Everyman: A Structural Analysis
[In the following essay, Van Laan analyzes the dramatic structure of Everyman, which he argues contributes to the success of the religious drama.]
The high value of Everyman has been provocatively asserted in T. S. Eliot's description of it as “perhaps” the only English drama “within the limitations of art.”1 Eliot writes this while discussing the lack of form in post-Kydian drama and thus implies that the source of this value is the play's formal unity. David Kaula has taken Eliot to mean “that nothing in the play is extraneous to the central homiletic purpose, that all elements of style, structure, and theme are governed by the conventions of allegory.”2 Yet the emphasis on Everyman's homiletic purpose and allegorical conventions does not sufficiently explain either its critical esteem or its theatrical popularity. Fortunately, Eliot has enlarged upon his original assessment in a later work.3 He argues that religious drama, to be successful, must combine its doctrine with “ordinary dramatic interest.” Everyman fulfills his requirement:
the religious and the dramatic are not merely combined, but wholly fused. Everyman is on the one hand the human soul in extremity, and on the other any man in any dangerous position from which we wonder how he is going to escape—with as keen interest as that with which we wait for the escape of the film hero, bound and helpless in a hut to which his enemies are about to set fire.
The comparison isolates rather succinctly the quality which has given Everyman its eminence: it is not only perfect allegory; it tends also to be high drama. This fusion of religious doctrine and ordinary dramatic interest results directly from the play's fundamental formal principle. The human action and its allegorical significance together form a distinct structural pattern which not only imposes discipline but also contributes its own intrinsic meaning. Through this twofold function, the pattern simultaneously deepens the doctrinal content and evokes the indispensable emotional tension.4
The structural pattern of Everyman is suggestively defined by the somewhat superfluous prologue and epilogue. The Messenger, who introduces the play, reiterates a single point, “How transytory we be all daye.”5 Although he insists that the play's matter and intent are “wonderous precyous,” his speech is essentially negative. He focuses on the inevitability of death and the destructiveness of sin. His outline of the action anticipates but one of its phases, for he mentions only the loss to man of those associates and attributes that “fade … as floure in Maye.” He concludes by announcing God's call for a “generall rekenynge,” an event which must inspire despair in anyone who, like Everyman, has found life and sin “full swete.”6 The Doctor's epilogue provides a remarkable contrast. In addition to pointing the moral for the less discerning, the Doctor absolves the prologue's negative emphasis by stressing the positive elements of the second half of the play and by focusing upon a character-concept not mentioned in the prologue: the Good Deeds which do not desert man. The Messenger leads up to the threat posed by God's call for a reckoning, but the Doctor concludes by affirming Everyman's ultimate end:
he that hath his accounte hole and sounde,
Hye in heuen he shall be crounde.
(916-917)
The prologue and epilogue clearly distinguish a two-part structure. One movement, a falling action, occupies approximately the first half of the play; it traces Everyman's decline in fortune from Death's entrance, which shatters the apparent serenity of his life, to the depth of his despair, where he can foresee only eternal damnation. The second movement, a rising action, carries him from this nadir to his final salvation, symbolized by the words of the welcoming Angel.7 Detailed analysis reveals this two-part, descent-ascent structural pattern as the basic principle of the play's organization. More importantly, such an analysis also shows how this structure enriches the experience to which it gives form.
The first movement of the action begins at the highest possible schematic level, out of time and the world, in God's presence. In the medieval world-view, with its series of concentric spheres, the presence of the Prime Mover postulates infinite height. But the action already suggests descent: God observes Earth and its creatures. Moreover, like the speech of the Messenger, God's words are wholly negative in force, implying only the difficulty to come, omitting any indication of hope for mankind. In God's eyes, men are blind to spiritual matters and drowned in sin. Having forsaken their God for worldly prosperity, they grow steadily worse each day. Man has even forgotten the love which God manifested in suffering for him. But man's rejection has been to his own disadvantage because God now plans to “Haue a rekenynge of euery mannes persone” (46). The whole speech thus moves logically to its conclusion where God sees that He “nedes on them … must do iustyce” (61). The “majesty” stressed in the first line connotes only power; its nature is characterized by the harshness of such words as “ryghtwysnes, the sharpe rod” (28). God speaks only in His aspect of righteousness and justice: He is the God of Wrath. God the merciful is evoked only by the reference to His Passion, and in this context the Passion serves as one more justification for the threatening tone. The conception of God thus established dominates the whole first half of the play and becomes explicit in such devices as Everyman's use of “Adonay” (245), “hye kynge” (330), and “hyest Iupyter of all” (407) to identify his antagonist.
The falling action proceeds without interruption as the scene itself shifts from Heaven to Earth, where Death confronts the unsuspecting Everyman. Everyman's initial position in the pattern of descent can be precisely determined. He is, as his failure to expect or recognize Death demonstrates, totally unaware of any values higher than those of world and time. From this limited point of view he stands at the highest possible level: he has all the wealth he can possibly want; he has friends and kindred on whom, he believes, he can rely. The sudden pressure of eternity brought to bear on him forces him downward toward death, the very antithesis of his criteria for success. Thus the ubiquitous medieval metaphor of the Wheel of Fortune assists the cosmological scheme in symbolizing the descending pattern of action. Everyman rests at the top of the Wheel, at the apex of Fortune.8 Death's visit turns the Wheel. But even more shocking for Everyman is Death's demand that he make a reckoning to God. For while Everyman's own point of view is purely temporal, God's opening speech has already specified an entirely different point of view. Everyman's distorted values associate him with the generic “Euery man” of God's condemnation. In the first of the play's numerous self-echoes, Everyman's language emphasizes his vulnerability: his reaction to the demand for a reckoning (“This blynde mater troubleth my wytte,” 102) unconsciously repeats God's image in “Of ghostly syght the people be so blynde” (25). The downward action thus aims even beyond loss of life. Everyman's lack of preparedness directs him toward an even lower depth, eternal damnation.
