Everyman | William Munson (essay date 1985)
William Munson (essay date 1985)
SOURCE: Munson, William. “Knowing and Doing in “Everyman.” Chaucer Review 19, no. 3 (1985): 252-71.
[In the following essay, Munson examines Everyman in terms of the play's dramatic rhythm in which the main character alternates between learning something and then acting on that knowledge.]
Until recently criticism has stressed the dramatic distinction of Everyman more than thematic reasons for its atypicality as a morality play.1 A recent reading, however, argues for a special connection of the play with Bernardine humanism, in which man is “an active agent in the work of his own redemption”:
The playwright, like Bernard, does not characterize his penitent's acquisition of knowledge as a passive acquiescence to a force imposed from without, but as the logical fruition of an internal probing, a psychologically intelligible ascent through three...
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