Knowing and Doing in Everyman

Download PDF PDF Page Citation Cite Share Link Share

SOURCE: Munson, William. “Knowing and Doing in “Everyman.Chaucer Review 19, no. 3 (1985): 252-71.

[In the following essay, Munson examines Everyman in terms of the play's dramatic rhythm in which the main character alternates between learning something and then acting on that knowledge.]

Until recently criticism has stressed the dramatic distinction of Everyman more than thematic reasons for its atypicality as a morality play.1 A recent reading, however, argues for a special connection of the play with Bernardine humanism, in which man is “an active agent in the work of his own redemption”:

The playwright, like Bernard, does not characterize his penitent's acquisition of knowledge as a passive acquiescence to a force imposed from without, but as the logical fruition of an internal probing, a psychologically intelligible ascent through three successive stages of augmented understanding.2

In the Castle of Perseverance, by contrast, man is saved at the last moment by God's mercy despite his soul's reckoning; one might add that the very prominence of supernatural and abstract machinery, the Good and Bad Angels, the Virtues and Vices, throws emphasis on “forces from without” and on moral universals, away from human agency and individual psychological process. Certainly the provocative connection of Everyman to a Bernardine humanism gives new force to its long-recognized subtlety of motive. If knowledge, however, is the “principal disposition” by which man makes the Bernardine ascent, “good deeds” is the comprehensive, controlling term in Everyman. It is central to Everyman's summary before his stepping into the grave (869), to Knowledge's own commentary (889), and to the Doctor's final address (907).3 It is Good Deeds who introduces Knowledge to Everyman, and it is Good Deeds who accompanies Everyman into the grave. The account developed here of Everyman's interaction with God reads Good Deeds, finally, as an epitome of Everyman himself.

Knowing is not only a human function in the play but a provisional one, often inadequate and at best incomplete. Everyman frequently errs, and his expectations fail him in not just one, but two, desertions by friends. There is a process of act, learning, and corrected act which, repeated, forms a dramatic rhythm. This process depends on an interplay between intellectual and volitional components, between knowing and doing. Everyman's first appearance when stopped by Death announces the issues of going and knowing:

DETHE:
… Whyder arte thou goynge
Thus gayly? …
EUERYMAN:
Why askest thou?
Woldest thou wete?

(85-88)

His progress begins when his unreflective and misdirected will is challenged and he must admit, “I wote not well what for to do” (195). At first he acts defensively, but by the end he has learned his relation to God and can act rather than react, going to death with an optimal strength and inwardness. The result is an integration of what is variously called, on the one hand, knowing, seeing, “counseyl,” “cognycyon,” “advysement,” deliberation, or understanding; and, on the other, doing, going, or willing.4 Throughout the play there is a fundamental tension of knowledge and act; partially this remains even at the end, at the moment of imminent victory.

The pattern of act, new understanding, and new act shapes the parts as well as the whole. There are rhythmic pulses as Everyman sets out, learns something, and sets out again. A pulse begins with a purposive statement initiating an act and ends with a summary of its meaning; this understanding, in turn, precipitates the next act. This sequence gives the play a characteristic rhetorical rhythm: discursive passages containing doctrinal definition mark moments of knowing and punctuate plot segments. The first large sequence begins when Everyman turns to friends who betray him, prompting self-judgment and subsequent repentance. Speaking with Goods, Everyman begins to look back on himself with an awareness newly critical: “Lo, now was I deceyued or I was ware; / And all I may wyte my spendying of tyme” (435-36). Everyman's knowing is at first strictly introspective self-awareness—such awareness of what he has done, thought, and felt as he begins to show when acknowledging, “O Deth, thou comest whan I had the leest in mynde” (119). New understanding comes to accept the responsibility placed by Goods' indictment, “Thou brought thy selfe in care” (454). But now it is expressed as a theological statement, Everyman's first: “A Good, thou hast had longe my hertely loue; / I gaue the that whiche sholde be the Lordes aboue” (457-58). Everyman, that is, now understands the limitations of what he has previously relied upon, the significance of his past purposes. Recapitulating his encounters, he summarizes this past and enlarges upon its theological meaning by admitting the peril of hell and assuming self-blame (465-78). His knowledge is now acquired self-knowledge in the theological framework of divine judgment.

