In literature, social satire is invariably associated with evils and with those who side with devils, because the sacramental social body is normative for community, which devils oppose. Social coherence derives from the sacraments and particularly from the eucharist, which is established in the passion of Christ, an episode more fully developed than any other in the biblical cycles. Its centrality is evident in its anticipation by literatures before it, it's shaping of plays after it, and its symbolic presence in all relationships, as they exemplify charity or its absence. In this view, though satire encompasses and expresses social resistance, satire does not arise from social resistance in the first place but from moral affrmation, which recognizes the gap between affrmation and practice (John Bossy, 1987).
Non-cycle literatures maintain the same standard of sociability as mystery plays, as we have just seen, and even though they tell a different story, they therefore generate the same kind of social satire. In these plays too, the sacraments are central to the individual moral life and to the life of the community, even when their subject appears to be secular, as in Skelton's Magnificence. No matter what the genre, as perceived by modern criticism, playwrights thus seem to have learned from each other and from common sources in using devils and personified vices as a means of establishing the expectation for sacramental community by default. In other words, the social function of stage devils is oppositional, not in subverting moral expectation but in manifesting and exemplifying the defeat of virtue in the life of the community.
This fundamentally moral and narrative sense of normative sociability is expressed in several features of dramatic satire that are consistent across the lines drawn by modern criticism between one early dramatic genre and another. The principle of consistency is the shaping influence of sacramental social assumptions in the formation of fifteenth-century dramaturgy.
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