HP as Morality Play (was Re: Harry learning from Snape )

[dzeytoun]

No: HPFGUIDX 114769


--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "dumbledore11214" > 
> Alla:
> 
> Could you educate me, please, a little bit? I know about those 
> Middle Age plays, but in a very general terms.
> Wisdom nurtures Love which will defeat Hate sounds like a rather 
> standard interpretation to me, but is it what usually was supposed 
> to happened with Bitterness according to the plot line?
> 
> 
> If it is true , I doubt that everything in Potterverse would fit to 
> the slightest degree.
> 
> Was Wisdom, for example supposed to make mistakes and admitting to 
> them in those plays?

The history of Morality Plays are extremely long and complex, and 
shoots into the development of Christian Liturgy on one hand the 
developoment of modern drama on the other.  There were literally 
thousands of different variations, although the main moral messages, 
based on Biblical Themes, remained constant.

Bitterness (or Hardness of Heart, as it would have probably been put) 
rejecting Love would play out in the context of a subtype of morality 
play focusing on the Judgement of Souls.  In this type of play 
different people dominated by different traits (Good Deed, Wealth, 
Hard Heart, Humility, etc) meet a personified form of Divine Love.  
Their response to this meeting determines their fate in the final 
scene of the play, when they appear before God and are judged.  You 
don't have complex characterization in morality plays, as the 
characters are archetypes or caricatures, as some people argue the HP 
characters are.  The characters don't change in the course of the 
play (after all, the subject is how certain traits lead to certain 
fates) and they often don't speak at all, but perform in pantomime 
while the play is narrarated from off-stage.

Actually, I don't think HP really corresponds very well to any fixed 
analogy.  Certainly some moral themes wind through the books, 
however, and I find, so far, that the themes smack more of a Morality 
Play than a Passion of Christ (talking in general terms, not about 
the Mel Gibson movie).

Dzeytoun