Medieval Drama in England

In England the folk-plays, throughout the Middle Ages sometimes took the form of dances (Morris dances). Others, exhibited with much fighting and buffoonery, had a slight thread of dramatic action. Their characters gradually came to be a conventional set, partly famous figures of popular tradition, such as St. George, Robin Hood, Maid Marian, and the Green Dragon. The real drama of the Middle Ages grew up from the regular services of the Church. The process of dramatizing the services in church contributed to the development of drama.Sometimes, in the later period, original and very realistic scenes from actual English life were added. Comic treatment was given to the Bible scenes and characters themselves. Noah's wife, for example, came regularly to be presented as a shrew, who would not enter the ark until she had been beaten into submission; and Herod always appears as a blustering tyrant, whose fame still survives in a phrase of Shakespeare's coinage - 'to out-Herod Herod.'

The morality plays had as their main theme choosing the right way in life and saving one’s soul.

Some of the moralities were anonymous; others were by known authors.

The best known of the former type is Everyman (late 15th century), which probably was derived from a Dutch source but was thoroughly Anglicized. In the play the protagonist Everyman learns that everything material he has gained in life deserts him as he journeys into the Valley of Death; in the end only the allegorical personage Good Deeds accompanies him.

Renaissance drama was strongly indebted to Medieval drama, just as Medieval poetry had a deep impact upon the poetry to come.

By the advent of the Renaissance in the 15th and 16th centuries, most European countries had established native traditions of religious drama and farce. Little had been known of classical drama during the Middle Ages, but they were to be rediscovered during the Renaissance.