Editing Morality play (section)

=== Decline ===
The recent trend in scholarship of the period in which morality plays were written is to admit the great degree of continuity between late medieval and Renaissance cultures of Europe. Nevertheless, although morality plays reach their apogee in the sixteenth century, religious drama of this sort and in general all but disappeared thereafter.<ref name="Betteridge 1603" />{{rp|at 15}} The cause of this change can be traced to both changes in religious sensibilities related to the Protestant Reformation and more broadly changes in theatre as an industry in England.

Mid-Tudor Protestants continued writing religious plays that were recognizably different from their Catholic predecessors. For example, whereas earlier plays emphasize the importance of sacraments, plays by Protestants emphasize justification by faith alone, and even cast vice characters as Catholic.<ref>Pineas, Rainer. "The English Morality Play as a Weapon of Religious Controversy." SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, vol. 2, no. 2 (1962): 157-180.</ref>

The relationship between theatricality and doctrine was also found more troubled by Protestants. Earlier plays were criticized for their embellishments to biblical material, to which Protestant religious drama tried to adhere more closely. However, in many ways they were formally quite similar to their predecessors in ways that sat beside the tendencies they wished to resist, thus challenging any attempts by scholars to place the development of theater in the period in an evolutionary model.<ref name="Betteridge 1603" />{{rp|at 3–4}}

With the opening of permanent and professional playhouses that were producing plays full time in the late sixteenth century, drama became "unmistakably an integral and compromised part of that same commercial culture" which earlier religious drama had criticized, and therefor "it could no longer seriously be maintained that it was primarily a pious activity."<ref name="Betteridge 1603" />{{rp|at 10}} Thus, by the start of the seventeenth century a play like Everyman would be regarded "as at best a waste of time and at worst a sinful, 'popish' excess."<ref name="Betteridge 1603"/>{{rp|at 1–20}} However, this change "had the positive effect of creating the space for the artistic and commercial speculation of the public stage as it emerged at the end of the Tudor period."<ref name="Betteridge 1603"/> It is in this space that the now better-known William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe would do their work.