The Theaters of Everyman
[In the following essay, Mills argues that the success and effectiveness of Everyman lies in the “skillful allusions to a range of different kinds of drama and allegory.”]
Everyman occupies a special place in the revival of medieval drama in England in the twentieth century. The success it has enjoyed since the time of Edward Poel's revival of the play at London's Charterhouse in 1901 has not only made it, in the words of Arnold Williams, “the morality play best known and most widely performed in modern times”;1 its repeated revivals have also shaped the popular idea of the morality play and set a standard by which other plays in that nebulous genre are judged. Students of medieval drama, however, accept that Everyman is, as Williams said, “decidedly atypical.” Williams emphasized two of the unusual features of the text—“its high serious tone” which set it apart from most contemporary English works, and its use of the pilgrimage motif (1961, 160-61). But behind the text lay problems of immediate and ultimate sources that concerned Williams as well as other critics.
Williams felt a tension between the play's moral philosophy and its ultimate source. As A. C. Cawley puts it, “Its teaching is a product of Western Christendom, its fable a product of the Buddhist East.”2 Williams thought that the Buddhist fable contained elements not readily assimilated into Christian belief. However, as Alan J. Fletcher has noted in discussing a particularly dramatic sermon analogue, “imported though Everyman may be, to an English audience its narrative would probably not have come entirely as a surprize,” while Thomas J. Jambeck has stressed the importance of Bernardine theology to an understanding of the play.3 Supplementing the list of sources and analogues in Cawley (1961, xvi-xix), these and other studies suggest that the tensions felt by Williams were not those of the contemporary audience or readership of Everyman.
As for the immediate source of the play, Williams accepted Henry de Vocht's arguments that the Dutch play Elckerlijc was a translation of Everyman, whereas scholars are now inclined to accept the view of E. R. Tigg that Everyman is a translation from the Dutch, with some modifications.4 We know considerably more about Elckerlijc than about Everyman.5 It was written by a certain Peter van Diest about 1470 and was the prize-winning play in a Rederijker play-competition held in Antwerp about 1485. The play thus originates in a cultural and theatrical context different from that found in England, and the act of translating, “carrying across,” this text into the society and theater of England had potentially significant implications for its interpretation.
In relocating the play in the English dramatic tradition, the scholar must admit the possibility that the impulse behind the translation was literary and devotional and that the text was intended for private reading, not for theatrical performance. Some support may be given to this view by the description of it as a “treatyse … in maner of a morall playe” (Cawley, Everyman, 1) in the heading to Skot's edition. Since four editions of the text are extant from the early sixteenth century, it seems to have been in wide demand.6 Coming from a part of Europe where religious controversy was strong, the text can readily be regarded as a contribution to the pamphleteering debates of the English Reformation. Though Cawley felt that, despite its date, Everyman seemed “untouched by either Renaissance or Reformation,” Bevington is surely correct in describing it as “designed for a crisis.”7 Its confident affirmation of the centrality of the Catholic church, its priesthood and sacraments to the salvation of humankind seems to predicate an active but unstated opposition to such claims. The play addressed a central area of contemporary controversy and derived a topicality that is lost in a modern revival. As C. J. Wortham says in placing the plays in their contexts of religious controversy, while “Elckerlijc is ante-Reformation, Everyman is anti-Reformation.”8
It is, of course, possible that the play was brought to England in the repertory of one of the groups of English players who are known to have toured in the Low Countries, or that it was commissioned as a translation for a company by an English patron who had witnessed the play abroad. Even if this were not the case, the casting of the “treatyse” in the form of a play invites the reader imaginatively to recreate the text and respond to it in terms of contemporary English staging conditions. It is my purpose in this essay to argue that Everyman's appeal and power result in large measure from the accommodation of familiar elements of performance to its metaphoric strategy, redesignating its acting spaces and drawing upon a variety of dramatic and allegorical modes.
DRAMA AS METAPHOR
In the form in which it appears in the Dutch original, Everyman is a framed play. The action of Everyman's journey begins and ends at the heavenly locus—
He thynketh on the in the heuenly spere
(95)
O gracyous God in the hye sete celestyall
(153)
God seeth thy lyuynge in his trone aboue
(637)
Now shalte thou in to the heuenly spere
(899)
—which not only provides a visual and symbolic point of reference but also lends concrete expression to metaphorical usages such as “the hye Iuge” (245), “the hyest Iupyter of all” (407). The most economical situation for this locus is above the House of Salvation, giving point to Everyman's prayer from the House (581-96). The line “O eternall God / O heuenly fygure” (581, italics mine) may suggest a distinction between God and the actor representing him. That God is an observer of the action that he has instituted in human affairs and is thus author and spectator of a play of his own creation is a a recurrent device of medieval theater, though exploited in an unusual way in Everyman.
Everyman takes from Elckerlijc the moralistic commentary upon the action that is offered by Knowledge toward the end of the play. But Everyman's journey is completed only after that commentary, and the play ends with a spectacular conclusion in which angels welcome the redeemed soul into heaven with music (“Me thynketh that I here aungelles synge” [891]). The historical action ends, as it began, in the heavenly sphere, with Everyman's journey visibly complete. The English translator has, however, accommodated this structure within a second, contemporary frame, which establishes the play as artifact and moves the audience to a contemplative distance from it. This frame, consisting of prologue (1-21) and epilogue (902-21), has parallels elsewhere in early drama.9 The headings used for the speakers—headed “Messenger” for the prologue and “Doctour” for the epilogue—probably define their different functions in the play rather than indicating different actors. It would be appropriate for those functions to be signaled by different costumes, with the Messenger in the livery of a nobleman and the Doctor as priest or friar.