Of this unavoidable implication, Everyman is not entirely aware. Although Death's visit troubles him, he still retains his earthly supports, and he now turns to these for help. The ensuing episodes define the falling action in a variety of ways, the first and most obvious of which delineates, in the loss of his worldly resources, Everyman's descent on the Wheel of Fortune. The effect which gives this whole section unity is visually symbolized by each of Everyman's earthly supports turning his back on him after denying him assistance. Everyman becomes more and more isolated and defenceless, a process heightened by the irony which has each deserter promise him aid before finally refusing it. Ultimately, he has nothing left; even his last resort, his Goods, proves to be no more than a temporary loan. In a further irony, the trussed, locked, and sacked Goods can also turn his back on the sinking hero. Death has left the stage, but his continued authority asserts itself through Goods's words, as “What! wenest thou that I am thyne … ? / Naye, Eueryman; I saye no. / As for a whyle I was lente the” (437-440) carefully echoes Death's mocking “What! wenest thou thy lyue is gyuen the, / And thy worldely goodes also … ? / Nay, nay; it was but lende the” (161-164).9
The second way in which these episodes have significance is through the conversion of Everyman's complacency into despair. This emotional pattern is formed in part by his changing appeal to his various associates. The length of the Fellowship episode reflects Everyman's confidence; he can withhold announcement of his precise need until he has successfully extracted a promise of assistance. The next episode, with Kindred and Cousin, is much briefer because Fellowship's desertion has shaken him. His anticipation is less sure: he “trusted” that Fellowship would help (203), he only “believes” that Cousin and Kindred will (315). Therefore he is more direct with them, telling them at once what he seeks, as if already expecting their refusal. His anticipation of the meeting with Goods indicates a further decline: “If that my Good now helpe me myght” (389). He quickly explains his situation to Goods, and without awaiting a reply begins to beg him for his help (409); close to hysteria, he varies plea with insistence and then with reproach. When he finally turns to Good Deeds, he has no confidence, no anticipation whatever: “Alas! she is so weke / That she can nother go nor speke” (482-483).
Between the episodes, Everyman remains alone on the stage, in a visual representation of his increasing loneliness. He expresses his reactions in soliloquy, and the separate speeches are linked by recurring motifs which emphasize the growing despair. The first motif consists of his abortive prayers. When Death leaves, Everyman cries out, “Lorde, helpe, that all wrought!” (192). Deserted by Fellowship, he echoes this cry with “A, Lady helpe!” (304). With Kindred and Cousin gone, he makes a third appeal: “A Iesus! is all come hereto?” (378). The prayers are similar in their brevity and their vehemence; they suggest a felt need to pray which is inhibited by excessive worldliness. At the same time, the three prayers create a progression of despair; he turns from a vague appeal to the power which now threatens him, to the Virgin, mankind's intercessor with his Saviour, and finally to the Saviour Himself. The order shows his growing awareness that he needs a Saviour, but the tone indicates little hope of moving Him. A second motif which links these soliloquies is Everyman's preoccupation with time. Death tells him he has but one day to get his account in order, then reminds him that “the tyde abydeth no man” (143). Throughout this section, Everyman fearfully notices the rapid movement of time (192, 194). He applies the motif to the deserters, who “fast awaye do … flee” (383). Abandoned by Cousin, he pauses to mourn, then realizes that “I lose my tyme here longer to abyde” (386). His interview with Goods convinces him that his whole life has been a “mysspendynge of tyme” (436). This preoccupation not only verbalizes the emotional pattern; by suggesting the sun sinking in the west, it evokes a new symbol for the falling action which the emotional pattern helps to define. A third and final motif uniting these soliloquies expresses, through the echoing of related words, the only sensation which Everyman can feel on his descent, that of his abject suffering. His heart is sick (133), he fears “endles sorowe” (172), his ever-worsening situation is a “dystresse” (391) and a “dysease” (403). Even Goods, by no means compassionate, characterizes Everyman's plight as a “dolour” (433) and as “this grete sorowe and care” (434). For Everyman, the suffering occasioned by his increasing despair epitomizes itself in a single forceful word, the “payne” which unites all these related expressions, and echoes throughout the desertion scenes (83, 191, 331).
The third way in which the desertion episodes contribute to the falling action is the most important of all because it pertains to the more encompassing point of view established in God's opening speech. The very fact that Everyman would seek help from such companions as Fellowship and Goods shows that, in his present state, he is damned.10 They represent aspects of life which can only condemn him, as Goods, whose name emphasizes the point through irony, triumphantly insists. But the severity of Everyman's peril is most conclusively established by the play's allegory, which here works on more than one level. These associates indeed represent friends and relatives and wealth, but the characterization given them points to a further, more threatening level of meaning. Their specific attributes combine with those of Everyman himself to make up a complete roster of the Seven Deadly Sins.
