Editing Morality play (section)

==Characteristics==

Morality plays typically contain a protagonist who represents humanity as a whole, or an average layperson, or a human faculty; supporting characters are personifications of abstract concepts, each aligned with either good or evil, virtue or vice.

The clashes between the supporting characters often catalyze a process of experiential learning for the protagonist, and, as a result, provide audience members and/or readers with moral guidance, reminding them to meditate and think upon their relationship to God, as well as their social and/or religious community. Many, but not all, of the morality plays also encourage their audiences and/or readers to reflect upon the importance of penitential ritual.

Several academics have written upon these common thematic characteristics. Considering the plays' investment in staging the audience's/reader's relationship to God, Eleanor Johnson writes that Wisdom and Mankind, among several other medieval literary works, dramatically stage acts of contemplation to encourage the "cultivation of self-conscious participation in God and of awareness of God's participation in man," while "creating literary experiences that initiate work of spiritual contemplation."<ref>Johnson, Eleanor. ''Staging Contemplation: Participatory Theology in Middle English Prose, Verse, and Drama'' (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018): 6.</ref> Additionally, Julie Paulson explores the plays' investment in relating penitential ritual and community; she writes, "In the moralities, it is impossible to split an interior self from the exterior practices and institutions that define it [...] By dramatizing their protagonists' fall and recovery through penance, the plays suggest how the experience of penitential ritual shapes penitents' understandings of the social and moral concepts central to the formation of Christian subjects."<ref>Paulson, Julie. ''Theatre of the Word: Selfhood in the English Morality Play'' (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019): 21.</ref> It is worth noting that Paulson, in making these summative comments, focuses her analysis on ''The Castle of Perseverance'', the Macro plays, ''Everyman'', and several moralities from the sixteenth century, and thus does not aim to characterize all moralities in her commentary.

=== Allegory and personification ===
Working to pinpoint a literary form that unites the moralities, the ''Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms'' offers this definition: "Morality plays are dramatized allegories, in which personified virtues, vices, diseases, and temptations struggle for the soul of Man."<ref>Baldick, Chris, ed. The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. 4th ed. (Oxford University Press, 2015): 232-233.</ref> The same book defines allegory as "a story or visual image with a second distinct meaning partially hidden behind its literal or visible meaning. The principal technique of allegory is personification, whereby abstract qualities are given human shape [...] allegory involves a continuous parallel between two (or more) levels of meaning in a story."<ref name="Baldick, Chris 2015">Baldick, Chris, ed. The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. 4th ed. (Oxford University Press, 2015): 8.</ref> While the ''Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms'' uses the words ''allegory'' and ''personification'' in tandem with one another, the link between the two terms is a point of debate among scholars. Walter Melion and Bart M. Ramakers indicate that literary personifications are the building blocks for creating allegory: arguing for "personification as a mode of allegorical signification," Melion and Ramakers state, "As narrative, dramatic, or pictorial characters [personifications] develop a distinct reality," specifically, a reality that connects the literal and metaphorical interpretations of an allegory.<ref>Melion, Walter and Bart M. Ramakers. [https://arcade.stanford.edu/content/personification-and-allegory-0 "Personification and Allegory."] Part of ''Personification and Allegory: Selves and Signs'', at ''Arcade: Literature, the Humanities, & the World''. Stanford University, 2021:</ref> However, Michael Silk insists that there is a fundamental difference between personification and allegory, as the representational figures within literary works are personifications that retain allegorical qualities. Additionally, Silk notes that "Various medievalists correctly insist that in antiquity and the Middle Ages the connection [between allegory and personification] is not made,"<ref>Silk, Michael. [https://arcade.stanford.edu/content/personification-and-allegory "Personification and Allegory?"] Part of ''Personification and Allegory: Selves and Signs'', at ''Arcade: Literature, the Humanities, & the World''. Stanford University, 2021:</ref> indirectly complicating the notion that morality plays are ''allegorical'' constructions employing personified concepts.