This outer frame not only denies the drama its theatrical autonomy. The prologue identifies the work by title and locates it generically as “by fygure a morall playe” (3). The speeches suggest a defensive stance toward the play, as if fearing misinterpretation or attack. But they distance members of the audience from the action, inviting them to reflect empathetically upon what they experience, much as Everyman reflects within the play upon his own experiences and learns. Lines 7-9
This mater is wonders precyous,
But the entent of it is more gracyous
And swete to bere awaye,
suggest a contrast between the subject matter at literal level (this mater) and the edifying purpose that the performance is designed to convey (the entent). The opposition of precyous and more gracyous is more obscure, particularly since precious can have a spiritual reference (MED, preciouse, 2[a]); but I take this to contrast the visual impact of the play (MED, preciouse, 1[b] “beautiful, fair; excellent”) with the doctrine of grace that the action transmits. The warning against responding to the play as a literal, sensory experience perhaps predicates a different initial expectation from its audience.
Through this outer frame, the play becomes a metaphor for the warning that God gives to humankind. Not only does it enact a memento mori, the coming of Death to Everyman to remind him of his mortality, it is itself a memento mori to members of the audience, serving to remind them also of their common fate. The Messenger of the play is analogous to Death as God's messenger, the play the message that he brings. God's play of Everyman becomes the playwright's play of God and Everyman.
This metaphoric use of drama extends to movement and playing time. It is self-evident that the action of Everyman is structured upon a journey. The image is biblical in its resonances,10 but is found widely in other literature as well. It is also the case that in allegorical drama the movement of an actor in the playing place and his proximity to or distance from a number of symbolic fixed points or characters have meaning beyond the literal. Everyman makes this link explicit by incorporating the journey within the text as a recurrent image and enacting the journey upon the stage. There are at least two fixed symbolic points on the stage. One, I have suggested, is the House of Salvation with God seated above. The other is the visible presence of Goods at the extreme of the playing area:
I lye here in corners, trussed and pyled so hye,
And in chestes I am locked so fast,
Also sacked in bagges. Thou mayst se with thyn eye
I can not styre; in packes, lowe I lye.
(394-97)
In a play with so little staging information, this is a remarkably detailed account, and the appeal to visible evidence demonstrates that the presence of Goods in material form throughout is essential to the impact of the play. Moreover, Goods lies in corners. The phrase predicates an enclosed playing space and suggests that at this important point in the play Everyman has reached the end of his physical and symbolic progress in one direction and is metaphorically “cornered.” The playing area is defined between the House of Salvation/God and Goods, the extremes of grace and damnation since the love of money is the root of all evil. These extremes, however, also embrace the audience. Effectively, this is a theater in the round.
From the moment that God introduces the image of journeying (a pylgrymage [68]), travel across the acting place becomes symbolic as well as literal. Death's initial greeting, “Eueryman, stande styll? Whyder arte thou goynge / Thus gayly?” (85-86), becomes a question about the direction and purpose of life. Everyman's movements are seemingly random, following the movements of his mind, as he accosts Fellowship, then Kindred and Cousin, and finally Goods. His movement from Goods must reverse his previous direction, since he cannot continue forward. It is when he thinks of his Good Deeds that he begins his movement that will lead initially to her, then to the guide of Knowledge. His movements now become purposive. He is led into the House of Salvation to perform penance and receive absolution, then returns to the wider playing space. This movement is repeated when Everyman returns to the House of Salvation to receive the Host and extreme unction and then returns to the wider playing area to go, with a sense of world-weariness and release, to the grave.
The grave constitutes a further symbolic and literal point in the play. Whereas in Elckerlijc Good Deeds lies upon a sick couch, her words in Everyman—“Here I lye, colde in the grounde” (486)—indicate that she is lying in a grave, symbolically dead and, like Goods, unable to move. Encountering this emblem, Everyman seems to recognize both his need and the true nature of the action in which he is involved. The grave becomes the central point in his physical journey and spiritual understanding and presumably occupies a midpoint in the playing area. The text gives no indication of the form that the grave might take, though it was presumably a monument of some kind, perhaps the kind of table-tomb usually shown in art representations of the Resurrection and adopted in the mystery cycles. The resurrection of Good Deeds is perhaps the strongest theatrical moment of the play, reminiscent of the powerful impact of the resurrections of Lazarus and of Christ in the mystery plays. As Everyman scourges his body, a ritual act observed by the audience, the voice of Good Deeds calls the audience's attention back to that now-moving figure:
I thanke God, now I can walke and go,
And am delyuered of my sykenesse and woe.
Therfore with Eueryman I wyll go, and not spare.
(619-21)
This is a further extension of the journey image, as the steps of the strengthening Good Deeds correlate with the blows of Everyman. He cannot see her approach, presumably kneeling with his back toward the wider playing space, and must take the assurance of Knowledge: “Now is your Good Dedes hole and sounde, / Goynge vpryght vpon the grounde” (625-26). Everyman is reunited with Good Deeds and on his return to the grave, the tomb becomes both the literal grave of Everyman and the point of symbolic union between the soul and good deeds.
The play derives its emotional power not from its affirmative theology, which has attracted much scholarly attention, but from its realization of isolation, loneliness, and betrayal, which are offered as the natural conditions of existence. God sits alone above the audience, soliloquizing on the ingratitude of humankind, which has abandoned its natural love for him and become vnkynde (23). His visible isolation reinforces his own sense of rejection; he has been forgotten:
I hanged bytwene two theues, it can not be denyed;
To gete them lyfe I suffred to be deed;
I heled theyr fete / with thornes hurt was my heed.
I coude do no more than I dyde, truely.
And nowe I se the people do clene for-sake me.
(31-35)
The pointed contrasts of lyfe-deed, heled-hurt, fete-heed, and the double sense of suffred (MED, sufferen 1[a] “to undergo physical, mental or spiritual distress or affliction”; 7. “to allow an action to occur”) intensify the sense of indignation, while the sequence of balanced half-lines lends force to the flatly prosaic line 34 with its final pleading truely, confirming the hurt bewilderment of these lines. Humankind seeks “after his owne pleasure” (40), not “the pleasure that I to them ment” (56), preferring the life of the world (38) to the heavenly company of angels (39). The play thus begins with God's sense of rejection. Unable to win humankind's fellowship by love, he applies fear (62). Death is his instrument of fear, the means by which he can coerce humankind to turn to him.