Everyman differs from the typical morality play in the narrow focus which has apparently excluded from the dramatis personae the usual comic characters, the Vices and the Seven Deadly Sins. But the Sins are certainly present in spirit. In the opening speech, God describes mankind's serfdom to “the seuen deedly synnes dampnable” (36). He enumerates “pryde, coueytyse, wrathe, and lechery” (37), adding “enuy” a little later (50). The list is incomplete, but as Morton Bloomfield has pointed out, the Middle Ages was so saturated with the concept that even partial enumeration effectively called attention to the whole.11 Medieval spectators knew the complete list, and they knew the typical characteristics of each Sin, for they met with them infrequently in other moralities and quite regularly in the Sunday sermon. They would thus see Everyman not only as a representative of themselves but also as a personification of Avarice. Everyman's addiction to the other pleasures in life is largely suggested by those with whom he associates, but his complete submission to Avarice dominates his own speech and behavior. Death prepares for Everyman's entrance by focusing on excessive love of riches (76). When Everyman finally grasps the sinister import of Death's visit, he offers a considerable bribe, one thousand pounds, in an attempt to defer the matter (121-123). All episodes in the first half of the play move climactically toward the scene with Goods, which delineates Everyman's most vicious involvement. His riches lie heaped up everywhere; he admits that he has loved Goods all his life (388). As the main figure in a morality, it is appropriate that he should personify what by the fifteenth century was rapidly replacing Pride as the chief of the Seven;12 as a man who has reached the age when Death approaches, it is equally appropriate that he should be possessed by the Sin naturally inherent to old age.13
God's speech and the presence of a fully achieved personification of Avarice prepare for details connoting other Sins. Fellowship's varying proposals contain much suggestive detail. He begins bravely enough:
If ony haue you wronged, ye shall reuenged be,
Thoughe I on the grounde be slayne for the,
Though that I knowe before that I sholde dye!
(218-220)
But when he realizes the ironic aptness of his words, he hastily retreats:
And yet, yf thou wylte ete, and drynke, and make good chere,
Or haunt to women the lusty company,
I wolde not forsake you. …
(272-274)
Finally, he settles upon a qualified version of his original offer:
But and thou wylte murder, or ony man kyll,
In that I wyll helpe the with a good wyll.
(281-282)
This vacillation gives Fellowship human reality; the details fill out his personification of “sporte and playe” (201). But there remains an excess not entirely accounted for by this single level of allegory. On the other hand, seen from the already established context of the Seven Deadly Sins, the double focus on murder suggests Wrath; revenge, the first thing that occurs to Fellowship, is a specific attribute of Wrath.14 The remaining details of eating, drinking, and frequenting questionable women denote Gluttony and Lechery, two Sins which, as here, are normally coupled in medieval accounts.15 These two Sins reappear in the refusals of Cousin and Kindred. Cousin “had leuer fast brede and water / All this fyue yere and more” than accompany Everyman (346-347), and the speech loses some of its point if the implication of Gluttony is ignored. Kindred re-introduces Lechery by offering Everyman, in lieu of his own accompaniment, his maid, who, since she loves to go to feasts, “there to be nyse” (361), is evidently no Beatrice. Further details, otherwise obscure, readily suggest Sloth and Envy. Cousin's curious excuse, “I haue the crampe in my toe” (356), does more than enliven him. Sloth is a sin of the feet: Sloth, or the slothful man, suffers from gout; sometimes his feet are gnawed.16 Cousin's cramp is wholly consistent with this tradition. Goods, whom Everyman had loved best, viciously upbraids him, rejoicing in his misfortune, glad that Everyman has brought himself into jeopardy: “I must nedes laugh; I can not be sadde” (456). Chaucer's Parson clarifies the significance of Goods's jubilation: “The seconde spece of Envye is joye of oother mannes harm.”17
Pride is the only one of the Seven Sins not evoked by specific verbal details. But Everyman, the personification of Avarice, is as hero equally likely to embody Pride, because this Sin, the original leader, continues to retain its prominence even while Avarice develops in importance,18 and one of the principal sources of Pride is wealth like that of Everyman's.19 His costume establishes a visual reference to Pride. Death's accusing question, “Whyder arte thou goynge / Thus gayly?” (85-86) indicates, as T. W. Craik has argued, the nature of Everyman's dress,20 and ostentatious clothing always signifies Pride.21 Everyman's adherence to Pride shows most clearly, however, in his early complacent acceptance of worldly life, a state which typifies the attitude Pride tries to instill in his victims.22 Lacking any notion of another, superior life, or of the death which links the two, Everyman imagines, in effect, that he can live forever; he suffers from Pride of Life, a condition perfectly exemplified by the king in the morality of that name:
I schal lyue ever mo
& croun ber as kinge;
I ne may neuer wit of wo;
I lyue at my likinge.(23)
Everyman naturally shows less and less evidence of pride as the falling action increasingly abases him; but this does not absolve his original guilt. He continues to be Pride's victim and thus its representation.24
Recognition that all Seven Deadly Sins participate in the downfall of Everyman demands reexamination of a view that the play fails to take evil seriously because its world “is not invaded by the Devil and his ministers, the personified vices.”25 On the contrary, this indirect representation of the Sins asserts an especially serious concept of evil. In other moralities the amusing farce of the personified Sins usurps all interest due the serious characters. The direct representation of the Sins undoubtedly demonstrates the active presence of evil, but their amusing activity threatens to obscure the homiletic purpose. Everyman eliminates this possible danger through the creation of two levels of allegory. The Sins are subsumed to the serious purpose because they are realized only on the second level and by the same characters who denote the friendship, family, riches, and mankind of the first. Everyman personifies two Sins, and the qualities which suggest the other five are shared by the remaining characters. This unsystematic distribution preserves the first level of allegory even while the second asserts itself. Since the function of the allegory is to infuse the human action of the surface with greater meaning, the order in which the two levels are established has great structural importance. The first level, more apparent, shows Everyman's over-reliance on worldly things; the second, slower to achieve realization, sustains the downward movement by particularizing this over-reliance as submission to the Seven Deadly Sins. God's opening characterization of man is thus made concrete in the action. The threat looms more ominously than ever before: unless man can in some way release himself from sin he must remain entirely devoid of hope. Everyman is not only a willing victim of the Sins but he does not even go beyond them in his search for help.
