UNIVERSITY OF WROCŁAW Faculty of Letters Ph.D. THESIS Ewa Błasiak The Return of the Morality Play in Anglophone Drama of the First Half of the Twentieth Century Supervisor prof. dr hab. Ewa Kębłowska-Ławniczak Co-supervisor dr Marcin Tereszewski Wrocław 2020 2 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to express my gratitude to my supervisor, Professor Ewa Kębłowska-Ławniczak, for her mentorship, guidance and constant support throughout the writing process. I am grateful for her patience, encouragement and the time she devoted to helping me develop this project. I would also like to thank her for being an extraordinary academic teacher, for it was the intellectual challenge of her English Literature classes which I attended as a first-year undergraduate student that inspired me to undertake further studies in this direction. I wish to extend my gratitude to my co-supervisor, Doctor Marcin Tereszewski, for the attention he gave to this thesis and for his invaluable suggestions. I am also grateful to the entire Institute of English Studies at the University of Wrocław for providing me with a stable and stimulating academic environment during all the years I spent there as an undergraduate and postgraduate student. I wish to thank all my teachers and lecturers for instilling in me curiosity and equipping me with skills which proved indispensable in working on this thesis. 3 4 Contents Introduction: Within and Beyond the Middle Ages ........................................ 7 Modern reception and assessment of the Middle Ages .................................................... 12 The notion of medievalism ............................................................................................... 18 Part I: The Return of the Morality Play Tradition to Contemporary British, European and American Drama and Its Reception ........................ 23 Chapter One: Edwardians, Their World and Drama, and the American Theatre of the Early Twentieth Century: A Historical Introduction ..................................................... 23 Edwardian England .......................................................................................................... 23 The early-twentieth-century British theatre ..................................................................... 31 Categories of drama: “the general drama,” “the popular drama” and “the progressive drama” .............................................................................................................................. 34 American theatre in the first decades of the twentieth century ........................................ 37 Realism and Eugene O'Neill ............................................................................................ 39 The everyman motif in American drama .......................................................................... 44 Chapter Two: Modern Morality Plays in England and Their Reception ..................... 49 Before William Poel: The success of A Message from Mars (1899) ................................ 49 William Poel, the Elizabethan Stage Society and Everyman’s glorious resurrection (1901) .......................................................................................................................................... 54 Provincial subplots: Walter Nugent Monck and the morality play .................................. 59 Unexpected inspirations: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and The Fires of Fate (1909) ............ 62 Sutton Vane’s Outward Bound (1923) .............................................................................. 64 T.S. Eliot, morality play and Murder in the Cathedral (1935) ......................................... 66 Chapter Three: Modern Morality Plays Outside England and Their Reception ........ 69 Morality play in America: The curious case of George V. Hobart’s Experience: A Morality Play of Today (1915) ......................................................................................... 69 Beyond the British context: Jedermann by Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1911) .................. 72 Conclusions to Part I ......................................................................................................... 79 Part II: Modern Moralities: A Close Reading ............................................... 85 Morality Plays: A Critical Introduction ........................................................................... 86 Chapter Four: Critical Analyses of Modern Moralities ................................................. 97 Religious Modern Morality Plays: A case study of Arthur Simmons' Conflict: A Morality Play in One Act with Prologue (1946) ............................................................................. 97 Secularised Modern Morality Plays: A case study of H. F. Rubinstein's Insomnia: A Modern Morality Play (1925) ........................................................................................ 111 5 Christmas morality plays: A case study of Edith Lyttelton's A Christmas Morality Play (1908) and Grace Latimer Jones's What Makes Christmas Christmas: A Morality Play in One Act (1916) ............................................................................................................... 149 Modern rewritings of Everyman: A case study of W.F. Almond's Everychild (1938) .... 172 Conclusions to Part II ...................................................................................................... 185 Coda: What comes next? ................................................................................ 187 Works Cited ..................................................................................................... 195 Appendix .......................................................................................................... 211 Abstract ............................................................................................................ 215 Streszczenie ...................................................................................................... 217 6 Introduction: Within and Beyond the Middle Ages In the collective consciousness, if acknowledged at all, the morality play is associated with medieval, not contemporary drama. In Mediaeval Drama, Alexander Manson Kinghorn writes that The separation of the modern from the mediaeval world has made the early English drama remote, and not even 'a willing suspension of disbelief' can change this, for what is lacking is not an act of imagination but a fact of faith in the kind of truth which … moralities sought to present. (128) This argument follows a discussion in which Kinghorn describes Everyman, which he calls “the greatest of the English moralities” (120), as a play entirely unsuited for modern audience. Morality plays became obsolete, argues Kinghorn, because as time went on “they no longer answered the questions which were being asked by educated people” (125). As other forms of medieval English drama, for example the mystery and the miracle play, moralities indeed display many characteristics likely to discourage contemporary viewers. One of them is the utter simplicity of their characters, which are always purely black or white personified abstractions who lack psychological depth, who never evolve throughout the play, and who thus function mostly as wooden “allegorical equations” (Donaldson 367). Other critics indicate the predictability of the plot as the key factor responsible for the obsolescence of morality play, that is, the absence of any plot twists or any unexpected turn of events which would be of interest for contemporary audience. Finally, the overt and unrelenting didacticism of the morality play, often described as “a sermon cast in dramatic form” (Kinghorn 112), contributes to the popular conception of this genre as outdated and unappealing to the modern theatrical taste. Indeed, the original goal of moralities was to teach the mostly illiterate audience about the proper conduct of Christian life in an approachable manner, and as Marion Jones explains in “Early Moral Plays and the Earliest Secular Drama,” allegory in these plays “is used by people who know all the answers, to enlighten those who might otherwise neglect to ask all the questions” (247). The problem is that the perception of theatre as a didactic tool was questioned in the twentieth century, and as a result, a significant number of modern viewers would subscribe to the view espoused by Eugene Ionesco, who perceived “all forms of didactic message in the theatre as a vulgarity” (Ekberg 19). 7 My dissertation has been designed as a response and a challenge to what seems a common academic discard of the morality play as a genre potentially relevant to the modern stage. By examining the largely unexplored phenomenon of the Morality Play Revival, which occurred at the beginning of the twentieth century, I will demonstrate that moralities not only survived in anglophone drama but also proved an adaptable and desired form. In my study, I will both discuss contributions of minor or amateur playwrights (such as Arthur Simmons or George V. Hobart), who often authored only one play or who wrote for performance at schools or parishes, and allude to several writers known from the western literary canon (such as T.S. Eliot or Arthur Conan Doyle), who admitted their indebtedness to the morality play tradition. The works of the latter group will not be analysed in detail, however, since adaptations and appropriations of the morality play are of more interest to this dissertation than such plays as Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral