Morality Play Research Articles

Cloud and Clothe : Hildegard of Bingen's metaphors of the fall of the human soul

The paper examines Hildegard's use of metaphors in her visions of the human fall, and the way she combined the biblical motif of Original Sin with the philosophical question of a soul's embodiment, particularly in her moral play, Ordo virtutum, but also in her medical and visionary writings. The metaphor of the cloud sometimes blends with the metaphor of clothing (as in, "to clothe"), since the corporeal vestment of the soul before the Fall is said to resemble a cloud of light. Both metaphors are present in Hildegard's other works, particularly the image of the cloud, which is frequently used to illustrate cosmological implications of Original Sin. The metaphor of clothing, on the other hand, reveals parallels with certain Christian Gnostic revelations, blended with the Neo-Platonic doctrine of the soul as enslaved to the body.

Fictional Remembrances of Sir Thomas More: Part II/II– Early Seventeenth Century

This article focuses on how artistic works such as plays and literature in 16th and 17th-century England dealt with the fictional presence of Sir Thomas More. Among Tudor statesmen, Thomas More had a special appeal as a topic of thought during the Elizabethan–Jacobean period, quite apart from his opposition to the marriage which led to the reign of Queen Elizabeth. The range of works considered covers the Marian, Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. These works compose a heterogeneous and intriguing group in which every piece has its own particular way of remembering Thomas More. Six works are presented here: the dialogue Il Moro (1556) by Ellis Heywood; a late morality play, The Longer Thou Livest the More Fool Thou Art (1569), by William Wager; a novel, The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), by Thomas Nashe; and three plays, Cromwell (1602), by an unknown dramatist, Sir Thomas More (1600–1603/4), by five different dramatists, and Henry VIII (1613), by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher. Due to the scope of this research, the article is written in two parts. This part explores the last three seventeenth-century fictional works by John Fletcher and Shakespeare, an anonymous play and the collaborative play by Anthony Munday, Henry Chettle, with additions by Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker and William Shakespeare.

Bastards, brothers, and unjust warriors: Enmity and ethics in Just War Cinema

AbstractHow do members of the general public come to regard some uses of violence as legitimate and others as illegitimate? And how do they learn to use widely recognised normative principles in doing so such as those encapsulated in the laws of war and debated by just war theorists? This article argues that popular cinema is likely to be a major source of influence especially through a subgenre that I call ‘Just War Cinema’. Since the 1950s, many films have addressed the moral drama at the centre of contemporary Just War Theory through the figure of the enemy in the Second World War, offering often explicit and sophisticated treatments of the relationship between thejus ad bellumand thejus in bellothat anticipate or echo the arguments of philosophers. But whereas Cold War-era films may have supported Just War Theory’s ambitions to shape public understanding, a strongly revisionary tendency in Just War Cinema since the late 1990s is just as likely to thwart them. The potential of Just War Cinema to vitiate efforts to shape wider attitudes is a matter that both moral philosophers and those concerned with disseminating the law of war ought to pay close attention to.

Nature Transformed: English Landscape Gardens and Theatrum Mundi

Nature Transformed: English Landscape Gardens and <i>Theatrum Mundi</i>

Barry Unsworth’s Morality Play: Narrative, detection, history

Morality Play is a historical detective novel set in the late fourteenth century and published in 1995, at a time of flourishing for historical fiction in Britain. This article argues that the novel shares some of the features of contemporary British historical fiction (notably, a degree of self-referentiality and a concern with the relationship between reality and representation), but also retains more traditional historical novels’ desire to show the fate of individuals caught at moments of historical change. Using White’s reflections on forms of historical writing and an understanding of the history of detective fiction, the article brings this currently under-examined text to critical attention and, in so doing, contributes to current scholarly understanding of the so-called ‘historical turn’ in late-twentieth century British fiction.