Deserted by Goods, Everyman summarizes the preceding episodes in soliloquy (463-478), heavily emphasizing the elements which illustrate his descent. Then, without hope, he turns to Good Deeds. She continually declares her willingness to help him; but once again irony occurs, for the visual image presents her as supine and possibly shackled. She regretfully adds to each insistence an admission of her sheer incapacity. Everyman stares helplessly at his book of account, which Good Deeds, in another image echoing God's description of man's spiritual blindness, calls “a blynde rekenynge in tyme of dystres” (508). She verbalizes the pity which Everyman's increasing hopelessness has instilled in the audience (“I am sory of your fall; / And fayne wolde I helpe you, and I were able,” 514-515), and her choice of the word “fall” to describe Everyman's progress epitomizes the whole preceding action. The word marks his complete defeat. He realizes that without Good Deeds's help, he is “for euer dampned indede!” (510). In terms of his descent on the Wheel of Fortune, he stands at the point of death; but within the wider frame of action that encompasses the whole medieval cosmology, death initiates for him an eternity of damnation. The physical relationship of the speakers, which forces Everyman to look downward, expresses some of the significance. He has failed to look up to Heaven; from his present vantage-point on Middle-Earth, he can only look down into the bottomless depths of Hell.
Yet this nadir is also his peripety. The motive which has at last brought him to Good Deeds is the realization of his own guilt, the first necessary stage in the alleviation of spiritual blindness. Goods's taunts have had their effect on him:
Than of my selfe I was ashamed;
And so I am worthy to be blamed.
(476-477)
Good Deeds, whose name suggests a meaningful change in Everyman's conception of “good,” is the first associate he seeks that never gave him pleasure, the first that is in no way connected with the Seven Deadly Sins. Awareness of his desperate situation makes him continue to beseech even after Good Deeds assures him she is helpless. As a result, she introduces him to Knowledge, whose arrival institutes a rising action which continues to the end of the play and which counters the falling action by stressing gain rather than loss, by resolving the various motifs which had enacted the descent, and by replacing the increasing despair of the first half with a steadily mounting joy in both Everyman and the spectators.
On one level of significance, the arrival of Knowledge begins to resolve Everyman's fruitless search for help, a point made explicit when her promise, “I wyll go with the, and be thy gyde, / In thy moost nede to go by thy syde” (522-523), echoes and eliminates Cousin's “I wyll deceyue you in your moost nede” (358).26 On another level, her arrival symbolizes the full growth in Everyman of the condition which she personifies. Knowledge here means acknowledgement of sin, or contrition.27 Everyman's clearer vision is thus embodied in the action. His acknowledgment of sin weakens the hold which the Seven have on him and marks the first stage of his redeeming penitence. Further, that Knowledge comes from outside Everyman, that she is unexpected, that her entrance is not prepared for—all suggest that Everyman has finally received the grace which he also needs to make his penitence effective, the grace which had always been available but which in his blindness he had been unable to perceive. The coming of grace modifies, for the first time, the opening picture of an entirely wrathful God.
Other motifs of the falling action are resolved as Knowledge leads Everyman through the vital stages of his penitence. The House of Confession recalls a prior house, not fully realized, where Goods lay piled up in corners. Knowledge's description of Confession as a “clensyng ryuere” (536) recalls and resolves God's image of man as “drowned in synne” (26). The complete absence of soliloquies in the second half of the play, a significant contrast to the falling action, helps to dramatize Everyman's relief from utter loneliness. More particularly, the three motifs of Everyman's soliloquies—prayer, time, and pain—here also resolve themselves. His prayers were ejaculatory, restrained by his ignorance of spiritual life. Once his redemption begins, however, he can render a fully-developed, clearly-outlined prayer (581-604), reuniting God, Christ, and the Virgin, the separate foci of the former abortive exclamations. He can now perceive and express not only the threatening aspect of God's majesty and righteousness but also the redeeming quality of His love and mercy. The full control in this prayer is revealed by its orderly movement toward the intended climax, “I beseche you helpe my soule to saue” (604). The motif of time is similarly resolved. Time had been a destructive force because so little remained and that little diminished so rapidly. Everyman's once futile desire for more time is fulfilled at last while he performs his penitence, when Knowledge approves his effort with “Eueryman, God gyue you tyme and space!” (608). Time thus changes to a redemptive force, for within it Everyman purges both his despair and his guilt. As he rises higher in his ascent, he even rejects the misguided overemphasis he had accorded time; in the new attitude toward his required pilgrimage, time, once too rapid, moves too slowly: “And lette vs go now without taryenge” (651). Fleeting time had been one of the causes of his pain. Pain also changes in meaning; it assumes a purpose that makes it both necessary and glorious. Good Deeds promises Everyman that Knowledge will take him “where thou shalte hele the of thy smarte” (528). When Confession presents him with the scourge of penance that he must himself administer, Everyman eagerly accepts it: “My body sore punysshyd shall be” (612). He rejoices in his self-imposed suffering because pain has also become a redeeming force; it is now the medium through which he can ultimately eliminate all pain and suffering. The motif is entirely resolved when Everyman, seeing Good Deeds released from her shackles, vows to intensify his bodily mortification (628).