While an allegorical literary form implies that literal and metaphorical elements must "continuously parallel"<ref name="Baldick, Chris 2015"/> one another, these plays do not always allegorically parallel theological qualities/concepts and concrete action, but rather humanize abstract concepts—thereby emphasizing characters as personifications, but not allegorical constructions. For example, examining the character Mercy in ''Mankind'', Pamela King notes, "Mercy the character begs God for the quality he represents, which is, strictly speaking, allegorical nonsense; he stands more for the human aegis by which mercy may be obtained, than for the quality itself."<ref>King, Pamela M. "Morality Plays." In The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, edited by Richard Beadle and Alan J. Fletcher. 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2008: 235-262, at 243.</ref>  Similarly, Eleanor Johnson explains Mercy's humanity, implying his status as a personified concept: "Mercy suffers, Mercy trembles, Mercy is vulnerable; this is not an untouchable, impregnable Mercy [...] but rather a strikingly vulnerable and human one".<ref>Johnson, Eleanor. ''Staging Contemplation: Participatory Theology in Middle English Prose, Verse, and Drama'' (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018): 184.</ref>  Additionally, scholars complicate the notion that morality plays allegorically parallel the audience with the dramatic characters, indicating that the moralities actually incorporate the audience into the dramatic community. For example, writing on ''The Castle of Perseverance'', Andrea Louise Young argues that the implied staging of the play (which includes the positioning of characters, as well as the placement of scaffolds and banners) encourages audience members to actively engage with the drama in a physical manner: "In moving around the play space, spectators can change the meaning of the drama for themselves and the other spectators."<ref>Young, Andrea Louise. ''Vision and Audience in Medieval Drama: A Study of The Castle of Perseverance'' (Palgrave Macmillan US, 2015): 25.</ref> Young notes that the play invites audience members to enter the dramatic space and consequently position themselves through both "their eyes and their bodies,"<ref>Young, Andrea Louise. ''Vision and Audience in Medieval Drama: A Study of The Castle of Perseverance'' (Palgrave Macmillan US, 2015): 49.</ref> through where they choose to look and move in relation to the staged characters. King, Johnson, and Young indirectly show, without explicitly stating so, how the morality plays are not simply allegorical constructions, but rather fluid forms of personification that blur the distinctions between literal and metaphorical elements, characters and audience members/readers.
 
Still, scholarship generally adopts the literary labels ''allegory'', ''personification'', and ''personification allegory'' to explain the morality plays' formal depiction of the relationship between the abstract realm of concepts and everyday circumstances of human life.  Pamela King notes the "broadly allegorical" form unifying the moralities.<ref name="ReferenceA"/> King suggests that the plays employ an allegorical framework of personification to metaphorically parallel, and conceptually separate, "the ephemeral and imperfect world of everyday existence" from an abstract "eternal reality".<ref>King, Pamela M. "Morality Plays." In ''The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre'', edited by Richard Beadle and Alan J. Fletcher. 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2008: 235-262, at 236-37.</ref> While King indicates that the plays show the dramatic action to merely parallel and imitate eternal, abstract concepts,<ref>King, Pamela M. "Morality Plays." In ''The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre'', edited by Richard Beadle and Alan J. Fletcher. 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2008: 235-262, at 237.</ref> Julie Paulson argues that the moralities use personification allegory to reunite the concrete and the abstract. Paulson writes, "in giving a word such as 'wisdom' or 'mankind' a body and a voice, personification allegory instead returns us to the lived experiences and particular circumstances that give those words their meanings".<ref>Paulson, Julie. ''Theatre of the Word: Selfhood in the English Morality Play'' (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019): 22.</ref> Additionally, Paulson underscores that plays such as ''The Castle of Perseverance'' and ''Everyman'' employ protagonists that personify humankind in an allegorical parallel to the audiences and readers of the play.<ref>Paulson, Julie. ''Theatre of the Word: Selfhood in the English Morality Play'' (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019): 42-43, 114.</ref> As one can see, different authors employ the literary terms ''allegory'' and ''personification'' to argue various conclusions about the plays' separation or unification of abstract and concrete realities.

