morality play

American  

noun

1. an allegorical form of the drama current from the 14th to 16th centuries and employing such personified abstractions as Virtue, Vice, Greed, Gluttony, etc.

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morality play British  

noun

1. a type of drama written between the 14th and 16th centuries concerned with the conflict between personified virtues and vices

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Etymology

Origin of morality play

First recorded in 1925–30

Example Sentences

A well-built, blackly comic morality play for which he stayed behind the camera, it’s among both his less metafictional endeavors and his most conventionally absorbing.

From The Wall Street Journal • Oct. 15, 2025

Possessing signifiers of a morality play, “The Lehman Trilogy” is, curiously enough, missing a moral center.

From Seattle Times • May 7, 2024

What’s really going on here is a kind of morality play of a much larger sort.

From Slate • Dec. 28, 2023

The action begins to drag, the twists get more belabored and what played at first like a gleefully unapologetic exploitation-movie exercise threatens to become a late-breaking morality play.

From Los Angeles Times • Feb. 23, 2023

Farmer listens good-naturedly, interpreting Ti Jean’s words as “a giant morality play, a commentary on social inequality.”

From "Mountains Beyond Mountains" by Tracy Kidder and Michael French