These episodes have more than one function in the rising action because of the play's double level of allegory. On the first level, Everyman's performance of the sacrament of penitence is an image of his ascent toward salvation. Each stage—contrition, confession, absolution, and satisfaction—not only represents an act he must go through to attain purification but also, since the parts of the sacrament are successive and cumulative, each stage carries him that much closer to Heaven. Simultaneously, on the second level of allegory, these episodes complete the play's subdued version of the Psychomachia, the battle between Sins and Virtues for the soul of man.28 From the second allegorical level emerge the remedia which counteract and purge the Seven Deadly Sins. Visual and verbal effects connote the elimination from Everyman of the two Sins he has himself personified, Pride and Avarice. Pride disappears when he accepts the guidance of Knowledge and willingly undergoes the program she imposes. Pride's defeat is visually symbolized when, after his scourging, Everyman changes his former gay costume for the garment of sorrow. The new garment represents contrition (645) and thus symbolizes Humility, the opposite of Pride. Avarice is defeated verbally when Everyman completes his penitence by making a will:
In almes halfe my good I wyll gyue with my handes twayne
In the way of charyte with good entent. …
(699-700)
The kind of Charity characterized by alms-giving belongs, along with Humility, to one category of remedia prevalent in the moralities and nondramatic moral treatises, the personified Moral Virtues, each of which opposes and defeats its corresponding Sin.29
Everyman also dramatizes a less familiar but more significant type of remedium. The Moral Virtues, a poetic device allegorizing a fait accompli, show by their presence that the Sins have been driven out, but they prohibit a dramatization of the change in the sinner himself and are thus discontinuous with the human action. The second type of remedium involves acts rather than personifications; it includes identification with events in the Christian narrative, such as the Passion, and with elements of devotion, such as the Pater Noster, which symbolically embody the forces necessary to defeat the Sins.30 Such remedia have greater value for drama because, as acts, they call for a performer; someone must subscribe to the redeeming value of the Passion, someone must recite the prayer. In Everyman, the defeat of the Sins emerges through the human action rather than in conjunction with it because the hero himself performs the remedial acts of confession31 and penitence.32 This second type of remedium also accounts for the “digression” on priesthood, which is in reality a dramatically pertinent focusing upon all seven sacraments, each of which was traditionally interpreted as the opposite of a specific Sin.33 The importance of the episode derives from its naming of the sacraments (722-727), which effects an incantatory defeat of the Sins. The priest is praised because it is he who administers these remedia, thus earning the title of “surgyon that cureth synne deedly” (744). That the priest is seen as higher than the angels (749) firmly indicates the supreme value of the seven sacraments as remedia. They are the ordinary man's closest earthly association with Heaven, and the last of them, which Everyman exits to receive, provides the link between physical and spiritual life. Knowledge's fear that some priests may be corrupt (751-763) re-introduces two Sins, Avarice and Lechery, thus establishing a more precise link between Sins and remedia. When Everyman returns, having “made true satysfaccyon” (770), the final step of an important stage in the rising action is achieved: the expulsion from his soul of the Sins which had helped carry him downward toward damnation.
Everyman's penitence liberates and strengthens Good Deeds and wins him the additional companions, Beauty, Discretion, Strength, and Five-Wits. Their arrival visualizes the accomplished purgation of sin and the resulting restoration of natural gifts. By completing the acquisition of useful companions, their arrival also resolves Everyman's earlier useless search. The subsequent desertion seems to parallel the desertions in the first half of the play, and Everyman momentarily reacts with the same show of despair. But his despair here suggests only that he has not yet achieved the peak to which he must rise. Moreover, the despair of the falling action had steadily increased in force, while here it is transformed into acceptance and understanding. This despair is as ironic as was the joy with which Everyman greeted the easy affirmations of Fellowship, and works in the same way to emphasize the growth of its opposite emotion. The desertion by his natural attributes teaches him the folly of relying upon any earthly supports, worthwhile or not; these companions, far better than those he sought in vain, can ultimately contribute little of value. Strength talks a little too much like Fellowship (684-685), while the contrast of the frivolity of Beauty (801) and Strength (809, 824-825) to the new understanding of Everyman affirms the extent to which the gift of grace has raised him above his natural gifts. Thus his statement that “all thynge fayleth, saue God alone” (841), touched as it is with despair, manifests rather the wisdom and joy of his new awareness. The exit of his bodily attributes visually isolates his strengthened Good Deeds, the evidence of his purified soul. This desertion, which eliminates the earthly and temporal, shows that Everyman is to leave world and time, to continue his rise above and beyond them to the eternal Heaven, the point from which the falling action began.
The new understanding which Everyman reveals during the second desertion is symptomatic of the character change accompanying and partially realizing the rising action. One of the evidences of satisfaction, the final stage of penitence, is the penitent's “yevynge of good conseil and comfort, goostly and bodily, where men han nede.”34 Everyman's ultimate ability to exhibit this proof of satisfaction constitutes the most significant indication of growth in his dramatic character. The man who has persistently sought advice and information becomes himself an instructor. It is Everyman who, once unfamiliar with death, explains its nature to Beauty (794-799). And it is Everyman who, at the point of his own death, can clarify his entire experience for the spectators, giving them spiritual counsel as he does so:
Take example, all ye that this do here or se,
How they that I loued best do forsake me,
Excepte my Good Dedes that bydeth truely.
(867-869)
With his opened eyes now turned ever upwards, Everyman commends his soul into God's hands, then enters his grave and eternal life. The final speech of Knowledge (888-893) brings to a close the temporal phase of the action; but it already looks upward to the spiritual phase, for Knowledge hears angels singing, making “grete ioy and melody / Where Euerymannes soule receyued shall be.” The play ends with the speech of the Angel who welcomes Everyman as “excellente electe spouse to Iesu!” (894). The Angel's “Here aboue” (895) denotes the goal of the rising action, “the heuenly spere” (899), where further rise is impossible, and continuous movement freezes in eternal stasis. The Angel's speech does more than specify the ultimate destination of Everyman: it also rounds off the entire pattern of action by echoing and resolving God's opening words. There the emphasis had been on justice and potential damnation. In the speech of the Angel, which focuses upon Everyman's “crystall clere” reckoning and consequent salvation, the emphasis is all on the other aspect of God, the mercy which assumes angelic form to welcome not only Everyman the individual but also every man who imitates his purification.
The structure of Everyman thus constitutes a complete and continuous pattern, both movements of which receive simultaneous visual summation at the end of the play when Everyman enters his grave to attain Heaven.35 The pattern gives value to the play through its function of organizing the numerous elements of the action into a form which provides order by keeping each element in its proper sequence and provides coherence by according each element its proper amount of emphasis. The pattern further succeeds in enriching the play's materials by balancing the rising action against the falling action: instead of standing alone, the various elements, in reflecting upon one another, work together to produce a rather complex experience. Finally, the structure is intimately involved in the play's success as Eliot has defined it, for the descent-ascent pattern intensifies both its doctrinal significance and its dramatic effectiveness.
