Everyman

Overview

Full title

The Summoning of Everyman, the name the Messenger gives the play in the prologue; the early prints introduce it as a 'treatise' in the manner of a moral play

Genre

Morality play: an allegorical drama in which a figure standing for all humankind meets personified abstractions

Date

Probably written in the late fifteenth century or the very first years of the sixteenth; no manuscript survives

Early texts

Four early sixteenth-century printed editions: two fragments printed by Richard Pynson and two complete copies printed by John Skot

Relation to Elckerlijc

Closely parallel to the Dutch play Elckerlijc, printed in the 1490s; most scholars now regard the English play as a translation and adaptation of the Dutch

Length and form

921 lines of rhymed verse, mostly in couplets and quatrains, with lines of irregular length and stress

Frame

A Messenger's prologue (1–21) and a Doctor's epilogue (902–921) enclose the action, which runs from God's complaint to the Angel's welcome of Everyman's soul

Setting

No fixed place: the play moves from heaven to the 'house of salvation' and finally to the grave, along a journey that is both pilgrimage and death

Text used here

The modernised text in Ernest Rhys's Everyman's Library volume (1909); line numbers count the verse lines continuously and agree with the standard numbering of modern editions

Modern revival

First modern performance by William Poel's Elizabethan Stage Society at the Charterhouse, London, in July 1901; adapted by Hugo von Hofmannsthal as Jedermann (1911)

Context

Everyman belongs to the kind of late medieval drama that modern critics call the morality play. Where the biblical cycle plays staged the history of salvation from Creation to Doomsday, the moralities staged the life of a single representative human being, surrounded by personified virtues, vices, faculties and forces. The surviving English examples are few. The Castle of Perseverance (early fifteenth century) follows Humanum Genus from birth to judgement; Wisdom and Mankind (both probably from the 1460s or 1470s) set their heroes between tempters and counsellors, and Mankind adds a good deal of rough comedy (Potter 1975) (Davenport 1982) (Beadle 1994) (Bevington 1975).

Everyman is unusual within this small group. It has no devils, no vices and no struggle over the hero's soul during his life. It begins at the moment when life is already over: God sends Death, and the whole play is the preparation for dying. This concentration gives it a severity, and an economy of means, unlike anything else in the English moralities, and it partly explains why it was the first of them to be revived on the modern stage (Mackenzie 1914) (Spivack 1958).

No manuscript of the play survives. It is known from four printed editions of the early sixteenth century, two (both fragments) from the press of Richard Pynson and two complete copies printed by John Skot (Greg 1904). A Dutch play, Elckerlijc, follows the same action speech by speech and was printed in the 1490s; its author is traditionally identified as Peter of Diest, sometimes equated with the Carthusian Petrus Dorlandus. Which play came first was argued for half a century, but most scholars now accept that the English Everyman is a translation and adaptation of the Dutch (Cawley 1961) (Davidson 2007).

The story itself is older than either play. Its core is a parable told in the legend of Barlaam and Josaphat: a man summoned before a king appeals to three friends, of whom the one he loved most will do least for him and the one he neglected will go with him before the judge. The play turns this into a theology of dying. The audience of the late fifteenth century knew the ars moriendi, the 'craft of dying' set out in Latin treatises of the early fifteenth century, in block-books with woodcuts of the deathbed and its temptations, and in English versions such as the one Caxton printed in 1490. Everyman stages the same lessons: that death comes without warning, that worldly goods cannot follow the soul, and that the dying should turn to contrition, confession and the sacraments (Beaty 1970) (Binski 1996).

The play's religion is that of the Church in England on the eve of the Reformation. Everyman is saved by penance in its traditional parts (contrition, confession and satisfaction), by the Eucharist and by extreme unction, and he speaks of purgatory and prays to the Virgin. A long passage praises the priesthood and then condemns priests who sell the sacraments or live unchastely. Such material shows the orthodoxy of the play, and also its awareness of the criticism the Church faced in the decades before Henry VIII's break with Rome (Duffy 1992) (Ryan 1957).

Plot overview

A Messenger asks the audience to attend to a 'moral play' that will show how transitory life is. God then speaks from heaven, complaining that mankind lives in worldly prosperity, forgetful of the Passion and given to the deadly sins. He summons Death and sends him to Everyman with the command to take a pilgrimage and bring a reckoning.