The fear that Death instills in Everyman separates the individual from his context, stripping him of social and physical support and identity until he is reduced to his essentials of his soul and his good deeds. The isolation of the individual soul before God translates into images of social rejection and abandonment in the two sets of “friends.” The action of the first part of the play, in which he accosts Fellowship, Kindred and Cousin, and Goods, is a series of rejections that underline his exclusion from that society, to his growing bewilderment and despair. The cheerful self-regard of Fellowship, Kindred and Cousin, and Goods counterpoints Everyman's growing despair and contrasts with the sympathetic response of Good Deeds. Their mindless pledges to Everyman—Cousin's “For, wete you well, we wyll lyue and dye togyder (324)—and their conventional farewells—Fellowship's “To God I be-take the” (298) or Cousin's “Now God kepe the, for now I go” (377)—are grimly ironic. The false currency of language equates here with the false currency of Goods. Their failure imaginatively to grasp Everyman's plight, combined with scorn for Everyman's naivety, wins him our sympathies. Later, as the spiritually cleansed Everyman leaves the House of Salvation, we see him gather to himself a new society, that of his faculties, which, because he has summoned it, he believes he can control. “Lacke I nought” (680), he claims, ill-advisedly. The aging process is translated into a process of social abandonment as each of the friends whom he summoned wilfully departs. Despair returns: “O Iesu, helpe! All hath forsaken me” (851).
Everyman turns to God because he has nowhere to go. Nothing in the selectively constructed world of the play affords human comfort or consolation, and it is with a sense of relief that Everyman turns from it: “Frendes, let vs not tourne agayne to this lande, / Not for all the worldes golde” (790-91). The acts of charity that Everyman has evidently performed and that speak for him before God are never played. No human being shows him sympathy, and he dies without human companionship. The Earth is as God describes it, a place of sin: “For now one wolde by enuy another vp ete; / Charyte they do all clene forgete” (50-51). Dramatically, this is a bleak world of loneliness and fear.
Everyman is of interlude length and is the only medieval play of which it is possible to claim that playing time represents real time. The period between Death's summons and Everyman's actual death seems very short. The play seems to concentrate upon what are regarded as the last moments of an individual life, and in that respect differs from the lifetime span of The Castle of Perseverance. Much of the tension in the play derives from the fact that Everyman has very little time to prepare for his journey. Lines such as
… without ony lenger respyte
(100)
Dyfferre this mater tyll an other daye
Eueryman, it may not be, by no waye
(123-34)
I gyue the no respyte. Come hens, and not tary
(130)
For thou mayst saye this is the daye
That no man lyuyng may scape a-waye
(182-83)
The day passeth and is almoost ago
(194)
give point to Everyman's frantic movements about the playing place. Although the play literalizes the time available to Everyman, it also uses the brevity of time as a metaphor, both of the life of humankind and of the life of the world.
The idea of a human life as a day evokes both the contemptus mundi topos and biblical writing.11 Something of this metaphoric sense is perhaps conveyed in the Messenger's line “How transytory we be all daye” (6). As Dennis V. Moran says, “The time allowed Everyman projects the fullness of life's experience.”12 Since, as we shall see, Death's initial commission is to warn, not to destroy, his coming can be read as a subjective realization rather than a physical attack by some terminal disease. Following his repentance, Everyman seems reinvested with the attributes of youth—Beauty, Strength, Five Wits, and Discretion—and returns to the wider playing area, apparently the world. It has been pointed out that the withdrawal of these attributes is an enactment of the aging process as well as of the process of death. Dying is not necessarily here the act of a few minutes but the inevitable outcome of a process of steady and inevitable decline, and the play advocates constant preparedness, not the importance of deathbed repentance.
The life of the individual is, however, microcosmic of the life of the world. Everyman is also a play of Judgment. Its outer frame is that of the “Doomsday” plays, and also to some extent the “Flood” plays, in the mystery cycles. God's speech in lines 22-63,
I perceyue, here in my maieste,
How that all creatures be to me unkynde,
Lyuynge without drede in worldly prosperyte.
Of ghostly syght the people be so blynde;
Drowned in synne, they know me not for theyr God.
In worldely ryches is all theyr mynde. …
metaphorically redesignates the performing space and assigns a role to the audience in the manner of the cycle plays where, as here, the literal gaze of the actor-God reconstitutes the audience as the totality of humankind and extrapolates the common condition of humanity from contemporary society:
I God, that all this world hath wrought,
heaven and yearth, and all of nought,
I see my people in deede and thought
are sett fowle in sinne.
(Chester Mystery Cycle, play 3, “The Flood,” 1-4)
Drowned in sin, a phrase without counterpart in Elckerlijc, might suggest that the English translator recognized the affinity with the “Flood” plays. Throughout the speech, the blurring of the functional distinction between generalizing word and specifying name allows the combination of the general judgment at the end of time and the particular judgment that follows upon the death of the individual.13
God's concluding words,
They be so combred with worldly ryches
That nedes on them I must do iustyce,
On euery man lyuynge without fere,
(60-62)
would in the cycles be followed by the summoning of the angels to sound their trumpets and display the instruments of the Passion. Instead of this general announcement Death is commissioned, and at line 66 the pronoun him signals finally the play's focus on the individual, and not the generality of humankind. But the wider perspective is seen to return at the time of Everyman's death; the reference to “whan Deth bloweth his blast” (843) may suggest a trumpet of doom sounded by Death from the locus of heaven, and the reception of the redeemed soul into heaven amid heavenly music is reminiscent of the reception of resurrected and redeemed souls in the Judgment plays. As Douglas Cowling has pointed out, the song is probably “Veni electa mea,” since the first line of the Angel's speech echoes the opening of that text.14 The Angel also refers to “the daye of dome” (901) while stressing the “synguler vertue” (896) that admits the soul of Everyman on his death; and the English translator recognizes the same perspective. The concluding words of the Doctor's epilogue allude to the general judgment, embrace vs all (918), and speak of the uniting of body and soul (919). While there are significant differences between the specific and the general judgment, the play points to affinities between the two both in theme and in theater. The metaphor of time is further extended.
