The Morality Play: Ancestor of Elizabethan Drama?

Abstract

At least since A. P. Rossiter's edition of Woodstock in 1946 and Tillyard's Shakespeare's History Plays in 1947, critics have become accustomed to suppose that the Elizabethan history play had its in the medieval morality. Once that opinion was accepted as a settled fact, as it was by the time Ribner published The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare, other scholars felt free to find morality roots for Elizabethan tragedy and comedy as well.l Thus in one view or another, virtually every Renaissance play was thought to exhibit direct and important influence by the moralities. The notion has not diminished much, and today the standard view seems to be that expressed by David Bevington:

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 10 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.