==== Justice and Equity as characters ====
In early English dramas [[Justice]] was personified as an entity which exercised "theological virtue or grace, and was concerned with the divine pronouncement of judgment on man".<ref>McCutchan, J. Wilson. "Justice and Equity in the English Morality Play."Journal of the History of Ideas. 19.3 (1958): 406.</ref> However, as time progressed, more moralities began to emerge; it is during this transitional period where one begins to see [[Justice]] begin to assume more and more the qualities of a judge.  The Justice in ''Respublica'' begins to concern himself with administering justice on "the criminal element", rather than with the divine pronouncement on a generic representative of mankind.<ref name="Respublica 1905">''Respublica'', ed. by [[Leonard A. Magnus]] (London, 1905), Extra Series XCIV.</ref> This is the first instance where one may observe a direct divergence from the theological virtues and concerns that were previously exerted by Justice in the morality plays of the fifteenth century. The Justice in ''Respublica'' is personified as a "civil force rather than a theological one".<ref name="Respublica 1905" /> An evolution of sorts takes place within the morals and agendas of Justice: he begins to don the Judicial Robe of prosecutor and executioner.

Another change envelops in the character of Justice during the sixteenth century in morality plays; [[Equity (law)|Equity]] replaces Justice and assumes the judiciary duties previously performed by Justice. This changing of rulers, or preceding justices, is done when Equity declares that his brother Justice has been banished from the country and that he (Equity) will from now on take on the duties of the former monarch, Justice.<ref>McCutchan, J. Wilson . "Justice and Equity in the English Morality Play."Journal of the History of Ideas. 19.3 (1958): 408.</ref> This change of ruling heads is portrayed in the morality play, ''Liberality and Prodigality'', where Equity serves Virtue in the detection, arrest, and punishment of Prodigality for the robbery and murder of Tenacity, a yeoman in the country of Middlesex.<ref>''Liberality and Prodigality'', in ''A Select Collection of Old English Plays''. ed. by W. Carew Hazlitt (London, 1874), VIII, 329-83.</ref> Virtue states,
<blockquote>
So horrible a fact can hardly pleaded for favour:<br />
Therefore go you, Equity, examine more diligently<br />
The manner of this outrageous robbery:<br />
And as the same by examination shall appear,<br />
Due justice may be done in presence here.<br /> (''Liberality and Prodigality'' 377)
</blockquote>

The meta phases that Justice undergoes during the sixteenth century in morality plays, from "Justice" to "Equity" further illustrates the evolution of Justice; not only did Justice change from a "theological abstraction to a civil servant",<ref>McCutchan, J. Wilson . "Justice and Equity in the English Morality Play."Journal of the History of Ideas. 19.3 (1958): 409.</ref> but he experienced a corporeal change as well.

One may readily observe the evolutionary progression of Justice as portrayed in the plays of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. One encounters Justice in the early-fifteenth-century moralities as a performer playing the role of a theological virtue or grace, and then one sees him develop to a more serious figure, occupying the position of an arbiter of justice during the sixteenth century. It is a journey of discovery and great change on which Justice welcomes one to embark as one leafs through the pages of morality plays.

=== Use of language and poetic technique ===
All of the morality plays, especially the Macro plays, show not only a mastery of language but also a light-hearted delight therein.
 
All of the plays are written in some sort of end-rhymed verse, but with much variation, not only between the plays but in individual plays as well. Often verse is used to contrast the personalities of good and evil characters. For example, in ''Wisdom'' the characters Wysdom and Anima speak in "dignified, regular rhythm, almost always with four stresses" and the [[rhyme scheme]] ABABBCBC whereas "Lucifer prefers a tripping measure with two to five stress and only two rhymes."<ref>Eccles, Mark. ''The Macro Plays'' (Oxford: Oxford University Press/Early English Text Society 262, 1969): xxxii.</ref> Other characters speak like Wisdom when under his influence and like Lucifer when under his.<ref>Eccles, Mark. ''The Macro Plays'' (Oxford: Oxford University Press/Early English Text Society 262, 1969): xxxiii.</ref>  This system of contrastive verse is further refined in ''Mankind'' (Ramsay cxxxix). This is not the only use of variation in meter. For example, even without having to contrast with a good character's manner of talking, when Mankind ascends to World's scaffold in ''The Castle of Perseverance'', Mundus, Voluptas, and Stultitia briefly switch from a four stress line to a faster and more excited two stress line (ll. 610–646), before returning to the four stress line after a scene change.<ref name="KlausnerCastle"/>
 