Death finds Everyman, who tries in vain to bribe him and to win a delay. He may, however, take any companion who will go with him. Fellowship swears to go with him even to hell, but refuses as soon as he hears where the journey leads. Kindred and Cousin refuse with excuses; Goods, lying locked in his chests, tells Everyman that love of wealth has made his account worse and that riches were only lent to him.

Everyman turns at last to Good-Deeds, who lies on the ground too weak to stand because of his sins. She gives him her sister Knowledge as a guide, who leads him to Confession. Everyman confesses, prays and scourges himself in penance; Good-Deeds rises up strong, and Knowledge gives him the garment of contrition. He is joined by Beauty, Strength, Discretion and Five-Wits, makes his will, and goes to a priest to receive the sacrament and extreme unction.

When Everyman reaches his grave, Beauty, Strength, Discretion and Five-Wits desert him one after another. Knowledge stays until the moment of death; only Good-Deeds goes with him into the grave. Everyman commends his soul to God and dies, and an Angel receives his soul into heaven. A Doctor closes the play by drawing the moral: all at last forsake Everyman except his good deeds.

Part by part

Characters

Humankind

Everyman

The representative human being, summoned by Death when he least expects it. He is not a villain but a man who has lived for pleasure, friends and riches and forgotten God. His journey from bribery and panic through shame and penance to a calm death is the whole play. His name makes the point that the audience is watching itself.

Heaven

God

Speaks only at the opening, from his majesty. He complains that mankind has forgotten the Passion and lives in sin, and decides on a reckoning. In the course of the play he is also called Adonai, Messias and even, strangely, 'the highest Jupiter of all'.

Death

God's 'mighty messenger', who carries a dart and spares no one, pope or emperor. He refuses Everyman's bribe and every plea for delay, but allows him to look for a companion. He is stern rather than grotesque, an officer of justice and not a figure of horror.

Angel

Receives Everyman's soul into heaven as the elect spouse of Jesus, declaring his reckoning 'crystal-clear'.

Frame

Messenger

Speaks the prologue, calling the audience to attention and announcing the moral of the play.

Doctor

A learned churchman who speaks the epilogue, restating the moral and warning that after death no amends can be made.

Worldly companions

Fellowship

Everyman's companion in sport and play. He makes the loudest promises of loyalty and breaks them first, offering instead to share in drinking, women and even murder. He is the friend of prosperity who vanishes in adversity.

Kindred

Everyman's family. He promises to stand by him in wealth and woe, then refuses, offering instead to lend his maid, who loves feasts and dancing.

Cousin

Another kinsman, whose excuse, a cramp in his toe, is the play's broadest joke. He also gives the most sober reason for refusing: he has an unready reckoning of his own.

Goods

Everyman's wealth, lying in corners, chests and bags, unable to move. Goods explains that he was only lent, that love of him has blotted Everyman's account, and that he will deceive his next owner the same way. He laughs at Everyman's ruin.

Spiritual helpers

Good-Deeds

Everyman's good works, neglected all his life. She first lies on the ground, bound by his sins and too weak to stand, but rises when he does penance. She is the only companion who goes with him into the grave and speaks for him before God.

Knowledge

The sister of Good-Deeds and Everyman's guide, who leads him to Confession, gives him the garment of contrition and sends him to the priest. She stays with him until death but not beyond. Critics usually take her as the knowledge of sin and of the means of salvation.

Confession

A 'holy man' who dwells in the house of salvation. He gives Everyman the jewel of penance, a scourge, and promises the oil of forgiveness.

Personal faculties

Beauty

Everyman's physical beauty. She promises to stay until death's hour, but is the first to leave at the grave, horrified by the thought of smothering there.

Strength

Everyman's bodily strength. Strength promises to stand by him even in battle, then leaves at the grave and calls him a fool to complain.

Discretion

Everyman's prudence or judgement. He advises deliberation, but follows Strength away from the grave, saying that where Strength goes he always follows.

Five-Wits

The five senses. Five-Wits delivers the long praise of the priesthood, and is the last of the faculties to leave Everyman at the grave.