Fictional Remembrances of Sir Thomas More: Part I - The Sixteenth Century

This article focuses on how literary works such as plays in 16th–17th century England dealt with the fictional presence of Sir Thomas More. Among Tudor statesmen, Thomas More had a special appeal as a topic of thought during the Elizabethan–Jacobean period, quite apart from his opposition to the marriage which led to the reign of Queen Elizabeth. The Marian, Elizabethan and Jacobean periods cover the range of the selected works. They compose a heterogeneous and intriguing group in which every piece has its own particular way of remembering Thomas More. Six works are presented here: the dialogue Il Moro (1556), by Ellis Heywood; a late morality play, The Longer Thou Livest the More Fool Thou Art (1569), by William Wager; a novel, The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), by Thomas Nashe; and three plays, Cromwell (1602), by an unknown dramatist, Sir Thomas More (1600–1603/4), by five different dramatists, and Henry VIII (1613), by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher. Due to the scope of this research, the article is written in two parts. This part explores the first three sixteenth century fictional works by Wager, Heywood and Nashe.

John Skelton: The Career of an Early Tudor Poet. John Scattergood. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2014. Pp. 432.

<i>John Skelton: The Career of an Early Tudor Poet</i>. John Scattergood. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2014. Pp. 432.

Humour as a Teaching Tool in Jean Gerson’s (1363–1429) Morality Plays

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.

“Men and Women o’the Time”: Allegory in Three 2015 Productions

This essay starts with a comment from a choric figure in Jonson’s The Staple of News (1626): that the Vice and other figures from the older moral drama now appear onstage “attired like men and women o'the time.” After a review of contemporary evidence, the focus is on three 2015 productions. First is a clearly allegorical script, Carol Ann Duffy’s adaptation of the best known moral play, Everyman , at the National Theatre where a relatively short early Tudor play, with its homily linked to the protagonist’s preparation for Death and a final reckoning, was transformed into a much longer polemic against today’s abuse of the environment. The other two items singled out are the RSC productions at the Swan of The Jew of Malta and Volpone , neither of which contains overt allegory yet both include sections that may have been understood then in near allegorical terms, whether to depict a sleeping Christianity in Marlowe’s Malta or an ejection of Conscience in Jonson’s Venice. The goal is to call attention to the possibility of new possibilities and meanings lurking behind a familiar episode or configuration so that theatre history, rather than being reductive, can display how the play of ideas in a scene or sequence could be both entertaining and meaningful in their theatrical terms and--perhaps--still translatable into ours.

Charlotte and Elizabeth: Multiple Modernities in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice

This essay argues that in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice Charlotte Lucas and Elizabeth Bennet exemplify competing claims about the development of personhood through conjugal intimacy. Charlotte and Elizabeth’s contrasting views are often translated by critics into a narrative of cultural modernization that foregrounds the development of Elizabeth Bennet as an exemplary modern subject. I read the disagreement between the two friends as a highly conflicted moral drama about the relationship between marriage and individual fulfillment. This essay contends that Charlotte’s stance is important to consider two hundred years later as a reminder of the multiplicity of attitudes toward intimacy, conjugality, and self-fulfillment in Austen’s fiction. This multiplicity remains overlooked by a tradition of Austen criticism that is often bound, even in contemporary feminist forms, to the analytic and prescriptive parameters of liberal personhood as those are understood to have emerged at the end of the eighteenth century.

Rhetorical Analysis of Resistance to Environmentalism As Enactment of Morality Play between Social and Ecological Well‐Being

Well‐being is a goal pursued by many consumer resistance movements. This study contributes to the literature by analyzing the rhetorical appeals and techniques utilized by the Resisting the Green Dragon (RGD) movement that employs the value of social well‐being to oppose environmentalism. We integrate prominent consumer resistance discourses and religiously charged nationalistic mythical narratives to interpret the RGD phenomenon using rhetorical analysis. The authors examine the rhetorical structure of the RGD YouTube campaign designed to activate resistance to environmentalism. Results indicate that the RGD campaign portrays environmentalists as morally bankrupt individuals surreptitiously limiting the freedom of all‐too‐willing mainstream consumers. The results further suggest that the RGD campaign positions environmentalism as an anti‐Christian and un‐American phenomenon that sacrifices social well‐being for ecological well‐being. The foundations of the RGD's view are elaborated on and implications are discussed.