The structure forms the message on holy dying into an illustrative pattern which not only further clarifies the doctrinal import but also demonstrates its validity. As Bernard Spivack has shown in a valuable discussion of the moralities, Christian allegory portrayed human action in terms of a moral sequence. In describing human life, the allegorist “was concerned with charting the progressive stages of ascent or decline,” for ascent metaphorically represented the development of virtue within the human soul, while descent represented the aggravation of vice. In those moralities which dramatize the Psychomachia, the moral sequence ordinarily manifests itself as a pattern in which the hero begins in relative innocence, falls into a state of degeneracy when corrupted by evil, and finally rises to his salvation when converted by the forces of good, a pattern which is sometimes repeated for emphasis, as in The Castle of Perseverance and Nature.36Everyman treats only the coming of death, but the dramatist has adopted as his disciplining form the same pattern which had proved so fruitful for the ordered dramatization of the whole pilgrimage. In Everyman this pattern has even further significance; it makes the message more complex by going beyond the surface doctrinal level to the core of Christian theology. The moralities teach man's redemption, but more particularly they teach his redemption through Christ. Everyman emphasizes this important distinction through its numerous thematic references to the Passion.37 The extensive references make relevant to the meaning of the play another version of the same descent-ascent pattern, the Christic action, in which Christ comes from Heaven to assume human form, suffers death in His Crucifixion, descends into Hell, returns to worldly life through His Resurrection, and ultimately re-ascends to Heaven.38 The Christic action is pertinent to the meaning of Everyman, for it alone has made possible the salvation there enacted, and in Christian thought the successful pilgrimage of the individual analogously recreates that action. The play's references to the Passion show that the parallel between the Christic action and Everyman's progress is explicit. During the first half of the play, when Everyman is seen as a victim of Adam's fall (145), the significance of the Passion is that Everyman has separated himself from its redeeming value. But in the second half, when the references increase, Everyman's progress becomes what that of every Christian must be, an imitation of Christ.39 The structural pattern thus illustrates how the fallen hero rises through the aid of and in imitation of Christ's Passion, defeating his own sins as Christ had defeated all sin.
The fundamental dramatic pleasure evoked by the play derives from the tensions of the human action, but because these tensions are formed into and intensified by the descent-ascent pattern, a performance of Everyman arouses in its spectators an experience of universal application. Maud Bodkin has discerned in Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner a pattern similar to that in Everyman.40 The importance of this pattern in Coleridge's poem, according to Miss Bodkin's analysis, is that it coincides with a frequently-recurring emotional rhythm within the human consciousness, the experience which Jung has called the psychological process of mental and spiritual rebirth. This is the process in which the individual sinks to a state of hopelessness, frustration, and spiritual death, but finds there the possibilities which, when acted upon, permit his ascent to a new stage of mental and spiritual growth.41 A performance of Everyman effects a result for its spectators similar to that which Miss Bodkin receives from a reading of the Ancient Mariner. The performance recreates in the consciousness of its audience an emotional rhythm which is familiar, universal, meaningful, and, since it carefully alters fully-aroused pity and fear to sheer joy, extremely pleasurable.
The structural pattern of Everyman thus intensifies both the religious and the ordinary dramatic interests by expanding the focus of the action to universal dimensions. But as Eliot has argued, in Everyman the two interests are fused. The fusion exists because the structural pattern and the experience of the hero are one. The dramatic tension enamates from the evolving situation of the human hero, whose progress in terms of sin and redemption—the religious message of the play—establishes the pattern of descent and ascent. In turn, the more universal pleasure which the spectators derive from the vivifying of a potential emotional rhythm forces their sympathetic participation in all phases of the progress which stimulates it. The pleasure thus enforces the homiletic message because the doctrine's most persuasive advocate is the individual spectator's desire to give reality and permanence to the exaltation temporarily instilled by the performance of the play. In creating successful allegory, then, the dramatist has simultaneously and of necessity created successful drama.
As its presence in other moralities suggests, the pattern which gives form to the material of Everyman recurs frequently in literature.42 But pattern is, of course, an abstract concept; like all abstractions, it can have no real existence apart from its concrete realization in some specific work. For this reason, it is not the mere presence of the pattern which gives value but the way in which the dramatist has employed it. The superiority of Everyman to other moralities lies in the art of the dramatist, his ability to realize the many complexities in an apparently simple material. The style of the play is an image of that artistry. While obviously less mature than the dramatic styles developed a century later, it merits the high praise in Harley Granville-Barker's description of it as “workmanlike.”43 In “its plain, clear diction,” it effects, as Cawley notes, a “triumph of compromise” between the aureate and the overly-colloquial styles of the late fifteenth century. Cawley further establishes the value of the play's style when he sees it fulfilling one of Eliot's foremost requirements for dramatic verse: “the freely rhythmical verses of Everyman harmonize with its neutral style, so that we find ourselves ‘consciously attending, not to the poetry, but to the meaning of the poetry’.”44 But the primary virtue of the style of Everyman is the quality through which it fulfills Eliot's plea for “a form of verse in which everything can be said that has to be said.”45 The versification ranges from the brief colloquial lines which embody the tensions in Everyman's exchanges with such characters as Death and Goods, to the formal line-groups which expand with the more elaborate shape of summary (463 ff.), doctrine (573 ff.), prayer (581 ff.), and conclusion (894 ff.). The neutral language expresses the situation clearly and succinctly; at the same time it accommodates without strain the introduction of the many proverbs that, spoken principally by the hero, lend him universality and charm, or the images of blindness and the references to time, pain, and Christ's Passion which deepen both emotion and meaning, or the occasional unobtrusive words like “fall” and “here aboue” which crystallize the meaningful structure.
