Counterfet Countenaunce: (Mis)representation and the Challenge to Allegory in Sixteenth-Century Morality Plays

Author: Griffiths, Jane

Source: The Yearbook of English Studies, Volume 38, Numbers 1-2, 1 July 2008 , pp. 17-33(17)

Publisher: Modern Humanities Research Association

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Abstract:

This chapter examines the use of personification allegory in a number of sixteenth-century morality plays, focusing in particular on the vices' use of assumed names in Skelton's Magnyfycence and Udall's Respublica. It argues that these plays manifest a striking self-consciousness about the limitations of the allegorical mode, and that they thereby both reflect and contribute to contemporary linguistic debates. They should therefore not be thought of as a static medieval survival, but rather as making a practical and dramatic contribution to changing sixteenth-century perceptions of how language signifies.

Document Type: Research article

Affiliations: 1: University of Bristol

Publication date: 2008-07-01

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A supplement to the Modern Language Review, this journal includes articles and reviews on the language and literature of the English-speaking world. Most of the volumes published so far are 'Special Numbers', collections of between fifteen and eighteen commissioned articles on particular topics, such as the impact of the French Revolution on English writers; literature in the modern media; and colonial and imperial themes in literature.