Mystery Play, Miracle play, Morality plays

A play is where live actors get on a stage and act out a story in front of an audience.
During Medieval times most plays were religious and were used to teach people
about the Bible, the lives of saints, or how to live your life the right way. There were
three different types of plays preformed during medieval times; The Mystery Play,
the Miracle Play and the Morality Play.

Miracle Play

The Miracle play was about the life or actions of a saint, usually about the actions
that made that person a saint.

- One popular Miracle play was about Saint George and the dragon.
- Miracle play or mystery play, form of medieval drama that came from
dramatization of the liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church.
- It developed from the 10th to the 16th cent., reaching its height in
the 15th cent.
- The simple lyric character of the early texts, as shown in the Quem
Quœritis, was enlarged by the addition of dialogue and dramatic action.
- The miracle play developed from the trope, a few lines of dialogue
dramatizing part of the Mass and acted out during the Mass for the
edification of the worshipers, who did not understand Latin.
- Eventually the performance was moved to the churchyard and the
marketplace.
- Rendered in Latin, the play was preceded by a prologue or by a
herald who gave a synopsis and was closed by a herald's salute.
- When a papal edict in 1210 forbade the clergy to act on a public
stage, supervision and control of presenting the plays passed into the
hands of the town guilds, and various changes ensued.
- The vernacular language replaced Latin, and scenes were inserted that
were not from the Bible.
- The acting became more dramatic as characterization and detail became
more important. Based on the Scriptures from the creation to the Second
Coming and on the lives of the saints, the plays were arranged into cycles
and were given on church festival days, particularly the feast of Corpus
Christi, lasting from sunrise to sunset. Each guild was responsible for the
production of a different episode.
- With simple costumes and props, guild members, who were paid actors,
performed on stages equipped with wheels (see pageant); each scene was
given at one public square and drawn on to its next performance at
another, while a different stage succeeded it.
- Each large town had its own body of miracle plays, called a cycle, which
was presented annually to celebrate a religious holiday, usually Corpus
Christi. A cycle told a complete story, such as the life of Christ. Some cycles
depicted scenes from the Bible from the creation of the world to the final
judgment, consisted of more than 40 plays, and took two or more days to
perform.

- Named after the towns in which they were performed, the principal
English cycles are the York Plays (1430–40), the longest, containing 48
plays; the Towneley or Wakefield Plays (c.1450, in Yorkshire); the
Coventry Plays (1468); and the Chester Plays (1475–1500). The Passion
play is the chief modern example of the miracle play.

- English Miracle Plays: Miracle plays were popular in England from

the 12th to the 16th century. It is impossible to fix the date or authorship of
any of the known plays. The earliest of record is the Ludus de Sancta
Katharine, performed at Dunstable about 1100. (Miracle plays had been
enacted in France even earlier than this.) The Harrowing of Hell, a long
verse drama of the 13th or 14th century, tells of Christ's descent into hell in
the interval between his burial and resurrection. He forces Satan to release
several Old Testament characters who were unsaved because they had died
before his coming.

o Comic or ribald elements became so common in the miracle plays

that the clergy began to frown upon all theater-going as early as
1300. A comic sheep-stealing scene was introduced in the Second
Shepherd's Play of the Wakefield cycle. In another play, Noah
quarrels violently with his wife and has great difficulty in
getting her aboard the Ark. A play about the Crucifixion was
enlivened by a playful King Herod, who leaps off the stage to jeer at
members of the audience. These humorous episodes were ancestors
of the interlude, a type of short farce presented usually at banquets
in the homes of aristocrats.

o In England the plays were put on by craft guilds. Each guild

performed a separate play on a two-tiered, horse-drawn platform
called a pageant. The lower level of the pageant, curtained from the
audience's view, was used as a dressing room; the upper as a stage.
On the day of a performance, audiences assembled at several
locations about town. The guilds moved their pageants from place
to place, performing once for each audience
 - The French mystère distinguished those plays containing biblical
stories from those about the lives of the saints. The auto, the medieval
religious drama in Spain, was acted concurrently with the secular drama
throughout the Golden Age and into the 18th cent. Calderón was the
greatest composer of the auto sacramental, which dealt with the mystery
of the Mass in allegory. In Italy the laudi were basically choral in form and
so distinguished from the later sacre rappresentazioni, which became
lavish artistic productions comparable to the French mystère.
- Methods of production varied. In France and most other continental
European countries, lay brotherhoods produced the plays. A series of
stages, called mansions, was erected along one side of a street. The
mansions, which were reused each year, represented the settings of the
plays. Heaven's gate was at one end, Hell-mouth (shaped like a dragon's
jaws) was at the other, and such places as Bethlehem and Herod's palace
were in between. The spectators walked along the street to follow the
action of the plays.
Manuscripts still exist for the cycles of plays performed in the English towns of York,
Wakefield, and Chester.

Mystery plays

Mystery plays were stories taken from the Bible. Each play had four or five different
scenes or acts. The priests and monks were the actors. Each scene or act was
preformed at a different place in town and the people moved from one stage to the
next to watch the play. The play usually ended outside the church so that the people
would go to church and hear a sermon after watching the play.

Morality Plays

Morality plays were designed to teach people a lesson in how to live their life
according to the rules of the church.

The morality plays combined characteristics of the miracle play and allegorical
works like the Romance of the Rose. They appeared in the latter part of the 14th
century. The virtues and vices—personified in such characters as Pride, Gluttony,
Temperance, and Good Deeds—engaged in a struggle for the soul of man. The
Paternoster moralities, performed in York, depicted this struggle as occurring
between the Seven Moral Virtues and the Seven Deadly Sins. The comic Devil of the
miracle plays was retained, and Vice was introduced as his assistant. Vice, who
played mischievous pranks on the virtuous characters, was the forerunner of the
jester or clown.
The 15th-century Everyman was the most famous morality play. Its subject is the
summoning of every man by Death. After the middle of the 16th century, the
popularity of the morality plays declined sharply.

Sometimes these plays had elaborate sets, sometimes no sets at all. It didn't seem to
matter. The people attended these plays. They didn't have to, but it was a break from
their normal daily lives.
Reference

https://history.howstuffworks.com/european-history/miracle-play.htm