Goethe’s Allegories of Identity. Jane K. Brown. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Pp. xviii+232.

Goethe’s Allegories of Identity. Jane K. Brown. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Pp. xviii+232.

Allegorical Causation and Aristotelian Physics in Henry Medwall’s Nature

This article argues that Henry Medwall’s early interlude Nature (ca. 1495) reworks the typical staged allegory of the morality play, staging a struggle not over the fate of man’s soul but over two competing interpretations of Aristotelian physics. Medwall finds in theater the perfect way of investigating the role that allegorical drama can—and must—play in understanding not only how our ideas about nature are intimately connected to ideas such as causality, responsibility, and the place of the human within the natural world but also how staged allegory might be used to engage in debates about nature.

JONO PAULIAUS II IR BENEDIKTO XVI POŽIŪRIS Į EUROPOS SĄJUNGĄ

Katalikų bažnyčia yra vienintelė institucija Europoje, nepertraukiamai veikianti ištisus kelis tūkstančius metų, jokia kita institucija ar organizacija Europoje tokiu tęstinumu pasigirti negali. Atitinkamai jokia kita institucija negali prilygti Bažnyčiai savo indėliu į Europos kūrimą. Dauguma Europos Sąjungos piliečių – net 260 milijonų – save laiko katalikais1. Tačiau dabar­tinės Europos Sąjungos, skaičiuojančios tik kelis savo gyvavimo dešimtme­čius, vadovai naujausioje Lisabonos sutartyje nesugebėjo sutarti dėl nuo­rodos į krikščioniškas Europos Sąjungos šaknis. Šis Bažnyčios ir Europos Sąjungos pozicijų išsiskyrimas nėra atsitiktinis – tūkstantmečiais Bažnyčios puoselėjama Europos samprata dabartinėje Europos Sąjungoje tampa vis sve­timesnė. Europos Sąjunga praranda savo metapolitinį arba dvasinį lygmenį, savo prasmę bei tikslą, pats Sąjungos funkcionavimas ar net išlikimas tampa jos savaiminiu tikslu. Savo ruožtu, Jonas Paulius II ir Benediktas XVI bandė ir bando paskatinti Europos Sąjungą atsigręžti į tūkstantmetes vertybes, ku­rios lėmė ilgametį Europos dominavimą pasaulyje. Jono Pauliaus II teigimu, „vyksta didžiulis dvasinis konfliktas ir nuo to, kaip jis baigsis, priklausys šio tūkstantmečio pradžioje besiformuojantis Europos veidas“2. Kokia yra ši Šventojo Sosto Europos Sąjungos samprata, kurią aktyviai bando skleisti Jonas Paulius II ir Benediktas XVI, tačiau kurios negali priimti dabartinė Europos Sąjunga?

“There's No Remaking Reality”: Roth and the Embodied Human Condition in &lt;em&gt;Everyman&lt;/em&gt;

