Key, Dana Lynn; (2022) From medieval morality play to Jacobean city comedy: the afterlives of the seven deadly sins. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis explores the legacy of the iconographic and rhetorical conventions of late medieval personified abstractions of the Seven Deadly Sins and related vice characters of English morality plays. It traces the continued utility of these traditions through sixteenth-century moral drama and into the Jacobean London city comedies. I offer a significant new exploration of the dramatic traditions that connect late medieval religious drama with the secular comedy of a century and more later that is insistently set in the topography of its contemporary London. The project begins by exploring personifications of the Sins found in late medieval drama and ecclesiastical artwork, uncovering native English conventions of the costumes, stage properties and gestures as well as the rhetorical strategies that playwrights used to personify the Sins and related vices. It also demonstrates how moments of topical social satire create connections between the dramatic characters and audience members to give immediacy to the drama’s didactic messages. The second section traces developments in sixteenth-century moral drama and identifies connective strands of these iconographic and rhetorical traditions that survived intact or were refashioned against the backdrop of the Reformation, the rise of the humanist curriculum and the development of a London-centric mercantile economy. The final section of this thesis explores the continued, but necessarily altered, incorporation of character types whose personal attributes suggest an analogous kinship with certain of the Seven Sins during a period when morality drama intersected with the competing influences of other literatures in the developing genre of London city comedy. A final exploration of the city comedies of Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton reveals a spectrum of approaches to the native tradition from a subtle, almost subconscious reception of conventions to an outright parody of them, a technique that ironically refreshed those very traditions for a seventeenth-century audience.

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