Quotations

"The most striking difference from the later morality form is the entire absence, in the Psychomachia, of the hero and central figure of the moralities, Humanity. This omission explains the further omission of the Devils, or devils on the one side and God or his angels on the other. In the conception of Prudentius, Humanity or the Soul of Man furnished the theater of his action (cf. the exordium, especially ll. 5,6, and 14,15, and also ll. 740-3); naturally it could not appear as one of the actors. . . . This absence of the central figure makes an essential difference in the form of the plot. The conflict has no specified object. The combatants fight merely for supremacy. In place of the varied and natural succession of scenes that appear in the later form,--innocence, temptation, life in sin, repentance--we have really but a single scene, the conflict, preceded by a presentation of the combatants and followed by the exultation of the victor, motives hardly affording the material for separate scenes. The story could only continue only by a repetition of the same process; and the natural result of the lack of any common object of the conflict was the tendency to break it up into a series of single combats." Robert Lee Ramsay, Magnyfycence: A Moral Play, by John Skelton (London: Kegan Paul, 1906), pp. cl-cli. poor scan.