But understanding of responsibility for misplaced love and of the danger of hell is also prospective; understanding always occurs in the context of the necessity for acting. The summary in which Everyman acknowledges blame is prompted by his query,

O, to whome shall I make my mone
For to go with me in that heuy iournaye?

(463-64)

And this leads to his being able to turn to Good Deeds:

Of whome shall I now counseyll take?
I thynke that I shall neuer spede
Tyll that I go to my Good Dede.

(479-81)

Everyman's going to Good Deeds begins the second large subdivision of the play, which takes him through the acts of confession, penance, restitution, almsgiving, eucharist, and extreme unction. In penance he achieves a feeling and active love based on recognition of Christ's own compassionate suffering for man; he turns this outward to mankind in restitution and almsgiving, and then receives God's grace in the eucharist and last unction. The conspicuously discursive discussion of the sacraments concludes this phase.

It now seems that Everyman both knows what to do and is able to do it. But it is always a matter of action leading to more purposive, more founded action. So human purpose is disciplined and honed yet again in preparation for the climactic integration of knowing and doing in the act of dying. The setting off in a third section with seven helpful friends issues, to Everyman's final surprise, in another stripping away. Once this is accomplished, Everyman is the completed person, having consolidated inward purpose effective to accomplish the saving act of giving his soul to God. The last retrospective summary, by Everyman and Good Deeds, follows the crisis at which his natural powers desert him. It corresponds to his first major summary and, intensifying the expository impression by containing direct address to the audience, leaves to be accomplished only Everyman's stepping into the grave:

Me thynke, alas, that I must be gone
To make my rekenynge and my dettes paye,
For I se my tyme is nye spent awaye.
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.
GOOD Dedes:
All erthly thynges is but vanyte:
Beaute, Strength / and Dyscrecyon do man forsake,
Folysshe frendes and kynnesmen that fayre spake.

(864-72)

The following outline quotes the purposive beginnings of each phase, where an act of willing or going leads to awareness and definition (it is enlarged to include the three separate approaches to the false friends, and the middle section is also divided into two: a part consisting of penance, culminating in the revival of Good Deeds and the wearing of the coat of contrition; and a part leading to almsgiving, restitution, the eucharist, and last unction):

  • I.
    • A. Everyman approaches Fellowship: “To hym wyll I speke to ese my sorowe” (204).
    • B. Everyman approaches Kindred: “To my kynnesmen I wyll, truely” (313).
    • C. Everyman approaches Goods: “I wyll speke to hym in this dystrese” (391).
  • Summary regarding failure of friends, self-hatred, and fear of hell (465-78).

  • II.
    • A. Everyman approaches Good Deeds: “Yet wyll I venter on her now” (484).
    • Summary regarding forgiveness and contrition (643-47).

    • B. Everyman speaks to Good Deeds and Knowledge: “Lette vs go now without taryenge” (651).
    • Discussion of the priesthood and sacraments (713-68).

  • III. Everyman speaks to Good Deeds, Knowledge, Beauty, Strength, Discretion, and Five Wits: “Let vs go with-out longer respyte” (776).
  • Summary regarding uniqueness of Good Deeds (867-73).5

The rhythm of act and learning leading into new act shapes a local texture of continuous trial and correction. After his first set of disappointments, Everyman begins a new phase by turning weakly and hesitantly to Good Deeds: “I thynke that I shall neuer spede / Tyll that I go to my Good Dede” (480-81). His confidence sinks as he recognizes her weakness, but then he summons resolve, “Yet wyll I venter on her now” (484). Venturing—acting in the face of uncertainty—is the essential consequence for willing in the forward-looking rhythm of acting and learning. It is here both a weak and a “blind” undertaking: Everyman does not seem to be able to find her. Good Deeds as a dramatic character then voices the moment awareness arises out of volition. She crystallizes perception by locating herself: “Here I lye, colde in the grounde” (486). But this is more than a simple fulfillment of effort because Good Deeds corrects Everyman: she is able to speak (although he is right that she cannot move).