As with style, so with structure. The artistry which finds a style expressive of its content finds and develops as well a structural equivalent. Everyman surpasses numerous other works which achieve form through some variation of a descent-ascent pattern because the dramatist has seen much of the pattern's potential and has given it dramatic solidity. In Everyman, the pattern can intensify the religious significance because the dramatist has perceived and utilized the parallel with the Christic action. The pattern can arouse profound psychological response because through it the dramatist has made his allegory the product of a human action that, in its tensions and ironies, demands the commitment of all human beings. It is, in the final analysis, the fusion of artistic creativity with potentiality of pattern which makes the parable of Everyman a prime example of great religious drama.
Notes
-
“Four Elizabethan Dramatists,” Selected Essays (London, 1951), p. 111. A. C. Cawley's “Introduction” to his edition of Everyman (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1961) contains the best general discussion of the play's texts, meaning, style, versification, and staging. Cawley also conveniently summarizes (pp, x-xiii) and provides a bibliography of (pp. xxxii-xxxiii) the rather conclusive arguments for the priority of Elckerlijc. Since my focus in this study is a formal analysis of the English text, I have generally ignored the vexed question of its relationship to the Dutch play.
-
“Time and the Timeless in Everyman and Dr. Faustus,” College English, XXII (Oct. 1960), 9.
-
Religious Drama: Medieval and Modern (New York, 1954).
-
The structure of Everyman has been examined by Cleanth Brooks and Robert B. Heilman (Understanding Drama, New York, 1948, pp. 104-108) and by Lawrence V. Ryan (“Doctrine and Dramatic Structure in Everyman,” Speculum, XXXII, 1957, 722-735). Brooks and Heilman discern a four-part structural scheme: (I) the fruitless conflict with Death, (II) the failure to find a companion, (III) the change from despair to joy through the arrival of worthy companions, and (IV) the new complication arising from the desertion by the worthy companions. In their view, the new complication is resolved when Everyman dies, “completely sobered and matured by his experience” (p. 105). Ryan distinguishes, roughly, a three-part scheme: “Structurally, the play turns on two climaxes, growing out of the abandonment of the hero by two theologically and dramatically distinct groups of ‘friends’ in whom he has placed his confidence” (p. 725). Both analyses present certain fundamental difficulties. Because of their emphasis on drama rather than doctrine, Brooks and Heilman isolate episodes where “the sermon takes precedence of the drama” (p. 106). Ryan, in seeing the theology of the play as the sole source of its “characters, structure, significance, and even its dramatic impressiveness” (p. 723), tends to obscure the dramatic artistry. In calling the later desertion a dramatic climax, both analyses distort its significance as a specific stage in a continuous pattern of action.
-
All citations to Everyman are to the text established by J. Q. Adams, Chief Pre-Shakespearean Dramas (Cambridge, Mass., 1924), pp. 288-303.
-
As Cawley points out (p. 29), this prologue has no parallel in Elckerlijc, and it erroneously anticipates the appearance of “Iolyte” and “Pleasure.” Such facts prompt him to suggest that “it may have been written by someone other than the translator.” Yet some introduction seems necessary to focus the attention of the spectators and to identify the first speaker. Furthermore, the speech has considerable dramatic value. It effectively anticipates the play's message without fully expounding it, and it requests without negating the emotion basic to the play's opening scenes.
-
The two-part movement in Everyman may also be distinguished by comparing the play with a Scottish narrative poem of ca. 1480-85, “The Thrie Tailes of the Thrie Priests of Peblis.” The third tale tells the same story, but the action in the poem focuses almost exclusively on the ever-increasing decline in the hero's fortunes, with only a perfunctory conclusion to restore him to his original position. H. deVocht, an advocate for the priority of Everyman over Elckerlijc suggests that this poem may be the source from which the dramatist worked (Everyman: A Comparative Study of Texts and Sources, Materials for the Study of the Old English Drama, n. s. XX, Louvain, 1947, pp. 192-201). The poem is available in Early Popular Poetry of Scotland and the Northern Border, ed. David Laing, Re-arranged and Revised by W. Carew Hazlitt (London, 1895), I.127-168.
-
See Cawley, p. xxi, on Everyman's riches and friends being gifts of fortune.
-
Parallel noted by Cawley, p. xxvi.
-
Cf. Ryan, p. 725: Everyman's “excessive love of passing things has placed him in danger of hell-fire.”
-
The Seven Deadly Sins (East Lansing: Michigan State College Press, 1952), p. 147.
-
On Avarice's replacing Pride as Chief Sin, see The Castle of Perseverance, where Sir Covetous has a scaffold of his own, as do God, Flesh, World, and Devil, and has command over the other Sins (cf. J. Wilson McCutchan, “Covetousness in ‘The Castle of Perseverence’,” Univ. of Virginia Studies, IV, 1951, 175-191). For this development in non-dramatic literature, see Bloomfield, pp. 74, 95, 183, 189, 222-223, 237. For this development in the sermons, see G. R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England (Cambridge, England: University Press, 1933), pp. 307-308.
-
This is a frequent motif of the moralities. In The Castle, Sir Covetous wins back the hero after he has grown so old as to be immune to the other Sins. In Henry Medwall's Nature, Man at first ignores Covetousness, but his fellow Sins have no fear because they know Man will turn to him “whan hys hed waxeth hore” (I.1243 f.). For this motif in non-dramatic literature and in the sermons, see Bloomfield, pp. 76, 165, 432; Owst, p. 535.
-
See Owst, p. 460. In Chaucer's “Parson's Tale” (The Poetical Works of Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson, Boston, 1933, X [I], 570), advising murder is treated as a major characteristic of Wrath.
-
Bloomfield, passim.
-
See Bloomfield, pp. 177, 181, 221, 433.
-
Chaucer, X (I), 492. On this, the reverse aspect of Envy, see also Owst, p. 457.