One difference between Everyman and the “Doomsday” plays is God's redesignation of the acting space and audience. Whereas the God of the cycles constructs the city in which the cycle is performed as the world, in Everyman specific allusions to worldly prosperyte (24) and worldly ryches (60) characterize a more restricted society, one that is wealthy and materialistic. Although the play is frequently performed today in ecclesiastical settings, the text seems rather to predicate the secular setting of the hall and to address the society within it. Pressure from this context lends added resonance to the “Doomsday” commonplace of the Judgment as a “reckoning,” itself an image of biblical origin:15 “It ys full youre syns I beheight to make a reckoninge of the right” (Chester Mystery Cycle, play 24, “The Judgement,” 9-10). The reference retains the specific force of fiscal accountancy. What is evidently a nobleman's hall thus becomes a metaphor of the world, its ostensible security the illusory materialism that is the prime initial target of the play, while the ambivalence of the accountancy image draws attention to its confused values. That image is actualized in the books of account that Everyman discovers beneath the feet of Good Deeds (or of Everyman, since he picks them up [500-8]).
The books are a property of major significance. They are held by Good Deeds, who brings them to Everyman from the grave—“Good Dedes, haue we clere our rekeynge? / Ye, in dede, I haue it here” (652-53)—and presumably carries them with her back to the grave. Opportunity exists for the illegible page to be displayed to the audience, and for the “clear” account to be displayed similarly. Such display of pages occurs elsewhere in medieval drama. In Chester's play 11, “The Purification,” Simeon's “correction” of the biblical text is emended first in red and then in gold letters by an angel and evidently shown to the audience in evidence. The blotted record of Mischief's court in Mankind seems likewise displayed, for comic ends. Books are also employed in the Doomsday plays of the cycles.16 The claim that “one letter here I can not se” (507) can be glossed from Goods' claim that “Thy rekenynge I haue made blotted and blynde” (419); the page is so blotted that the account cannot be read. Since the account has to be presented to God, it is possible that Good Deeds, who says “Fere not; I wyll speke for the” (876), presents the books to the angel after line 887, prompting the line “Thy rekenynge is crystall-clere” (898).
The “business” image is an extension of the wider distinction between treasure in heaven and treasure upon earth. Language plays its part in Everyman's confusion. The modern plural Goods, preferred in many editions, has ousted and hence obscured the force of the singular collective Good which is employed in the play. The combination of reference to material goods and to abstract virtue in the word provides the basis for ironic word play and pun—
O false Good, cursed thou be,
Thou traytour to God, that hast deceyued me
And caught me in thy snare
(451-53)
—where the staging polarities are caught in the verbal link of Good and God, and false Good picks up not only the duplicity of worldly wealth but also the idolatrous love of it as a false God that leads to damnation.
THE THEATER OF THE WORLD
God's instruction to Death, “Go thou to Eueryman” (66), initially seems to lack a reference. Everyman is Anyman among the audience gathered in the space before God, and the actor Death might draw any one of them into the play, just as Death might strike anyone. Death's promise, “Lorde, I wyll in the worlde go renne ouer-all / And cruelly out-serche bothe grete and small” (72-73), suggests that, like the Virtues in the N-Town “Mary” play, he descends from the heavenly sphere to audience level, in this case, the floor of the hall;17 there he threatens the spectators with his dart (76) as he searches through them for his prey. The actor playing Everyman is either not present or—more likely—hidden among the audience, not obviously distinguishable by his dress. This easy interchange of actor and spectator is found in other hall interludes such as Medwall's Fulgens and Lucrece, where
There is so much nice array
Among these gallants nowaday
That a man shall not lightly
Know a player from another man!
(Glynne Wickham, ed., English Moral Interludes [London: Dent, 1976], 42, lines 53-56)
Death's description of Everyman as going gayly (86) seems to confirm the impression that he is the young gallant, the youthful retainer who wears the livery of a great lord and flaunts the excess of his wealth in extravagant dress. As Tony Davenport says, “Man glorifies his flesh by assuming the trumpery finery of the world or of the court, and flaunts his short gown and immodest codpiece, his wide sleeves, his striped hose, his lace trimmings, the elegant smooth tightness of his hose, his open shirt, his slashed doublet and sleeves.”18 Such familiar finery signals Everyman's social identity and constitutes an index of his material priorities, which he must subsequently shed in preparation for his scourging (605-6). It is never resumed, for, as Davenport also notes, Knowledge gives Everyman in its place a garment of sorowe (638-41), which sets him apart from the rest of the audience and marks the change in his spiritual status.
As the quotation from Fulgens and Lucrece suggests, the livery of the retainer is analogous to a costume, assigning a role and, equally important, an identity to the wearer and encouraging him to act out his stereotypical part in a self-contained social drama. Death calls Everyman into a different play, that devised by God. But the values of Everyman are those of his society. Fellowship, the first friend to whom he turns, is the collective of such gallants (MED, felaushipe, 6. “An organized society of persons united by office, occupation, or common rules of living”). He voices the normative standard of conduct for the group, from which, like the servant B in Fulgens and Lucrece, he emerges. Fellowship's values confirm God's assessment of humanity. Fellowship proposes revenge (“If ony haue you wronged, ye shall reuenged be” [218]), gluttony and lechery (“And yet, yf thou wylte ete, & drynke, & make good chere, / Or haunt to women the lusty company” [273-74]), the sport of murder (“But and thou will murder, or ony man kyll” [281]), and the love of finery (“and thou wolde gyue me a newe gowne” [292]). Fellowship thus serves to define Everyman for us. The subjective sense of his name, “the mutual relationship, or characteristic behavior, of boon companions” (MED, felauship, 3) points to compatibility and may well suggest that the two actors are costumed identically.
