Though medieval plays clearly foreshadow the future, they also reflected their own times. The players were still amateurs, members of specific trade guilds who volunteered to help with seasonal performances. Shakespeare smilingly acknowledged those actors when he drew the working-class characters of A Midsummer Night's Dream who rehearse a play within the play. Bottom is a weaver while other characters are identified by such crafts as tinker (a metal worker), carpenter, and joiner (one who built furniture).

Public morality plays used symbolic characters to get their points across. The characters became known collectively as Vices and Virtues (Hal teasingly calls Falstaff a Vice in Henry IV). Players wore costumes which identified them as specific vices and virtues like Pride or Humility, Anger or Temperence. The human protagonists were Everyman or Mankind figures.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, private performances for noble folk were held in great dining halls lit by tall candles. A curtain ran behind the boards, forming an area hidden from public view where the actors could change costumes and make ready their entrances and exits. They used few props and little scenery and often schoolboys took part. These plays, called interludes, reflected a growing interest in nonreligious subject matter among the educated classes.

As the public theater developed throughout the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and went from a traveling entertainment to something housed in a permanent structure, distinctive stories about recognizable characters with sometimes ambiguous purposes and personalities developed.