Themes

Death and the reckoning

The play is a dramatised preparation for death. Death comes suddenly, when Everyman has him 'least in mind', and offers no respite. What Death demands is not only the end of life but an account of it: the play's key word is 'reckoning', and its central image is the account book that Everyman must bring before God.

The commercial language is deliberate. Everyman thinks like a man of business: he offers Death a thousand pounds, asks for time to put his books in order, and hopes that money will 'make all right that is wrong'. The play takes his language and turns it to spiritual use, so that the final verdict is given in accounting terms: 'Thy reckoning is crystal-clear' (Kolve 1972).

Transience and the loan of life

Everything Everyman has is only lent to him. Death says so of his life and goods; Goods says so of himself; Everyman's own faculties, at the grave, show that even his body is borrowed. The theme belongs to a wider culture of death in the late Middle Ages, in which tombs, paintings and poems reminded the living of the corpse they would become (Binski 1996).

The play does not reject the world. Beauty, Strength and the senses are welcomed as companions and are even necessary to the journey; Everyman gives half his goods in alms. What the play condemns is trust in these things as if they were his own.

True and false friendship

The first half of the play is a study in false friendship. Fellowship, Kindred and Cousin speak fair and fail in need, illustrating Everyman's proverb that 'in prosperity men friends may find, / Which in adversity be full unkind'. Their scenes draw on a long medieval and classical tradition about the friend who is tested by misfortune (Conley 1969).

Good-Deeds is the true friend who 'bideth truly'. The play's last lesson is that she is the one companion Everyman never valued, which turns a social theme into a religious one.

Penance and the sacraments

Everyman is saved through the Church. His turning point is not a private conversion but a confession, followed by the satisfaction of the scourge, the garment of contrition, a testament of alms, the Eucharist and extreme unction. Each step is a recognised part of the late medieval sacrament of penance and the rites for the dying (Ryan 1957) (Duffy 1992).

At the same time, the play insists on inward feeling: contrition is a garment 'wet with your tears', and Everyman weeps 'for very sweetness of love' when Good-Deeds returns. The outward rite and the inward change belong together.

Grace and works

Good-Deeds alone goes with Everyman to judgement, so the play can seem to teach salvation by works. But Good-Deeds can do nothing until Everyman repents and receives grace through penance. The play thus represents the Catholic teaching that good works are made effective by grace, a position that Protestant readers of the sixteenth century and after would find problematic (Ryan 1957).

Everyman as audience

The hero's name makes him a mirror of the spectators, and the play constantly turns outwards: the Messenger and the Doctor address the hearers directly, and Everyman himself tells them to 'take example' from his desertion. The theatrical experience is meant to become an act of self-examination.

Motifs

The journey and pilgrimage

Death's summons is described as a pilgrimage and a long journey from which no one returns. The metaphor gives the play its movement, from the street where Death finds Everyman to the house of salvation and the grave.

Promise and betrayal

One companion after another makes a promise and breaks it. Fellowship says that 'Promise is duty' just before he breaks his; Strength leaves although Everyman reminds him that a promise is a debt.

'I had wend so'

Everyman's repeated reply to Death and Goods ('I had supposed so') shows a man discovering that what he took for granted was false. The phrase marks the stages of his disillusionment.

Tears and weeping

Everyman weeps first for fear, then in penance, and finally 'for very sweetness of love'. The change in his tears marks his change of heart.

Forsaking

The word 'forsake' and its forms recur from Fellowship's first promise to the Doctor's moral, giving the play a refrain that the audience hears in every scene of desertion.

Symbols

The book of account

Everyman's account of his life, blotted by sin so that he cannot read a letter of it, and cleared by penance. It turns the abstract idea of judgement into a visible object.

The scourge of penance

The 'precious jewel' Confession gives Everyman. His self-scourging imitates Christ's scourging and stands for the satisfaction that completes penance.

The garment of contrition

A garment of sorrow, wet with tears, which Everyman must wear to his journey's end. It represents the inner repentance without which outward penance is empty.

The grave

The 'cave' into which Everyman must creep. It is where his faculties abandon him, and the point at which the play's earthly action ends and the Angel's voice begins.

Critical debates

Everyman or Elckerlijc: which came first?

