In the mystery plays, social satire is invariably associated with devils and with those who side with devils, as we noticed in chapter 2, because the sacramental social body is normative for community, which devils oppose. Social coherence derives from the sacraments and particularly from the eucharist, which is established in the passion of Christ, an episode more fully developed than any other in the biblical cycles. Its centrality is evident in its anticipation by plays before it, its shaping of plays after it, and its symbolic presence in all relationships, as they exemplify charity or its absence. In this view, though satire encompasses and expresses social resistance, satire does not arise from social resistance in the first place but from moral affirmation, which recognizes the gap between affirmation and practice.

Non-cycle plays maintain the same standard of sociability as the mystery plays, as we have just seen, and even though they tell a different story, they therefore generate the same kind of social satire. In these plays too, the sacraments are central to the individual moral life and to the life of the community, even when their subject appears to be secular, as in Skelton's Magnificence. No matter what the genre, as perceived by modern criticism, playwrights thus seem to have learned from each other and from common sources in using devils and personified vices as a means of establishing the expectation for sacramental community by default.