Such concerns suggest affinities with the Youth interludes and seem to herald a sociopolitical critique on contemporary mores and crime. The play's date coincides with the popularity of the Youth plays,19 and its affinities with the genre might therefore have seemed the more significant. Although, as Ian Lancashire points out, Everyman is a very different kind of play from Youth and Hickscorner,20 the potential for development in the direction of social comment is not only present but to some extent exploited in this section of the play. Everyman is imprisoned within the literalism of the world that he inhabits and must be led to recognize that those around him, including himself, are bound up in their own allegorical limitations and ambiguities.
Continuing to search the playing area for help, he encounters two further representatives, Kindred and Cousin, his blood relatives. To some extent this might seem to repeat the encounter with Fellowship since they too reflect society and its values. But they also offer Everyman an alternative identity to that provided by society, that of descent, birth, and inherited rank. The word kinrede encompasses not only our modern sense of “kinsfolk” but also “stock, family, lineage, race” (MED, kinrede, 1). The personification here seems to take the form of an older, established member of society. The comment
It auayleth not vs to tyse.
Ye shall haue my mayde with all my herte;
She loueth to go to feestes, there to be nyse,
And to daunce, and abrode to sterte
(359-62)
has the jocular tone of an older generation looking indulgently upon the pleasures of the young. The picture of a society feasting, dancing, and wandering abroad, and the use of nys with its semantic range from “frivolous” to “lascivious” (MED, nice), briefly calls to mind the errors of the spoilt child in morals of education such as Nice Wanton. In a hall setting, the allusion to feasting would be strongly underlined by the context, while the performance of a moral play would establish this occasion as distinctively different from those described. If the actors here double as the sisters, Good Deeds and Knowledge, then it would seem probable that Kindred and Cousin are also played as women, and that the maid is a lady's maid.21
Cousin seems closer to the age group of Everyman. We are half a century from the first OED example (1561) of the verb cozen, “to cheat, defraud by deceit,” but it is difficult not to suspect a pun on the word in the otherwise surprising “Trust not to me, for, so God me spede, / I wyll deceyue you in your moost nede” (357-58). While no less firm in refusal than Kindred, (s)he identifies more fully with the plight of his/her kinsman, learning from his situation, almost as an example to the audience of their response: “Also of myne owne an vnredy rekenynge / I haue to accounte; therfore I make taryenge” (375-76).
As we have seen, the final encounter of this socially focused section of the play takes Everyman to the physical and moral limit of his travel through the literal and metaphorical acting space. He has now reached the heart of his own and society's corruption. Goods stands as the material wealth that sustains their pleasure and maintains their illusions of self-sufficiency. This is a society in which money can override all claims of morality and justice:
For, parauenture, thou mayst before God Almyghty
My rekenynge helpe to clene and puryfye,
For it is sayd euer amonge
That “money maketh all ryght that is wronge.”
(410-13)
The section thus ends with a critical observation on the contemporary values that structure Everyman's philosophical framework. He has extrapolated from the activities of the world in which he lives the values by which the universe operates, in ironic reversal of God's true intention.
The limited vision which these empirically deduced values promote is shown in Everyman's encounter with Death. Everyman's initial failure to recognize Death may seem to deny the literal level of the action in order to make an ironic allegorical point about Everyman's spiritual blindness. Death's self-description suggests that he takes the traditional form of a dart-armed skeletal figure (76), and although he does not verbally identify himself until line 115, he does announce himself as a messenger of God at the start of their dialogue (90-91). The problem is for a producer to address, though it admits of a number of possible solutions. Death may be literalized by Everyman as a curiously costumed actor, whose serious purpose only gradually penetrates his understanding. Alternatively, Death may speak at some distance from Everyman, calling out to him (“Loo, yonder I se Eueryman walkynge” [80]) and moving round him until he confronts him at line 115. Or he may be in cloaked disguise, revealing his identity visibly only at 115. Whatever the solution preferred, Everyman responds as if dealing with a normal master-messenger relationship of a kind he is accustomed to handling. He has received an unwelcome invitation, which he is not at the moment minded to accept (101, 113), and seeks to bribe the messenger to go away until a more suitable moment (122). His attitude is that of the busy man of the world, interrupted with an unwelcome bill at an inopportune moment. His “What desyreth God of me?” (97) is not, I think, a statement of surprise but a brusque, impatient remark on being jolted out of his reveries of lust and treasure.
THE THEATER OF THE MEMORY
Thus far, Everyman has occupied a timeless present; he expects past joys to continue unchanged, and that illusion has been translated into allegorical figures that outlast the life span of the individual. Goods says,
For whan thou arte dede, this is my gyse—
Another to deceyue in this same wyse
As I have done the, and all to his soules reprefe.
(448-50)
Now Everyman's punning progression from Goods to Good Deeds, from material to spiritual, corresponds to his change of physical movement as he turns away from the corner toward God. In so doing, he redesignates the acting space, from worldly society to the inner world of the mind. Whereas those whom he has encountered so far manifest themselves in familiar material guises, the appearance of the sisters Good Deeds and Knowledge is not readily determinable. Though they could be dressed in religious habits, such identification would seem to link them confusingly with the familiar social world, and a more anonymous dress, such as the linen gown of Lady Holy Church in Piers Plowman, might be more appropriate. The transition to this theater of the memory is, however, less abrupt than might at first seem, for Everyman has been, from the outset, a play about memory.
God's initial complaint is that his sacrifice is forgotten: “My lawe, which I shewed, whan I for them dyed, / They forget clean / and shedynge of my blode rede” (29-30). Death comes to Everyman not to dispatch him but to remind him of what he already knows but has since forgotten:
Full lyttell he thynketh on my comynge;
His mynde is on flesshely lustes and his treasure. …
Thoughe thou haue forgete him here,
He thynketh on the in the heuenly spere.
(81-82, 94-95)
Everyman does not think that he is immortal, and he knows from the start what is required of him and his unpreparedness: “Full vnredy I am suche rekenynge to gyue” (113). Death is not simply the destroyer of life; he is the messenger of God, sent to warn humanity, and as such is also a part of Everyman's consciousness. What he brings is a reminder of mortality into the mind of Everyman.
