Medieval drama can be divided into secular and religious strands. The secular works were relatively few in number and seem to be related to the musical tradition of mimes, minstrels, the troubadours and similar vernacular poets. Adam de la Halle’s "Le Jeu de Robin et Marion", is a complete surviving piece with a full musical score, generically somewhere between a sung performance like opera or oratorio and theatre as we now conceive it. Sacred drama included mystery cycles that illustrated stories from the Bible, miracle plays telling lives of the saints, and morality play, that have characters embodying abstract moral qualities. Staging in all of these was spare, and generally not naturalistic.
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