-
Even though Sir Covetous is the obvious Chief in The Castle, it is nevertheless Pride who, in keeping with tradition, launches the first attack upon a Virtue. See the references in n. 12.
-
Chaucer, X (I), 450-456; Owst, pp. 308-312.
-
The Tudor Interlude (Leicester: Leicester Univ. Press, 1958), pp. 78-79. Since no concrete evidence concerning Everyman's costume exists, Death's line may in fact characterize only his attitude. For confirmation of Craik's interpretation, see Fellowship's hint that Everyman is in the habit of bribing his friends with new clothes (292) and Everyman's later reference to his body's delight in going “gay and fresshe” (614). Moreover, gay and colorful array is perfectly in keeping with Everyman's personality; it would enhance the developing emotional effect, for the costume must remain while the hero's inner gaiety diminishes; such a costume is especially necessary for the full significance of the contrast achieved when Everyman changes into the garment of sorrow (643).
-
Chaucer, X (I), 412; Owst, pp. 82, 404-407. Cf., in Medwall's Nature, Pride's characterization as the typical dandy.
-
Cf. Nature (I.955 ff.) where Pride flatters Man's superior intelligence.
-
The Pride of Life, ll. 175-178, ed. Alois Brandl, in Quellen des weltlichen Dramas in England vor Shakespeare (Strassburg, 1898). Bloomfield (p. 188) refers to a treatment of this condition in religious prose.
-
The tradition of the Seven Deadly Sins accommodates their representation by characters with other and more attractive names. Familiar in the sixteenth-century morality, this device occurs much earlier in religious prose (see Owst, p. 96). Desertion of their victims by characters personifying the Sins is also a known motif, occurring in the morality tradition as early as The Castle, where Mundus and Sir Covetous desert Man once his complete submission fulfills their purpose. See also Bloomfield, pp. 204-205.
-
Kaula, p. 11.
-
Parallel noted by Cawley, p. xxv.
-
DeVocht, pp. 59 ff.; Ryan, p. 728.
-
E. N. S. Thompson (“The English Moral Plays,” Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, XIV, 1910, 353) mentions without developing the idea the presence of a Psychomachia in Everyman. Cf. deVocht, p. 187.
-
The Moral Virtues should be distinguished from the well-known Seven Cardinal Virtues, which do not satisfactorily correspond to the Sins. The list of Moral Virtues was never as rigidly formulated as that of the Sins. For a typical list, see The Castle, which presents Meekness, Patience, Charity, Abstinence, Chastity, Industry, and Largitas. In Nature, “almes dede” replaces Largitas and “good besynes” Industry. Chaucer's Parson lists “humylitie, or mekenesse” (opp. Pride), love (Charity; opp. Envy), “Debonairetee and Pacience” (opp. Wrath), “fortitudo or strengthe” (opp. Sloth), “misericorde, pitee, and largesse” (opp. Avarice), abstinence (opp. Gluttony), “chastitee and continence” (opp. Lechery).
-
For the various aspects of Christ's Passion interpreted as remedia, see The Castle, ll. 2083 ff. (cf. Chaucer, X [I], 255 ff.). Each of the seven parts of the Pater Noster was conceived as a remedium for a specific Sin. See Thompson, p. 334; Hardin Craig, English Religious Drama of the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), p. 338.
-
Bloomfield, pp. 97-99, 149; Chaucer, X (I), 958 ff.
-
The whole point of the sermon by Chaucer's Parson is the remedial function of penitence.
-
Bloomfield, pp. 214, 217.
-
Chaucer, X (I), 1030.
-
Cf. Cawley's suggestions concerning the original staging, pp. xxix-xxx. The “house” of Confession was probably a castle with heaven located at its top. The grave, then, would be at the bottom, “so that Everyman could enact his own salvation by entering his grave and ascending from it to the heights of the ‘heuenly spere’ (899)” (p. xxx).
-
Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1958), pp. 101-103. Cf. David M. Bevington, From Mankind to Marlowe (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1962), p. 117, passim. The pattern is occasionally made explicit. In Nature, Reason points out that through accepting the Virtues, Man is “lykely to aryse / From the vale of syn whyche ys full of derknes / toward the contemplacyon of lyght that ys endles” (Nature, II.1384-86).
-
See ll. 29-31, 512, 563-565, 582-585, 603, 751-754, 812, 882.
-
On the Christic pattern, see William F. Lynch, S. J., Christ and Apollo (New York, 1960), pp. 13, 15, 40-41.
-
See especially ll. 561-565: “Here shall you receyue that scourge of me, / Whiche is penaunce stronge that ye must endure / To remembre thy Sauyour was scourged for the / With sharpe scourges, and suffred it pacyently; / So must thou, or thou scape that paynful pylgrymage.” On the Christian's imitation of the Christic pattern, see Lynch, p. 50.
-
Archetypal Patterns in Poetry (New York, 1958), pp. 52-53: “Within the image-sequences examined the pattern appears of a movement, downward, or inward toward the earth's centre, or a cessation of movement—a physical change which … appears also as a transition toward severed relation with the outer world, and, it may be, toward disintegration and death. The element in the pattern is balanced by a movement upward and outward—an expansion or outburst of activity, a transition toward redintegration and life-renewal.”
-
Bodkin, pp. 50-51, 69-70.
-
Cf. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957). Frye's accounts of the quest-romance (p. 187) and comedy (p. 171) give some suggestion of the universality of this pattern.
-
On Dramatic Method (New York, 1956), pp. 42-44.
-
Cawley, pp. xxiv, xxviii.
-
“Poetry and Drama,” On Poetry and Poets (New York, 1957), p. 78.
Get Ahead with eNotes
Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.
Already a member? Log in here.
The Meaning of the Character Knowledge in ‘Everyman’
The Doctrine of Friendship in Everyman