[[Alliteration]] is put to wonderful effect in ''The Castle of Perseverance''. It appears in every stanza of more than four lines,<ref>Eccles, Mark. ''The Macro Plays'' (Oxford: Oxford University Press/Early English Text Society 262, 1969): xvii.</ref> though this is not evenly distributed, with later debate scenes employing less alliteration and the characters World, Belial, Flesh, and the seven sins alliterating nearly all of their lines, a habit the character Mankind learns from them.<ref>Eccles, Mark. ''The Macro Plays'' (Oxford: Oxford University Press/Early English Text Society 262, 1969): xvi-xvii.</ref>  This is not to imply that alliteration is purely the mark of an evil character, for the bad angel alliterates very little and the neutral flag bearers who provide a summary of events at the beginning of the play script make extensive use of alliteration. At many points this is for ornamental effect: Michael R. Kelley places this in the context of a flamboyant style originating in Franco-Burgundian culture.<ref>Kelley, Michael R. "Fifteenth-Century Flamboyant Style and ''The Castle of Perseverance''." Comparative Drama 6.1 (1972): 14-27.</ref> But that is not all the playwright does with the effect. Clare Wright argues convincingly that alliteration among other formal structures encourages the actors to perform with a "devilish corporeal register."<ref>Wright, Clare. "Empathy with the Devil: Movement, Kinesthesia, and Affect in ''The Castle of Perseverance''." ''Theatre Survey'', vol. 60, no. 2 (2019): 179-206, at 190.</ref> She uses Belyal's first speech as an example:<blockquote>Now I sytte, Satanas, in my sad synne, (Now sit I, Satan, steadfast in my sin,)

As devyl dowty, in draf as a drake. (As devil doughty, like a dragon on my sack.)
 
I champe and I chafe, I chocke on my chynne, (I champ and I chew and I thrust out my chin;)
 
I am boystous and bold, as Belyal the blake. (I am boisterous and bold as Belial the black!)
 
What folk that I grope thei gapyn and grenne, (The folk that I grasp they gasp and they groan,)
 
Iwys, fro Carlylle into Kent my carpynge thei take, (From Carlisle to Kent, my carping they take!)
 
Bothe the bak and the buttoke brestyth al on brenne, (Both the back and the buttocks burst burning unbound,)
 
Wyth werkys of wreche I werke hem mykyl wrake. (With works of vengeance, them wretched I make.)<ref>Wright, Clare. 
"Empathy with the Devil: Movement, Kinesthesia, and Affect in [http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~ajohnsto/cascomp.html "The Castle of Perseverance."] ''Theatre Survey'', vol. 60, no. 2 (2019): 179-206, at 196-203. Translations from Alexandra F. Johnston, The Castle of Perseverance: A Modernization (1999):</ref></blockquote>
 
In this speech, many of the alliterated phonemes are "aggressively [[plosive]]" and the /tʃ/ of "I champe and I chafe, I choke on my chynne" "requires the speaker to part his lips and bare his teeth, bringing them together in an expression that resembles the clenched-tooth grimace of the devil in contemporary iconography."<ref>Wright, Clare. "Empathy with the Devil: Movement, Kinesthesia, and Affect in ''The Castle of Perseverance''." ''Theatre Survey'', vol. 60, no. 2 (2019): 179-206, at 191.</ref> 
 
While mostly written in [[Middle English]], some of the plays employ [[Latin]] and [[French language|French]] to wonderful effect, both thematically significant and just plain humorous. Latin, of course, as the language of the [[Roman Catholic Church]], was naturally important for the sort of religious discourse these plays engaged in. That does not mean that the playwrights were unwilling to play with Latin. For example, in ''Mankind'', the character Mercy has a highly Latinizing manner of speech: in terms of vocabulary and meticulously tidy versification and sentence structure, all of which culminates in what one scholar calls "[[inkhorn]] and churchily pedagogical." (Johnson 172). Mercy ends his first speech saying "I besech yow hertyly, have this premedytacyon" (l. 44),<ref name="ReferenceD">Ashley, Kathleen M. and Gerard NeCastro, eds. [https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/ashley-and-necastro-mankind "Mankind"]. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2010</ref> ending with a cumbersome Latin loanword. The first vice character on stage, Mischief, immediately picks up on Mercy's excessive Latinisms and continues with this end rhyme in order to mock Mercy's ornate speech:<blockquote>I beseche yow hertyly, leve yowr calcacyon.
 