INTRODUCTION: SALVATION AND THE HUMAN CONDITIONYou're on Earth, there's no cure for that!-Beckett 37The title of Roth's Everyman refers to fifteenth-century morality play of same name. Commenting on play, Roth has stated the theme is always salvation [...]. The moral was always 'Work hard get into Heaven.' 'Be a good Christian or go to hell' (Krasnik 28). Despite Roth's tongue-in-cheek terseness, his comment accords with following, more measured critical response to play:Despite its several severe warnings, Everyman is essentially reassuring in its estimation of man's chances for salvation. [. . .] The universe of Everyman in general is one thoroughly under control of a benevolent deity who sees to it that normal, repentant sinner has more than a fair chance to save himself [...]. (Kaula 10-11)Importantly, Roth's caustic summation of play hints that his version of Everyman will deviate from thematic motif of Christian salvation. Thus, although Roth's unnamed protagonist (from here on called Everyman) is a strident atheist,1 it is desolate poignancy of Roth's prose that best intimates that Everyman's world lacks any religious consolation. This pathos is brought into sharp relief in novel's opening pages, during Everyman's sparsely attended funeral, in which dazed bewilderment of his ex-wife (Phoebe), abject recruitment duties which are forced upon his daughter (Nancy), opaque, spasmodic rage of his estranged son (Lonny), form a nexus of human relations which attest to sadness, irresolution messiness of human existence:When asked by Nancy if she wanted to say anything, Phoebe shook her head but then went ahead to speak in a soft voice, her speech faintly slurred. It's just so hard to believe, I keep thinking of him swimming bay-that's all. I just keep seeing him swimming bay. [. . .] Nancy [. . .] placed phone calls to those who'd showed up so that mourners wouldn't consist of just her mother, herself, his brother sister-in-law. (1-2)Lonny [. . .] stepped up to grave first. But once he'd taken a clod of dirt in hand, his entire body began to tremble quake, it looked as though he were on edge of violently regurgitating. He was overcome with a feeling for his father that wasn't antagonism but that his antagonism denied him means to release. (13)In Everyman, human lives seem to end pitifully, inspiring neither comfort nor resolution for bereaved. Indeed, psychological ambience of whole novel suggests that people have an implicit awareness that they are stranded in a world without a metaphysical horizon-a world, in other words, that is paradigmatically separated from salvation God (the dilapidated Jewish cemetery in which funeral takes place arguably symbolizes decay of this religious sentiment [1]). Unsurprisingly, then, after Everyman's funeral, reader is given yet another distinct impression of an irresolute anticlimactic world, in which even most significant events end with a bang but a whimper (The Hollow Men 5.98 82): That was end. No special point had been made. [. . .] In a matter of minutes, everybody had walked away-wearily tearfully walked away from our species' least favorite activity-and he [Everyman] was left behind (14-15). With wry humor concision, phrase and he was left behind confirms how Roth's atheism is also aligned with a materialistic emphasis upon human body. In Roth's universe, funerals do not end with souls being whisked up to heaven: they instead end with bodies that define our subjectivity being left in isolation to rot underground. The funeral scene in Everyman thus intensifies continues Roth's materialistic reading of religious rites2 by focusing on locus of materiality that, in Roth's view, is constitutive of human subjectivity-the body.3DEATH IN THE BODY: ROTH'S OBJECTION TO A KEATSIAN UNDERSTANDING OF DEATHSo far I've explored how Roth's novel is critical of Christian cosmology expressed in medieval play Everyman. …

Ben Jonson’s Volpone : An Unconventional and Innovative Jacobean Comedy

Ben Jonson’s Volpone (1605) is the best known, most performed and most studied of all of his Plays. Volpone, or The Fox, does not contain the traditional moral and broad themes of Shakespeare. Volpone, disguised as a didactic comedy, is actually an intelligent and cynical satire that compels the audience to rethink their moral expectations. In Volpone, Jonson was successful in combining three genres in order to create a new form of comedy. Volpone is a powerful moral study of human greed, foxy cunning, and goatish lust. It is not the traditional form of comedy. It is a play that takes on the form of a comical satire as well as a morality play. It also adapts the features of a fable, and in that it strives to teach a moral. This play puts a different twist on what people would expect from a comedy or morality play. But, more than a satire on the traditional morality, it is a satire on the type of drama that was prevalent. This article analyses how Jonson presents his audience with an unconventional way of approaching the subjects he is satirizing by creating a new form of comedy that embodies the aspects of all three genres. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3329/iiucs.v8i0.20400 IIUC Studies Vol.8 December 2011: 27-38

The Explanatory Critic:

The Explanatory Critic:

