Editing Morality play (section)

==Historical background==
===Arundel's Constitutions===
Scholars have long noted that the medieval morality plays were written after the creation of Arundel's Constitutions in 1407, whereby the Archbishop [[Thomas Arundel]] and his legislation sought to limit the preaching and teaching of religious matters, and outlawed any biblical translations into the vernacular.<ref>Steenbrugge, Charlotte. "Morality Plays and the Aftermath of Arundel's Constitutions." In ''The Routledge Research Companion to Early Drama and Performance'', ed. Pamela M. King. Routledge, 2016, at 205.</ref> His Constitutions were written in explicit response to the threat of [[Lollardy]]. Since the morality plays do contain aspects of religious doctrine, such as the importance of penance and the salvation of the soul, scholars have questioned how it is that morality plays, in both the play-text and play form, continued to thrive throughout the fifteenth century. While scholars have not arrived at a satisfying conclusion, they nonetheless agree the morality plays were not seriously affected by the Constitutions, which suggests that either Arundel's Constitutions, the divide between Lollardy and orthodoxy, or the role that morality plays themselves played in society, continue to be somewhat misunderstood.

=== 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.

=== Pre-Reformation versus Post-Reformation ===
The outward purpose of all morality plays is to instruct listeners on the means of receiving redemption: a purpose that some plays adhere to relatively consistently, while others delight so extensively in their vices that broad entertainment establishes itself as an equally dominant ''raison d'etre''.  However, morality plays after the [[Protestant Reformation]] are of a distinctly different [[didacticism]] than the morality plays before the Reformation.

Whereas the didactic elements pre-Reformation morality plays usually reinforced the practices or doctrines of medieval Catholicism (often focusing on sacraments like penance), the post-Reformation morality plays—when they concerned themselves with religious doctrine, rather than more secular concerns about education or good living (as with [[John Redford]]'s ''Play of Wit and Science'') -- sometimes worked to destroy Catholic credibility and demonise the Catholic Church.  Although many post-Reformation morality plays were often like their predecessors in that they also were concerned with the salvation of its audience (and in their tendency to allow playful depictions of vice to eclipse those concerns), they differed in that they believed that the theology promoted by pre-Reformation plays was antithetical to salvation. Thus, a major shift in focus, from concern for the individual's moral behaviour to concern for the individual's theological practices, occurred with the post-Reformation morality plays. The wave of [[Protestantism]] which fuelled the content of these plays dictated that more attention should be given to warning people against the Catholic Church than of their sinful nature.  The means of redemption, according to the philosophy embedded in post-Reformation morality plays, is dependent upon the audience understanding the truthfulness of Protestant theology and verses and also the deceptiveness and wickedness of Catholic theology, whose best example is the secular play of Calderón.<ref name="Muratta Bunsen, Eduardo 2014">{{Citation | last = Muratta Bunsen | first = Eduardo | title = Leidenschaft des Zweifelns: Skepsis und Probabilismus in den Säkulardramen von Pedro Calderón de la Barca | trans-title = Passion of Doubt: Skepticism and Probabilism in the Secular Dramas of Pedro Calderón de la Barca | work = www.geisteswissenschaften.fu-berlin.de | date = 31 August 2007 | language = de | publisher = FU | place = Berlin, DE | url = http://www.geisteswissenschaften.fu-berlin.de/we05/forschung/dissertationen/}}.</ref>

The Vices in post-Reformation morality plays are sometimes depicted as being Catholic. At times this depiction is achieved through their physical appearance. For example, Vices in post-Reformation morality plays could be dressed as cardinals, friars, monks, or the pope. Other times, the Vice comes out and states he is a Catholic, or elucidates that he is Catholic by swearing a Catholic pledge. To deceive the victim of post-Reformation morality plays, the Vice typically assumes a new name to disguise what actual Vice he is.{{citation needed|date=August 2016}}