Leve yowr chaffe, leve yowr corn, leve yowr dalyacyon.
 
Yowr wytt ys lytyll, yowr hede ys mekyll, ye are full of predycacyon (ll. 45-47).<ref name="ReferenceD"/></blockquote>
 
Shortly thereafter Mischief fully switches to a nonsense mixture of Latin and English to continue mocking Mercy's Latinizing, as well as to mangle Mercy's earlier reference to the parable of the wheat and tares: "Corn servit bredibus, chaffe horsibus, straw fyrybusque" (l. 57, translated: Corn serves bread, chaff horses, straw fires).<ref name="ReferenceD"/> The result of this is not only to show that the formal structures of Latin are nothing more than formal structures that can be [[wikt:Special:Search/spoof|spoofed]] and misused, but also to create a tone shift from stuffy seriousness to an amusement that "is central to the contemplative logic of the play" by showing how even Latin can be "dragged from the reaches of the church and into the mess of everyday life."<ref>Johnson, Eleanor. ''Staging Contemplation: Participatory Theology in Middle English Prose, Verse, and Drama'' (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018): 173-74.</ref>  There are many such examples of amusing nonsense Latin throughout the play.

In what is possibly most memorable of the vices' use of puns to twist good into bad, at one point in ''Mankind'' belt out a vibrant ditty on [[defecation]] that concludes, in a clear echo of 'holy holy holy,' with "Hoylyke, holyke, holyke! Holyke, holyke, holyke!", quite possibly a pun on 'hole-lick' or 'hole-leak'.<ref name="ReferenceD"/> Because of how this spoofs liturgical call-and-response worship as well as Nought's invitation, "Now I prey all the yemandry that ys here / To synge wyth us wyth a mery chere" (ll. 333–4), this is likely a moment of audience participation to highlight their own "susceptibilities to seduction by frivolity."<ref>Johnson, Eleanor. ''Staging Contemplation: Participatory Theology in Middle English Prose, Verse, and Drama'' (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018): 175-76.</ref>

Finally, a peculiar trait that one will likely notice while reading these plays is the tendency of characters to describe in speech the actions they are (presumably) simultaneously performing as a way of verbally encoding stage directions. For example, in ''Mankind'', the character Mankind says, "Thys earth wyth my spade I shall assay to delffe" (l. 328);<ref name="ReferenceD"/> this line, meaning, "This earth with my spade I will attempt to dig," appears to serve as a stage direction for Mankind's actor to literally dig. Besides simple actions, the same thing occurs in slapstick comedy or action scenes: when Mankind fights the vice-characters Nowadays, New Guise, and Nought, Mankind threatens to hit them with his shovel, saying, "Go and do yowr labur! Gode lett yow never the! / Or wyth my spade I shall yow dynge, by the Holy Trinyté!" (ll. 377–376); in response, New Guise says, "Alas, my jewellys! I shall be schent of my wyff!" (l. 381), directly indicating that Mankind has hit him as or right after he was threatening.<ref name="ReferenceD"/> This is not a trait restricted in the period to morality plays: a reason for the existence of this trait suggested by one scholar while discussing the Chester plays is that "A spectator who could see the action without hearing the lines would not have a significantly different experience from someone who could hear them."<ref>Sergi, Matthew. ''Practical Cues and Social Spectacle in the Chester Plays'' (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020): 3.</ref>

=== Thematic characteristics ===
What binds morality plays together as a genre are the strong [[family resemblance]]s between them. These resemblances are most strong in regard to personification allegory as a literary form. The plays also resemble each other in regard to thematic content. They feature other common characteristics that are not necessarily common to all texts within the genre. Particularly notable thematic commonalities include: the transitoriness of life in relation to the afterlife, the importance of divine mercy, the use of misprision by vice characters, and the inevitable cycle of sin and penitence found in the Macro plays and Henry Medwall's ''Nature'' (c. 1495). The emphasis on death in these plays underscores how to live a good life; in the medieval moralities and Medwall's ''Nature'' in particular, virtue characters encourage the generic human protagonist to secure a good afterlife by performing good deeds, practicing penitence, or asking for divine mercy before their death.