Good Deeds also extends Everyman's perception by suggesting a theological cause for her weakness: “Thy synnes hath me sore bounde.” Such interpretation is controlled by the immediate context of Everyman's progress in self-understanding: in the preceding speech he had merely acknowledged that he was “worthy to be blamed” and that he hated himself (477-88). Enhanced theological awareness precipitates a stronger reaction—fear—than the previous sinking of heart (“alas”), but also new (though facile) hope:

O Good Dedes, I stande in fere!
I must you pray of counseyll,
For helpe now sholde come ryght well.

(489-91)

Finally, Good Deeds makes Everyman's emerging perception both fuller theologically and more explicit as “understanding”:

Eueryman, I haue vnderstandynge
That ye be somoned a-counte to make
Before Myssyas, of Iherusalem kynge.

(492-94)

This prompts the next action, “Therefore I come to you my moone to make. / I praye you that ye wyll go with me” (496-97). In a unit as brief as a dozen lines the method of the play is reflected: the initial act has issued in perception, emotion, and a new act.

Everyman's request begins a new small unit of action and further correction. To Good Deeds' polite statement that she would go with him but cannot stand, Everyman returns to the flippancy which marked his first meeting with Death: “Why, is there ony thynge on you fall?” (499) Good Deeds nurtures Everyman's self-awareness by replying with continuing politeness but also with irony which puts the responsibility back on him, “Ye, syr, I may thanke you of all” (500). Shown the books of “workes and dedes” unhappily underfoot, Everyman is quickly sobered, “Our Lorde Iesus helpe me! / For one letter here I can not se” (506-07). Everyman begins to be aware of his own blindness, an awareness which he then pushes to a new stage of theological definition and clarity:

Good Dedes, I praye you helpe me in this nede,
Or elles I am for euer dampned in dede;
Therfore helpe me to make rekenynge
Before the Redemer of all thynge,
That Kynge is, and was, and euer shall.

(509-13)

His understanding of judgment has here progressed to expand the reference to “Myssyas, of Iherusalem kynge” to stress the King's redeeming as well as judging nature. This makes possible a softening of Good Deeds' rebuke into sympathy: “Eueryman, I am sory of your fall, / And fayne wolde I helpe you, and I were able” (514-15). Now it is, after correction and clarification, that Everyman can change his request that Good Deeds go with him and, instead, ask, “Good Dedes, your counseyll I pray you gyue me” (516).

When Everyman changes his request from help to counsel, Good Deeds introduces her sister Knowledge. Introducing Knowledge by name is to raise to explicitness the process of learning which has preceded through trial and correction. Indeed, the first of the three major sections of the drama has centered on correction of Everyman's shallow understanding, his belief in the facile assurances of false friends. He now knows that he is subject both to divine judgment and the promise of salvation, but he needs also to know what to do about it (he must “make rekenynge”). Knowledge gives him this practical counsel: she directs him to Confession just as later she will direct him to sacraments other than penance. Underlying these associations which Knowledge has both with self-knowledge and with knowing the means of God's grace in the sacraments, there is a dramatic point: action, or going, based on knowledge is required of man. The character Knowledge provides the “counseyll” and “cognycyon” where Confession dwells, and hence is especially associated with the cognitive phase of this crucial human action. Good Deeds whole and sound, on the other hand, is someone who “can walke and go” (619) and hence is identified with the action phase. Her joining Knowledge and Everyman means that decisive acting, in addition to new knowing, is accomplished. This is seen in the increasing purposiveness and strength of Everyman's settings out. The key change in his initial statements occurs just at the juncture where Good Deeds can walk: the “I will” forms change to the newly decisive and urgent, “Lette vs go now without taryenge” (651). This latter is also Everyman's first plural address to Knowledge and Good Deeds together, and it tells us that both knowing and doing are at issue in the faithful life.