The English play and the Dutch Elckerlijc correspond so closely that one must be a translation of the other. In 1892 Henri Logeman printed the two together and argued for the priority of the Dutch. Some later scholars defended the English play's originality, but detailed comparisons of the rhymes and phrasing, notably by E. R. Tigg and Henry de Vocht, showed that Everyman often keeps Dutch rhyme-words or renders Dutch phrases literally, while the evidence pointing the other way is much weaker (Logeman 1892) (Tigg 1941) (De Vocht 1947).

Arthur Cawley's edition accepted the Dutch priority, and the parallel-text edition of Clifford Davidson, Martin Walsh and Ton Broos treats the question as settled. The consequence for criticism is significant: the English play is a skilful adaptation rather than an original composition, and some of what readers admire in it, including its structure and much of its doctrine, comes from the Dutch (Cawley 1961) (Davidson 2007) (Conley 1985).

Was Everyman performed?

No records of a performance before 1901 survive, and the early prints call the work a 'treatise' in the manner of a moral play. Some scholars have concluded that it circulated mainly as devotional reading. Others point to its clear theatrical design, its entrances, exits and properties, and to the tradition that Elckerlijc won a prize at a competition of Brabant rhetoricians, and assume that it was acted, perhaps by a small company, though we do not know where or by whom (Cawley 1961) (Lester 1981) (Potter 1975).

Who is Knowledge?

Knowledge guides Everyman to Confession, gives him the garment of contrition and leaves him only at death. She cannot represent human learning or knowledge in general. Critics have taken her as self-knowledge, as knowledge of sin, as acknowledgement (confession) of sin, or as knowledge of the sacraments and the means of grace. In Lawrence Ryan's account of the play's doctrine of penance she is closely tied to the sinner's recognition of his sin, the first step towards contrition and confession (Ryan 1957).

Structure: repetition or design?

Older critics sometimes found the play monotonous, a series of interviews with the same result. Thomas Van Laan argued instead for a careful structure in which a descending movement, ending in Everyman's shame, is followed by an ascending one, and in which the second desertion reverses the meaning of the first. W. A. Davenport's study of the early moral plays discusses its design alongside the other surviving moralities (Van Laan 1963) (Davenport 1982).

Orthodoxy, works and the Reformation

Because Good-Deeds alone goes with Everyman to judgement, the play has sometimes been called a play of salvation by works. Ryan argued that it is strictly orthodox: Good-Deeds is powerless until penance, and grace comes through the sacraments of the Church. The play's praise of priests and its attack on simony have also been read in relation to the religious tensions of early Tudor England, though the passage on corrupt priests is conventional and need not imply dissent (Ryan 1957) (Duffy 1992).

Friendship and the parable of the three friends

The plot goes back to the parable of the man and his three friends told in Barlaam and Josaphat. John Conley showed how the play combines this parable with the medieval doctrine of friendship, so that the scenes of desertion are not only allegories of death but also studies in the proverbial theme of the false friend (Conley 1969).

The ars moriendi and the culture of death

Everyman has often been read alongside the ars moriendi, the manuals that taught the dying how to resist despair and trust in God's mercy. The play shares their concerns but not their form: it has no deathbed temptations and no devils, and it concentrates on the account and the sacraments rather than on the last struggle. Scholars of the period have placed it within a wider culture of death that includes the dance of death and the cadaver tomb (Beaty 1970) (Binski 1996) (Duffy 1992).

The modern revival

William Poel's Elizabethan Stage Society staged the play in the courtyard of the Charterhouse in London in July 1901, the first known performance in modern times. Poel's production, revived with Ben Greet and taken on tour through Britain and America, gave the title role to a woman, Edith Wynne Matthison, and made Everyman the best-known medieval English play. Hugo von Hofmannsthal's German adaptation, Jedermann (1911), has been performed at the Salzburg Festival almost every year since 1920. The revival has shaped how readers imagine medieval drama, and it raised the question of how a strongly Catholic play could be staged for modern secular audiences (Speaight 1954).

Key passages

Questions for study

1. Why does the play begin with God's speech and not with Everyman?

   Consider God's complaint, the idea of justice after rejected mercy, and how the opening shapes the audience's view of the hero.