Even the theater of society has been in part a mental construct. Everyman has first to explore the concerns that were at the forefront of his mind when the realization of his impending death came before him. His physical and spatial progress is a mental progress, leading to the center of his own priorities and beliefs, and each dialogue is followed by a soliloquy in which Everyman reflects upon the process so far, clarifies his own false preconceptions, and moves on to the next possibility. As William Munsen says, “The rhythm of act and learning leading into new act shapes a local texture of continuous trial and correction.”22 The significance of Fellowship, Kindred and Cousin, and Goods is a projection of Everyman's own understanding. They are not as he constructs them. Goods, the inanimate object, states this point finally and clearly:
Mary, thou brought thy selfe in care,
Wherof I am gladde.
I must nedes laugh, I can not be sadde.
(454-56)
Goods is neutral, to be used for salvation through almsgiving when valued with reasoned moderation but a force for damnation when the sole focus of humankind's desires, the more usual role: “If I saue one, a thousande I do spyll” (443). As Jambeck suggests, this capacity of Everyman to be read as a drama of the inner being may account for some of its modern appeal.23The Castle of Perseverance, for example, also dramatizes a process of repentance. Humanum Genus rejects Shrift but is led to repentance by the prodding spear of Penitence and goes into the castle of perseverance to be defended by the seven virtues. What we witnesss is an inner drama; but what we experience is a play in which Humanum Genus is displaced from the center of the action by powerful external forces for good and evil. In Everyman the issue is determined by Everyman's misreadings of the world he occupies. The play's theatrical strategy denies the determinism of the Castle, responsibility is shown, both morally and dramatically, to rest with the individual.
In turning to Good Deeds, therefore, Everyman is also moving further into his own mind, having freed it from the preconceptions that are immediately present in his material environment. With the change of allegorical mode, the play has reached a point of transition. Good Deeds “exists” only in Everyman's past. Paradoxically, she is called to mind perhaps by Goods' reference to alms-deeds, that is, active charity. Hidden in the ground, she is also buried deep in the memory of Everyman. She directs him to Knowledge, who can instruct Everyman more clearly. Whereas Good Deeds is particular to Everyman, taking a different form in each individual, Knowledge is both individual and collective.24 She is what Everyman already knows, the way to salvation. As Everyman is definable in terms of his social station and values, he is also definable in terms of his Christian upbringing; he is Every-Christian-man. But Knowledge is also the collective knowledge of Christendom, from which Everyman's particular knowledge itself derives, and she can therefore survive him in a way comparable to that of the “social” allegories. She is the link to the guardian of that collective knowledge, the institution of the church, and hence leads Everyman out from one social construct, his secular world, into another, that of church sacraments, rituals, and worship.
THE THEATER OF SALVATION
The House of Salvation where the holy man Confession dwells constitutes a new theatrical space, invitingly present from the start. I have accepted that God's throne might be located above it, providing both the high place and an appropriate proximity to what is clearly construed as a church beneath. The entry into this structure is an act of withdrawal from the theater of society, a rejection of the values of the surrounding community, similar to Humanum Genus's entry into the Castle of Perseverance. Within this specifically designated space—perhaps an open-sided scaffold—Everyman enters a new kind of drama, a series of ritualized and formalized acts that are prescribed for him and undertaken unquestioningly under the direction of Knowledge. This is a different kind of allegory; familiar rituals and their associated symbolic objects, to which value has been arbitrarily attributed, are here translated into dramatic actions and stage properties and require authoritative explanation in order to make sense of the otherwise meaningless actions.
Within this context, physically and symbolically close to the actor-God, Everyman's memory reaches beyond his personal history of wrongdoing to retrieve the knowledge that God required at the outset: “To remembre thy Sauyour was scourged for the / With sharpe scourges, and suffred it pacyently” (563-64). This extension of memory is accompanied by an act of prayer to God which introduces a new voice of adoration into the play:
O eternall God / O heuenly fygure,
O way of ryghtwysnes / O goodly vysyon,
Whiche dyscended downe in a vyrgyn pure
Bycause he wolde euery man redeme,
Whiche Adam forfayted by his dysobedyence:
O blessyd God-heed, electe and hye deuyne,
Forgyue me my greuous offence!
(581-87)
This Latinate high-style appropriate to its high subject and purpose reflects in its formality the formal action of the speaker before God, and signals the ritualistic mode of the scourging, and subsequently the administration of the sacrament and the anointing. Everyman's memory now reaches into divine history, to Fall and Redemption. He has been called back to the opening vision given by God, the collectively available redemption, and the distinction of the individual and the generality of humankind has again been dissolved. He can now be “mery and glad” (623).
Everyman's unhappiness has been repeatedly restated by him as each of his friends in society deserted him. His exchange with Kindred emphasizes the recurring issue:
EUERYMAN:
Alas, that euer I was bore!
For now shall I neuer be mery,
If that you forsake me.
KYNREDE:
Ah, syr, what ye be a mery man!
Take good herte to you, and make no mone!
(348-52)
The self-focused joviality of the speaker not only contrasts with Everyman's growing misery, but that misery actually feeds the sense of joviality, as Everyman becomes the object of amusement in his mistaken readings. The sneering laugh of Goods, “I am gladde; I must nedes laugh, I can not be sadde” (455-56), is the most deriding and cruel. Everyman is made the more wretched by what are in effect stage-directions indicating the disposition of the actors toward him. He in turn, by his indifference, has caused distress to his Good Deeds, as her reproachful response implies: “If ye had parfytely chered me” (501) (MED, cheren, 1[a] “To cheer [sb] up”; 3. “To treat hospitably”). Knowledge's exhortation therefore sharply reverses the situation that has so far obtained. Now, with the arrival of Good Deeds beside Everyman a new language of tender affection is introduced, intensified by the cumulative appellations of Good Deeds, by the mutual use of the possessive pronoun, and accompanied by Everyman's tears of happiness:
GOOD Dedes:
Eueryman, pilgrim, my specyall frende,
Blessyd be thou without ende. …
EUERYMAN:
Welcome, my Good Dedes! Now I here thy voyce,
I wepe for very swetenes of loue.
