Medieval and Renaissance Dramatic Forms
The medieval and Renaissance section tests typology, staging and the transition from religious to professional theatre. You may be asked to classify a fragment, explain allegory, or relate a play to its performance conditions; precise genre labels matter more than plot summary.
Medieval forms
- Liturgical drama grows from the Quem quaeritis trope and the Visitatio sepulchri; it is sung in Latin inside the church.
- Mystery plays dramatize biblical episodes in vernacular cycles (York, Chester, Wakefield/Towneley), staged on pageant wagons or in fixed 'mansions' around a platea, often at Corpus Christi and controlled by guilds.
- Miracle plays dramatize a saint's life or a Marian intervention; morality plays stage an allegorical psychomachia, as in Everyman, Mankind and The Castle of Perseverance.
- Farces such as La Farce de Maître Pathelin and the sottie are comic, satirical and often professional.
Renaissance forms
- Commedia dell'arte is professional, improvised from a canovaccio, with fixed masks (Arlecchino, Pantalone, Dottore, Capitano), lazzi and acrobatic turns.
- Humanist scripted comedy appears in Machiavelli's Mandragola and in Latin-influenced school drama.
- Elizabethan public theatre uses blank verse, a thrust stage, daylight, minimal scenery and boy actors; the Globe (1599) and Marlowe's Doctor Faustus show commercial, collaborative conditions.
Worked example
Everyman opens with a Messenger and then God's summons to the allegorical Everyman. Classify it as a morality play: the dramatis personae are abstractions (Fellowship, Goods, Good Deeds, Knowledge, Confession), the action is a psychomachia ending in death and sacrament, and the didactic frame addresses the audience universally. It is not a mystery play, because it does not dramatize a biblical episode; it is not a miracle play, because no saint performs a wonder. The staging need not be a guild pageant; the play's flexible scaffold arrangement suits travelling or hall performance.
Traps that cost marks
- Calling Everyman a miracle or mystery play.
- Assuming all medieval drama is liturgical or clerical; farce and sottie are secular.
- Confusing a commedia scenario with a fully scripted play.
- Forgetting that Elizabethan daylight staging makes explicit night scenes verbal, not scenic.