Colloquium 4 Glaucon’s Fate: Plato’s Republic and the Drama of the Soul

I argue that the internal evidence of the Republic supports a conjecture first advanced by the historian Mark Munn: Glaucon was an accomplice of the so-called Thirty Tyrants who most likely died at the side of his relatives Critias and Charmides in the Battle of Munychia. If Munn is right, the Republic must be read as a poignant philosophical drama, the tragedy of Socrates’ unsuccessful struggle to save Plato’s brother from the corrupting influence of his family and his city. This perspective raises important questions about the nature and limits of Socrates’ philosophical pedagogy, which must in turn be seen within the context of the dialogue’s symbolic and mythical representation of the cosmic moral drama of the soul.

Bearing Witness and Taking Action: Audiences and Morality in Renaissance Tragedy and Activist Street Theater

The first time I realized I was an actor in an interactive drama was during a Palm Sunday Mass the year I was preparing for my First Communion. My fellow parishioners and I were instructed to participate in the reading of the Gospel by reciting the lines of the crowd that called for Barabbas's freedom and condemned Jesus to death by crucifixion. The guilt I experienced in this performance, however briefly it lasted, was profound. I realized how Mass had the potential to be a transformative event rather than just an hour of contemplation. Although the Gospel readings can be uneventful, when imbued with such an interactive element, the Church manages to make parishioners, their voluntarily captive audience, bear to the ethical and spiritual elements of the Passion and its central characters. By blurring the lines between actor and audience, the performance becomes visceral, intimate, and personal in a way that compels the audience to be active agents in the moral drama in which they are now participants. I begin with this childhood memory to underscore the thrust of my argument about how drama that ruptures the symbolic and physical distance between actor and audience can make viewers agents for positive moral change in their lives and those of others. By focusing on the didactic ethical, social, and political elements of plays in both Renaissance tragedy and postmodern street theater, we can understand how the interactive elements of street theater from political groups such as ACT UP are indebted to and follow the same ideological drive of the more understated interactive elements of Renaissance-era English plays such as Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy and William Shakespeare's Hamlet in calling audience members to bear and respond to the themes explored in the spectacles before them. While the writers and performers of both eras take different approaches to metadramatic moments and breaking the fourth wall, their underlying purpose revolves around an ethical charge to provide provocative, uplifting, and life-changing inspiration to an audience that can be disinterested, uninformed, jaded, and/or reluctant about the issue at hand. In her study of Christopher Marlowe's Edward II, Meg Pearson asserts that to term a spectator a is to draw attention to the moments in a play when the viewer engages not only with the play before them but with the contemporary discourses surrounding the judicial practices of the period and the lively debates surrounding the significance and credibility of vision and watching. (1) I am utilizing this interpretation of witness as both a noun and a verb. After all, without an audience a play is in some vegetative state bereft of its revolutionary power to transform the lives of its viewers. The performances discussed in this essay ask the audience to bear to the human condition through metatheatrical tools both subtle and explicit, depending on the historical moment and limits imposed on the social negotiations with which the playwright can invite the audience to respond. After all, drama, perhaps out of all forms of literature, is the epitome of a communication structure that ruptures a sender-receiver binary that posits the latter as passive. Live theater is corporeal. Whether the audience laughs, boos, cheers, claps, or remains silent, the presence and absence of sound is a form of dialogic, symbiotic communication. The actors and playwright, if present, can detect whether audience members sympathize, empathize, or recoil from the characters and the emotions played before them. All such interactions, auditory or not, are dependent on a shared set of experiences, values, and beliefs. When the audience is asked to bear witness, they must contemplate. When they become involved, they must make decisions. Drama that includes explicitly interactive elements may sound like a relatively recent invention to many people. But its genesis in Western theater is far older. …

Un joyeux quart de sentences: études rabelaisiennes LII par Marie-Luce Demonet, Stéphan Geonget