(629-35)
After the sequence of scornful rejections, Everyman has at last found the loving security and support he sought.
After his investment with his new “costume,” the “garment of sorowe,” glossed as “Contrition” (643-45), Everyman is ready to leave the House of Salvation, but he will return to receive the sacrament and extreme unction from Priesthood (750ff). This episode has occasioned some debate. The words go (707) and yonder I se Eueryman come (769) may suggest that Everyman goes from the audience's view after the speech of Five Wits (749), constituting, incidentally, the only infringement of unity of action in the play. It is at this point that the much discussed digression upon the authority of the priesthood between Five Wits and Knowledge occurs. The dialogue is in two parts—the praise of the power of the priesthood to Everyman, and then, in his absence, a criticism before the audience of the shortcomings of priests who lead lives of public scandal. Possibly the administration of the sacrament and the anointing are carried out in full view of the audience in a mimetic action within the stage of the House of Salvation while the dialogue between the two allegorical characters proceeds outside.
This section provides a further example of calling to memory, the need to remember the role of the church in the scheme for salvation, as evidenced in the comment on the sacraments: “These seuen be good to haue in remembraunce” (726). The sacraments are reminders of God's grace to humankind and also the pathways to redemption. The speeches also stress a distinction between the office of priesthood, as allegorized within the theater of salvation and sacramentalized within the church, and the particular holder of that office in society. The ability to separate the role in the play from the actor occupying it becomes a means of understanding the distinction between the individual priest and the power which that office within the church confers upon him.
THE THEATER OF THE BODY
As Everyman prepares to leave the House of Salvation for the first time, he is instructed by Good Deeds to accept as companions Discretion, Strength, and his Beauty, and by Knowledge to accept Five Wits (657-69). These new companions are called onto the stage by a conscious act of mind:
KNOWLEGE:
Also ye must call to mynde
Your Fyue Wyttes as for your counseylours.
GOOD Dedes:
You must haue them redy at all houres.
EUERYMAN:
Howe shall I gette them hyder?
KNOWLEGE:
You must call them all togyder,
And they wyll here you in-contynent.
(662-67)
Their coming heralds the final theater of the play, in which the action shrinks to that of the body. The changing designation of the playing space interconnects the two realms that Everyman inhabits, his social world of men and the world of his own body. It is difficult to understand how these different attributes might have been represented on the stage; possibly some form of costume incorporating symbolic designs could have been worn. Their gathering around him, however, marks the reconstitution of the body of the redeemed as a help and comfort in the world (676), instead of the seat of fleshly desires which work to damnation. Symbolically, this is a moment of rebirth; dramatically, it is emblematized in the return of Everyman from the House of Salvation to the outer acting area, where these qualities make up his defense against the temptations that once beset him.
The heedless confidence of the gallant on his first entry into the playing space is paralleled now by his newfound confidence in his own self-sufficiency as he reenters; he thanks God
that I haue hyder brought
Strength, Discrecyon, Beaute, and V Wittes. Lacke I nought.
And my Good Dedes, with Knowledge, clere.
All be in company at my wyll here.
I desyre no more to my besynes.
(679-83)
Everyman has found a kingdom that responds to his will to replace the one that worked in willful independence of him.
He asserts this control by making his will, an action that has both social and literary associations.25 Everyman is now reconstituted in his youthful prime. For the first time his words embrace the audience as well as his newfound friends as spectators, casting them as witnesses to the will:
Now harken, all that be here,
For I wyll make my testament
Here before you all present.
(696-98)
The making of a will was a necessary preparation before embarking on a physical journey, but it is also the prudent act of any whose death is approaching. Everyman's will is a product of his newfound Discretion in the world and constitutes a significant piece of stage-business, a model in itself. Perhaps surprisingly, the will does not follow the usual formula of bequeathing soul to Christ and body to church or making provision for funeral expenses. Its concern is with the distribution of the Goods to which Everyman spoke earlier. Here half the money will go to alms-deeds and the other half to paying debts and making other restitution, thereby reclaiming authority over the still-visible Goods who had gloated over his fate. The will, like the books of account, may be displayed; it is presumably entrusted to Knowledge. It is from this point that Everyman properly embarks upon his journey.
Returning from Priesthood, Everyman carries a crucifix (778). Whereas previously he had been reluctant to undertake his journey, he is now positively eager (“let vs go with-out longer respyte” [776]) and expresses weariness with life itself (“Frendes, let vs not tourne agayne to this lande” [790]). With Knowledge, Good Deeds, and bodily qualities he sets off for the grave which, we assume, had been vacated previously by Good Deeds and which is now literalized. The journey to the grave is evidently what the bodily qualities understood by his request to “folowe me” (779), for at the graveside they abandon him. This enacts the aging process, which carries the young man from youth to senility. The attributes leave him as they leave an aging man—first Beauty, then Strength, then Discretion, and finally his Five Wits. They are conscious of the appropriate sequence, suggesting an unstated inevitability about their departure. Strength comments that this is the appropriate time for him to leave: “Ye be olde ynoughe, I vnderstande, / Your pylgrymage to take on hande” (817-18). Discretion says that he must leave after Strength (834-35), and Five Wits follows the others (846). The dramatization of the aging process transforms the play into a “life of Humankind” format, which realizes the physical and mental degeneration of the aged in terms of a visible social isolation. Everyman is again threatened with loneliness, the more acute because of his earlier confidence and because he—and we through him—has experienced such isolation before. Again his sense of security has proved delusory, and a mistaken value has been projected upon autonomous characters. The parallel is emphasized by Good Deeds: “Beaute, Strength / and Dyscrecyon do man forsake, / Folysshe frendes and kynnesmen that fayre spake” (871-72).
