SOURCE: "Barry Unsworth Rescues 'All the World's a Stage' from Cliche," in Chicago Tribune Books, December 24, 1995, pp. 3, 6.

In the following review, Begley praises Unsworth's deft handling of the historical novel genre and his thought-provoking themes in Morality Play.

Morality Play, a fine new novel by Barry Unsworth, who won the 1992 Booker Prize for his Sacred Hunger, works brilliantly on three levels. It's an accurate, carefully imagined historical novel, set in 14th Century England; a dark and suspenseful murder mystery; and a provocative meditation on the birth of a new art form. Each layer adds a different flavor and texture. Binding the whole is Unsworth's understated, unerringly precise prose, and his narrator, a priest on the lam, very young and very poor, named Nicholas Barber.

We meet Nicholas as he's running out of a house without his cloak, running from the rage of a jealous husband. A priest caught...