played by others for material gain. Clever farce characters are comic because they are
prisoners of their own venality. If tricks are played in morality plays, it is because evil
characters are trying to lure the human protagonists into sin and damnation. The latter do
not have to play tricks to gain some paltry material advantage; they need only yield to
temptation in order to have all the worldly possessions they desire. When farce characters
gain something through deception, they are not punished. They live in an essentially
amoral world governed by folly. Morality-play characters know full well that every
action has moral consequences. Those who act virtuously will be rewarded, but those
who choose vice will be punished. The world that the morality play represents is order
ed, governed by reason, in which there is always a higher power to reward the good and
punish the wicked. Indeed, a character named Reason, representing the human ability to
distinguish good from evil, appears in a number of morality plays, such as the Lymon et
la terre and the Théologastres. Her function is to guide the protagonist into the path of
virtue.
Many morality plays have protagonists who are universalized individuals of the
Everyman type. They go by such names as Humanity, Humankind, or Sinful Man. Many
others present main characters who exemplify vices—e.g., Poison Tongue—or stages in
life. In the latter category are several plays from the 16th century dealing with the
problems of youth, especially the children of wealthy bourgeois. The parents in the
Enfant ingrat, for example, ruin themselves financially in order to give their son every
advantage. Morality plays that deal with individuals, whatever the scope, may be termed
personal moralities. Some plays, however, deal with the moral condition of particular
groups within society and thus have protagonists who personify institutions. These may
be termed institutional moralities. One such play is the Moralité des trois états réformés
par Raison, which shows that institutions as well as individuals can become corrupt when
they lose the guidance of reason. Another institutional morality is Envie, État et
Simplesse, which provides an example of institutional reform by having State expel Envy
from his company.
Virtually all morality plays are personification allegories in which ideas and
psychological traits are represented as characters on the stage. Their names range from
the designation of common virtues and vices like Charity and Pride, or conditions like
Poverty, to more fanciful appellations like Ashamed-to-tell-his-sins. One of the principal
attributes of these nonhuman characters is that, with few exceptions, they always
represent the static concept of their name and therefore never develop or change as would
a human character. A few morality plays lack personification of this sort, and they may
be called interpretive allegories. Their characters are all human, but the spectator is
expected to interpret the play in an allegorical sense. The epilogue to the Moralité de
Pyramus et Tisbee explains that Pyramus can be understood as the son of God and Thisbe
as the human soul. Similarly, André de La Vigne’s Aveugle et le boiteux, which has the
appearance of a farce, can be interpreted as an allegory of the ungainly pairing of soul
and body. When the two beggars are miraculously cured, the blind man (soul) accepts
God’s grace and the cripple (body) rejects it.
There is, finally, a fundamental difference between the morality plays and the
dramatic works of later centuries. Renaissance playwrights and their successors fell under
the influence of Aristotelian theories concerning the imitation of the physical world, but
the authors of morality plays worked largely with Platonic notions of mimesis. If the
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