The play concludes by returning the audience from the play world to the everyday world. Everyman first offers himself to the audience as example (“Take example, all ye that this do here or se” [867]). This is then taken up by Knowledge, who steps out of her allegorical role to become at one with the audience: “Now hath he suffred that we all shall endure” (888). Next the Angel turns from addressing the soul to addressing the audience: “Now shalte thou in to the heuenly spere, / Vnto the whiche all ye shall come” (899-900). Presumably the Angel is responsible for leading the soul to the locus of heaven. Finally the Doctor addresses “Ye herers, take it of worth, olde and yonge” (903) and urges their assent to the final prayer: “Therto helpe the Trynyte! / Amen, saye ye, for saynt charyte” (921-22). These prayers seem to be made against the tableau of heaven, with Knowledge standing at the grave.
The tightly controlled structure of Everyman sets it apart from the looser structures of our longer fifteenth-century morality plays. It would be a mistake, however, to overstress its atypicality. The effectiveness of the play lies not in any one unique feature, but in the skillful allusions to a range of different kinds of drama and allegory, all familiar and established. De Vocht's claim for its priority over Elckerlijc may no longer be accepted, but he rightly pointed to Everyman's comfortable accommodation into the existing traditions of English drama and devotional writing: “Everyman is as intimately connected with English Literature as any literary document of the period” (1967, 211). It was perhaps as much the recognition of that compatibility as of the appropriateness of its propagandist theme that led to its translation. At the same time, however, the play imaginatively exploits those resources and extends our understanding of the term “morality play.”
Notes
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Arnold Williams, The Drama of Medieval England (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1961), 160. On Poel's revival, see Robert Potter, The English Morality Play: Origins, History and Influence of a Dramatic Tradition (London: Routledge, 1975), 1-5.
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A. C. Cawley, ed., Everyman (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1961), xv-xvi. All quotations are from this edition.
-
Alan J. Fletcher, “Everyman: An Unrecorded Sermon Analogue,” English Studies 66 (1985): 297; Thomas J. Jambeck, “Everyman and the Implications of Bernardine Humanism in the Character ‘Knowledge,’” Medievalia et Humanistica 8 (1977): 103-23.
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Henry de Vocht, “Everyman”: A Comparative Study of Texts and Sources (Louvain: Librairie Universitaire, 1947); E. R. Tigg, The Dutch “Elckerlijc” is Prior to the English “Everyman” (London: privately printed, 1981). For a translation of Elckerlijc, see Adriaan J. Barnouw, The Mirror of Salvation (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1971).
-
See Barnouw, The Mirror, xiv-xvi; R. P. Meijer, Literature of the Low Countries, 2d ed. (Cheltenham: Thorne, 1978), 54-56.
-
W. W. Greg suggests that probably some ten editions may have been produced (Everyman, Materialen zur Kunde des älteren Englischen Dramas 20 [Louvain: Uystpruyst, 1910], 35n2). The four extant editions are described by Cawley (Everyman, ix-x).
-
Cawley, Everyman, xix-xx; David Bevington, Tudor Drama and Politics: A Critical Approach to Topical Meaning (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), 35.
-
C. J. Wortham, “Everyman and the Reformation,” Parergon 29 (1981): 23.
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E.g., Play 5 in the Chester Mystery Cycle, ed. R. M. Lumiansky and David Mills, EETS supp. ser. 3 (London: Oxford University Press, 1974). See also the use of the figure of Contemplacio in The “Mary” Play from the N-Town Manuscript, ed. Peter Meredith (London: Longmans, 1987).
-
Most significantly, Hebrews 11:9-16.
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Cf. Matthew 20:1-9, John 9:4, etc.
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Dennis V. Moran, “The Life of Everyman,” Neophilologus 56 (1972): 325.
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See particularly Carolynn Van Dyke, “The Intangible and Its Image: Allegorical Discourse and the Cast of Everyman,” Acts of Interpretation: The Text in Its Contexts 700-1600: Essays on Medieval and Renaissance Literature in Honor of E. Talbot Donaldson, ed. Mary J. Carruthers and Elizabeth D. Kirk (Norman, Oklahoma: Pilgrim Books, 1982), 311-24. On the general judgment, see particularly Matthew 20 and 21; on the individual judgment, Hebrews 9:27.
-
Douglas Cowling, “The Angels' Song in Everyman,” N& Q 85 (1988): 301-3.
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Cf. Matthew 18:23-30, Romans 14:12, 1 Peter 4:1-8.
-
Chester Mystery Cycle, play 11, “The Purification,” lines 1-118; Mankind (Mark Eccles, ed., The Macro Plays, EETS 262 [London: Oxford University Press, 1969], 176), lines 679-86. On books in the “Doomsday” plays, see, for example, Towneley play 30, “The Judgement,” lines 134-42; Chester Mystery Cycle, play 24, lines 549-564+Latin. The underpinning biblical text is Revelations 20:12.
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Meredith, The “Mary” Play, lines 1215-22.
-
Tony Davenport, “‘Lusty Fresch Galaunts,’” Aspects of Early English Drama, ed. Paula Neuss (Cambridge: Brewer, 1983), 112.
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See David Bevington, From Mankind to Marlowe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), 50-51.
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Ian Lancashire, ed., Two Tudor Interludes: “The Interlude of Youth”: “Hickscorner” (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980), 48.
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On doubling in the play, see John W. Velz, “Episodic Structure in Four Tudor Plays: A Virtue of Necessity,” Comparative Drama 6 (1972-73): 88-90.
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William Munson, “Knowing and Doing in Everyman,” ChR 19 (1984-85): 255.
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Jambeck, “Everyman,” 120.
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The exact reference of “Knowledge” has been much debated. Among suggestions are: “both self analysis and its product” (Allen B. Goldhamer, “Everyman: A Dramatization of Death,” Classica et Medievalia 29-30 [1968-9]: 610); “Everyman's experience of the world, his awareness of sin, and his understanding of God's mercy and grace” (Moran, “The Life of Everyman,” 326); “‘contrition’ or, better, ‘acknowledgement of one's sin’” (Lawrence van Ryan, “Doctrine and Dramatic Structure in Everyman,” Speculum 32 [1957]: 728).
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See Eber Carle Perrow, “The Last Will and Testament as a Form of Literature,” Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters 17 (1914): 682-753.
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