Editing Morality play (section)

=== 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.