ENGL 2100Y Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Memento Mori, Morality Play, Mystery Play
23 Feb 2016
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Document Summary
Medieval drama emerged as the great new literary form of the late middle ages. Unlike modern drama, the primary purpose of medieval drama was not the entertain but to teach and instruct - and to show to human beings the path of. However, medieval dramatists did find many ways to make the material both relevant to people"s daily lives and amusing, touching, and otherwise emotionally engaging. Medieval drama is a to a large extent a bourgeois literature". Unlike medieval romance, it appears to have emerged not from the aristocracy or the highly educated literary elite, but from the socially mobile and newly literate middle classes in the towns. Some medieval drama was performed in the streets. Viewing these plays as having closed" meanings is a mistake. Such an approach is especially pertinent to medieval drama a genre without named authors which by its very nature defies closed meanings.