2. What is the significance of the word 'reckoning' and the image of the account book?

   Look at Everyman's offers to Death, Goods' claim to have blotted the account, and the Angel's final verdict.

3. How does the play make the desertions of Fellowship, Kindred and Goods both comic and serious?

   Think of Fellowship's offers, Cousin's toe and Goods' laughter, and of what each refusal teaches.

4. Why are Beauty, Strength, Discretion and Five-Wits welcomed as companions if they will also leave?

   Distinguish between external goods and the faculties of body and mind, and consider what they are needed for.

5. Who or what is Knowledge, and why does she leave Everyman only at the moment of death?

   Consider her role in leading him to Confession, and the various interpretations critics have proposed.

6. Does the play teach salvation by good works?

   Look at the state of Good-Deeds before and after penance, and at the role of the sacraments.

7. What is the function of the debate about priests while Everyman is offstage?

   Compare Five-Wits' praise and Knowledge's criticism, and think about the religious situation of early Tudor England.

8. How does the play use the theme of transience and the idea that life is 'lent'?

   Compare Death's and Goods' speeches with the prologue's flower in May and the grave scene.

9. How does the relationship between Everyman and Elckerlijc affect the way we should read the English play?

   Consider what it means for originality, authorship and the play's place in English literature.

10. Why might Everyman have appealed to audiences in 1901 and after, when the morality play had long been forgotten?

    Think about the universality of its subject, its simplicity of staging, and the changes made by Poel and by Hofmannsthal.

Further reading

• Beadle, Richard, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
• Beaty, Nancy Lee. The Craft of Dying: A Study in the Literary Tradition of the Ars Moriendi in England. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970.
• Bevington, David, ed. Medieval Drama. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975.
• Binski, Paul. Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation. London: British Museum Press, 1996.
• Cawley, A. C., ed. Everyman. Old and Middle English Texts. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1961.
• Conley, John. 'The Doctrine of Friendship in Everyman.' Speculum 44 (1969): 374–82.
• Conley, John, et al., trans. The Mirror of Everyman's Salvation. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1985.
• Davenport, W. A. Fifteenth-Century English Drama: The Early Moral Plays and Their Literary Relations. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1982.
• Davidson, Clifford, Martin W. Walsh and Ton J. Broos, eds. Everyman and Its Dutch Original, Elckerlijc. TEAMS Middle English Texts. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007.
• De Vocht, Henry. Everyman: A Comparative Study of Texts and Sources. Materials for the Study of the Old English Drama. Louvain: Librairie Universitaire, 1947.
• Duffy, Eamon. The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c.1400–c.1580. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.
• Greg, W. W., ed. Everyman, Reprinted from the Edition by John Skot Preserved at Britwell Court. Materialien zur Kunde des älteren englischen Dramas. Louvain: Uystpruyst, 1904.
• Kolve, V. A. 'Everyman and the Parable of the Talents.' In Medieval English Drama: Essays Critical and Contextual, ed. Jerome Taylor and Alan H. Nelson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972.
• Lester, G. A., ed. Three Late Medieval Morality Plays: Mankind, Everyman, Mundus et Infans. New Mermaids. London: Ernest Benn, 1981.
• Logeman, Henri, ed. Elckerlijk, a Fifteenth Century Dutch Morality, and Everyman, a Nearly Contemporary Translation. Ghent: Clemm, 1892.
• Mackenzie, W. Roy. The English Moralities from the Point of View of Allegory. Boston: Ginn, 1914.
• Potter, Robert. The English Morality Play: Origins, History and Influence of a Dramatic Tradition. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975.
• Ryan, Lawrence V. 'Doctrine and Dramatic Structure in Everyman.' Speculum 32 (1957): 722–35.
• Speaight, Robert. William Poel and the Elizabethan Revival. London: Heinemann, 1954.
• Spivack, Bernard. Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil: The History of a Metaphor in Relation to His Major Villains. New York: Columbia University Press, 1958.
• Tigg, E. R. 'Is Elckerlijc Prior to Everyman?' Neophilologus 26 (1941): 121–41.
• Van Laan, Thomas F. 'Everyman: A Structural Analysis.' PMLA 78 (1963): 465–75.