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

There is a tendency to make economic tales resemble morality plays, where excess and pride lead ineluctably to poverty and humiliation.

From The Wall Street Journal

It’s a work of pageantry, inspired in part by Hull’s fascination with medieval morality plays, specifically the story of “Everyman,” an examination of self and of our relationship to a higher power.

From Los Angeles Times

Maybe it’s for the better — but you’ve been missing out on an unlikely morality play about who makes it and who doesn’t in the eternal heartbreak that is Los Angeles.

From Los Angeles Times

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

From Seattle Times