God's creation of man in a lyrical dramatisation; Noah's cantankerous and hilariously funny wife refusing to leave without her friends; the Massacre of the Innocents. Miracle Plays were a popular form of entertainment throughout the Middle Ages, and part of the poetic and dramatic tradiction on which Shakespeare drew. Everyman discovers what you can't take with you when you go. He beseeches in turn friends, family (one pleads 'cramp in my toe'), possessions ('I follow no man in such voyages'), and finally falls back on moral and religious values.