John Watkins also suggests that the principal vices in medieval morality plays, avarice, pride, extortion, and ambition, throw anxieties over class mobility into relief.<ref>Watkins, John. "The Allegorical Theatre: Moralities, Interludes, and Protestant Drama." In ''The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature'', ed. David Wallace, 767–92, at 767-68. Cambridge University Press, 1999.</ref> Fifteenth-century plays like ''Occupation and Idleness'' and later morality plays (commonly considered Tudor interludes, like John Skelton's ''Magnyfycence'') portray class-mobility positively. Whether for or against class mobility, morality plays engage with the subject. Other, smaller commonalities include audience participation, elaborate costuming, the virtue of labour, and the governance of the body/passions by the soul/reason in the service of Catholic virtue, money management, or the proper methods of governing a state.

The cohesion of the medieval morality play genre in particular is questionable as their family resemblances are loose in some instances. Despite being treated as the archetypal morality play, ''Everyman''{{'}}s plot has little in common with the other plays in the genre.<ref>{{cite journal|last1=Little|first1=Katherine C|title=What Is ''Everyman''?|journal=Renaissance Drama|volume= 46|issue= 1|year=2018|pages=1–23|doi=10.1086/697173 |s2cid=195005744 }}</ref>{{rp|at 1–2}} That said, ''Everyman''{{'}}s straightforward focus on death, uninterested in the cycle of sin and penitence found in the Macro plays, resembles the ''Pride of Life''. These two plays are less like the Macro plays than Medwall's ''Nature'', which is not traditionally considered as a medieval morality play. Scholars such as Katherine Little, who claims that ''Everyman'' is not a medieval morality play, continue to pull at the genre's incohesive threading.

There are points of distinction in morality plays, beginning with ''Everyman'', which can generally be attributed to humanism. According to Thomas Betteridge and Greg Walker, the majority of English dramas were religious in some form.<ref name="Betteridge 1603" />{{rp|at 4–5}} However, plays are increasingly divorced from religion, and in particular, the staging of God and priests.<ref name="Betteridge 1603" />{{rp|at 5}} While drama continued to contain religious themes, it was less and less often the case that religion was expressed directly. Betteridge and Walker also note that morality plays began to focus on the importance of education, specifically in regard to classical literature.<ref name="Betteridge 1603">{{cite book|last1=Betteridge|first1=Thomas |last2=Greg |first2=Walker|chapter=Introduction: 'When Lyberte ruled': Tudor Drama 1485-1603|title=The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Drama|editor-first=Thomas |editor-last1=Betteridge|editor-first2=Greg |editor-last2=Walker|pages=1–20|location=Oxford|publisher=Oxford University Press|year=2012}}</ref>{{rp|at 12}}

In Medwall's ''Nature'', the opening speech prompts readings of [[Ovid]] and [[Aristotle]]. However, a strong focus on education can be found in ''Occupation and Idleness'' as well, which stages an errant schoolboy being taught to respect and learn from his teacher—this play is roughly contemporaneous with the Macro plays, suggesting that humanist trends are traceable in the morality play much earlier than ''Everyman''.<ref>Lee, Brian S. "Occupation and Idleness." In ''Medieval Literature for Children'', edited by Daniel T. Kline, 249–83, at 249. New York: Routledge, 2003.</ref> There is also a general, continuous increase in the individuation and complexity of characters. In ''Nature'', a prostitute is given a regular name rather than the name of a concept. In ''Everyman'', Everyman's mercantile language suggests a generic protagonist that represents a much smaller generic portion of humanity, '"every merchant," in juxtaposition to Mankind's earlier, full representation of all humanity.<ref>Watkins, John. "The Allegorical Theatre: Moralities, Interludes, and Protestant Drama." In ''The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature'', ed. David Wallace, at 101. Cambridge University Press, 1999.</ref> In Skelton's ''Magnyfycence'', Magnificence and the vices that corrupt him represent a particular person, King Henry VIII, and his court 'minions' who were expelled for their poor behaviour.<ref>Skelton, John. Magnyfycence. In Medieval Drama: An Anthology, edited by Greg Walker, 347–407, at 350. Wiley-Blackwell, 2000.</ref>