic possibilities inherent in specific exempla as from evidence of their widespread popularity. An example of a didactic story with such dramatic adaptability is offered by the tale of the penitent usurer. Its theme, the struggle between demons and angels for the soul of man, seems to foreshadow the conflict-between-the-vices-and-virtues type of morality. The number of mss., moreover, which have survived, proves that the tale was disseminated throughout England and the Continent, and therefore would be easily accessible to playwrights in search of dramatic material. Furthermore, the same inference may be drawn from the analogy between plays embodying favorite miracles or fabliaux and morality plays probably based upon popular exempla. For, although no scholar has hitherto shown the dependence of any extant morality play upon a specific exemplum, yet it is almost inconceivable that well-known didactic tales, obviously suited to dramatic purposes and extensively circulated in collections of exempla and in commonplace books, should not have been used by the makers of moral plays.