Reviews 219 Demonet, Marie-Luce, et Stéphan Geonget. Un joyeux quart de sentences: études rabelaisiennes LII. Genève: Droz, 2012. ISBN 978-2-600-01607-0. Pp. 190. 70 CHF. The inclusion of Rabelais’s Fourth Book of Pantagruel in the 2012 agrégation has resulted in renewed interest in and an impressive number of publications on this relatively little-taught text. This collection of eleven articles mostly combines presentations of two preparatory workshops, which reunited some of the foremost specialists on the topic. The pedagogical and scholarly aspirations of the contributions, although not always well balanced, make this a recommended reading for the specialist and the more casual reader. Daniel Ménager opens the volume fittingly with a discussion of the first text of the Fourth Book, the dedicatory epistle addressed to the Cardinal of Châtillon, in which the critic sees the reflection of many of Rabelais’s preoccupations: the equivalence of reading and healing; the defense against all kinds of inquisitions; a lesson in interpretation. In a similar vein, Jean Céard also analyzes a somewhat neglected episode (île des Macraeons), which deals with prodigies and miracles in order to underline the importance of “coded language” that demands interpretation (29). Nicolas Le Cadet’s overview of the Andouilles episode, although somewhat negligent of some recent scholarship, seeks to better define its function and place in the narrative, linking it to the ‘thawing’ of language that aligns it with the previous articles. Stéphan Geonget focuses on another major episode, the Papimanes, to investigate the meaning of the notion of ‘literature’ at the time, notably by juxtaposing transparent allegory and polysemy or history/polemics and fiction. Marie-Luce Demonet is interested in Rabelais’s mastery of nautical vocabulary and its implications, for instance its illustration of the different stylistic and lexical levels that also serve as intentional distractions of the reader. Myriam Marrache-Gouraud contributes two articles, more general discussions of the notion of curiositas as well as of the concept of Pantagruelism, the latter functioning as an ethos but more importantly as a guiding principle of how to read. Frédéric de Buzon adds another layer to the discussion of the status of “meaning” by looking at the role of music and sounds, culminating in the “atomisme sonore”of the Thawing Words-episode (115). John O’Brien focuses on the experimental concept of the tragicomedy, an agent of ambivalence mediating, for example, laughter and violence. Bérengère Basset studies the ethical, philosophical, and hermeneutical implications of Rabelais’s use of apophthegmata, which facilitates the juxtaposition of Pantagruel’s and Panurge’s respective attitudes (inquiry v. dogma) or of gravitas and facetiae in order to elaborate meaning through language. Jean Lecointe, finally, suggests that Rabelais’s ambition was to conceive of a national masterpiece in the tradition of Homer, Virgil, or Ovid, a morality play in prose within the framework of contemporary treatises (Josse Bade, Sébillet), combining abstraction and individualization, allegory and decorum personarum, grotesque and sublime elements, a fascinating premise that requires more detailed treatment, however. Like most recent publications on the Fourth Book,the focus of this fine collection is centered on Rabelais’s complex concept of interpretation, a problem that continues to mobilize scholars of the Renaissance. Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center, CUNY Bernd Renner Dozo, Björn-Olav,Anthony Glinoer, et Michel Lacroix, éd. Imaginaires de la vie littéraire: fiction, figuration, configuration. Rennes: PU de Rennes, 2012. ISBN 9782 -7535-1862-9. Pp. 376. 20 a. The introduction and twenty-three essays in this Québécois, Belgian, and French collection examine“comment la littérature se pense comme création et discours, mais aussi comme lieu de socialisation et de travail collectif” (back jacket). Edited by the three founding members of GREMLIN (Groupe de recherche sur les médiations littéraires et les institutions), the volume focuses on prose and poetry of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from Balzac to Stephen King. It emphasizes the self-conscious tradition, including satiric and parodic self-representation by real, fictive, and symbolic writers, editors, and publishers. The four sections treat type characters, legendary figures in literary history, intermediaries (journalists, reviewers...