rashmi

Ans 2:- Together with the Mystery play and the Miracle play, the Morality play is one of the three main types of vernacular verse drama produced during the medieval period in England. The Morality plays attempted to educate via entertainment. It is thought that the Dominican and Franciscan orders of Christian monks developed the morality play in the 13th century by adding actors and theatrical elements to their sermons. By doing so, the (mainly illiterate) masses could more easily learn the basics of Christianity through the dramatic spoken word. The Morality plays were most popular in Europe during the 15th and 16th centuries. Doctor Faustus, though a Renaissance text, is like the medieval Morality plays Everyman and The Castle of Perseverance based on the theoretical concept of the human predicament as a sequence of innocence, fall and redemption. In the following paragraphs we will deal with the elements of the Morality play visible in Doctor Faustus as well as the points at which the play is different from the traditional Morality.

According to M.H. Abrams, "Morality plays were dramatized allegories of a representative Christian life in the plot form of a quest for salvation, in which the crucial events are temptations, sinning and the climatic confrontation with death." The protagonist who is often representative of mankind is met by personifications of various moral attributes who try to prompt him to choose a godly life over one of evil. Typically after a spiritual battle for his soul, the Morality play ends with the salvation of the protagonist. In the light of the above features we will discuss how the Renaissance tragedy Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe can be read as belonging to the realm of Morality plays with some significant deviations that indicate the ideological frameworks within which it was operating.

A morality play typically has a protagonist who represents humanity as a whole (Everyman or Mankind) or a smaller social group,