The morality play is a genre of medieval and early Tudor drama. The term is used by scholars of literary and dramatic history to refer to a genre of play texts from the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries that feature personified concepts (most often virtues and vices, but sometimes practices or habits) alongside angels and demons, who are engaged in a struggle to persuade a protagonist who represents a generic human character toward either good or evil. The common story arc of these plays follows "the temptation, fall and redemption of the protagonist".

Hildegard von Bingen's Ordo Virtutum (English: "Order of the Virtues"), composed c. 1151 in Germany, is the earliest known morality play by more than a century, and it is the only medieval musical drama to survive with an attribution for both the text and the music. Because there are many formal differences between this play and later medieval moralities, as well as the fact that it only exists in two manuscripts, it is unlikely that the Ordo Virtutum had any direct influence on the writing of its later English counterparts.

Traditionally, scholars name only five surviving English morality plays from the medieval period: The Pride of Life (late 14th century), The Castle of Perseverance (c.1425); Wisdom, (1460–63); Mankind (c.1470); Everyman (1510). The Pride of Life was the earliest record of a morality play written in the English language; the text (destroyed by fire in 1922, but published earlier) existed on the back of a parchment account roll from June 30, 1343, to January 5, 1344, from the Priory of the Holy Trinity in Dublin. However, this textual record was incomplete. The play cut off mid-line, when the character Messenger, at the command of the King, called upon Death; the plot summary provided by the introductory banns, featured at the beginning of the play, indicated that the action continued.

The Castle of Perseverance, Wisdom, and Mankind are all part of a single manuscript called the Macro Manuscript, named after its first known owner, Cox Macro of Bury St Edmunds. A second copy of the first 752 lines of Wisdom is preserved in MS Digby 133. It is possible that the Macro version was copied from the Digby manuscript, but there is also the possibility that both were copied from elsewhere. Unlike The Pride of Life and the Macro plays, all of which survive only in manuscript form, Everyman exists as a printed text, in four different sources. Two of these four sources were printed by Pynson and two were printed by John Skot. Pamela King notes how Everyman's status as a printed text pushes the boundaries of the medieval morality genre; she writes, "It was also one of the very first plays to be printed, and in some respects belongs more to the early Tudor tradition than that of the late Middle Ages."

Other English moralities include the fifteenth-century plays Occupation & Idleness and Henry Medwall's Nature, as well as an array of sixteenth-century works like The World and the Child and John Skelton's Magnificence. Additionally, there are other sixteenth-century plays that take on the typical traits of morality plays as outlined above, such as Hickscorner, but they are not generally categorized as such. The characters in Hickscorner are personified vices and virtues: Pity, Perseverance, Imagination, Contemplation, Freewill, and Hickscorner.

The French medieval morality play tradition is also quite rich: for an explanation of French medieval morality plays, visit the French Wikipedia page.

While scholars refer to these works as morality plays, the play texts do not refer to themselves as such; rather, the genre and its nomenclature have been retroactively conceived by scholarship as a way for modern scholars to understand a series of texts that share enough commonalities that they may be better understood together. Thus, as scholar Pamela King has noted, the morality plays' "absolute cohesion as a group" is "bound to be questioned in any attempt to define that form in its individual manifestations and theatrical contexts." As for the history of the term itself in modern usage, premodern plays were separated into 'moralities' and 'mysteries' by Robert Dodsley in the 18th century; he categorized moralities as allegorical plays and mysteries as biblical plays, though nothing suggests that the moralities are not biblical or would not conceive of themselves as such.

Although they do not explicitly label themselves with the genre title morality plays, some of the play texts self-reflexively refer to themselves with the term game. While the Middle English spelling of game varies, the noun generally refers to a joy, festivity, amusement, or play. In the opening lines of The Pride of Life, the Prolocutor uses the word game when asking his audience to listen attentively, stating,