Medieval Drama

The medieval period produced a body of drama very different from anything that came before or after — mystery cycles staged on wagons through city streets, morality plays in which abstractions like Greed and Mercy walked across the stage as characters, and liturgical pageants performed inside cathedrals. The works that survive give modern readers a window onto the religious, communal, and frankly entertainment-hungry culture that produced them.

Plays from Medieval Drama continue to define what working theatre artists assume a play is. Drama-school curricula are built around them; regional theatres programme at least one of them every season; high-school English departments teach them year after year because students respond to the structural clarity and the language. What looks at first like pious veneration of the canon is, on closer inspection, a working consensus among practitioners that these plays still teach us how the form actually works.