So the corrective rhythm of trial act, awareness, and new act has consequences for the central personifications—Knowledge and Good Deeds—whose names themselves suggest (among other possibilities) a psychological distinction between cognition and volition.6 In the plot seen in overview, the two usefully visualize the general relationship between awareness and act. Everyman's goal, as he says when he first sets out, is to know what to do. His initial act leads to better knowledge, which is the basis for more purposeful acts, better integrating understanding and doing. It thus takes Good Deeds to introduce Knowledge to Everyman, who alone tends him until Good Deeds in full strength can join Knowledge. After repentance the two together do both accompany Everyman. Both share in the instruction that Everyman call together his personal resources—Beauty, Strength, Discretion, and Five Wits. Good Deeds appropriately emphasizes force, “thre persones of grete myght” (658), and Knowledge cognition, “Your Fyue Wyttes as for your counseylours” (663). Until Everyman actually steps into the grave, Knowledge and Good Deeds remain together.

In the pivotal penitential sub-section, two corresponding pulses of the action set side by side show the transformation of Good Deeds into his active wholeness. The play's rhythmic repetition is shaped by speech-for-speech correspondence between sections in which Everyman, in response to his overtures, learns, respectively, the dwelling place of Confession (516-44) and the meaning of Contrition (617-47).7 In the first, he asks for counsel and is introduced to Knowledge, who will help him make reckoning (521); in the second, he sets out to wade the water of penance and is met by Good Deeds now able to help declare his good works (622). Everyman responds with strong emotion to each of these assurances of assistance. It is characteristic that he takes premature comfort in his first perceptions and accomplishments and has to learn that his prospect is never simple and sure, but replete with a continuing effort which precludes his ever being “holy content” (525), as he first says at Knowledge's appearance. Everyman is certainly not yet in good condition “in euery thyng” (524), however he may feel. When he repeats his content at Good Deeds' “wordes swete” (534), Knowledge has to prod him toward Confession. Every initial act, that is, needs correction and further action—further going and willing. (Confession's subsequent instruction, too, prompts rejoicing which Knowledge immediately chastens by demanding the second stage of penitential scourging, beyond the confessional call for mercy: “Loke your penaunce that yet fulfyll” (577].) In the parallel section Everyman's first response to Good Deeds' coming must be interpreted in this context: he says that his heart will be light “euermore” (627).8 But even this will be qualified as Everyman faces more disappointment.

Everyman's emotion, however, gives foundation for the initiative he must undertake. His joy at Good Deeds' approach does, by interiorizing his act of penance, energize it: “Now wyll I smyte faster than I dyde before” (628). The venture into penance (“Now of penaunce I wyll wade the water clere”) has resulted in a new strength, a new vigor: Good Deeds' speech emphasizes capability, determination, effort—“now I can walke and go” (619), “I wyll go and not spare” (621), “I wyll helpe hym” (622)—not understanding. But the better action goes with a corresponding gain in reflection too. At Good Deeds' approach Everyman begins to interpret and control his emotion by naming it “swetenes of loue” (635). Knowledge takes over the explanation from Good Deeds, objectifying the experience, which becomes partially detached from the relatively more spontaneous emotion and act, by offering a garment “wette with teres.” At the same time she is explicit about theological significance by mentioning Everyman's journey to God. So, after act, emotion, and correction, Everyman's awareness comes to a climax as he actually asks for the name of the garment: “What do ye it call?” Contrition summarizes the theological meaning of the experience, as Confession had done for the earlier pulse:

It is a garment of sorowe;
Fro payne it wyll you borowe.
Contrycyon it is
That getteth forgyuenes;
He pleaseth God passynge well.

(643-47)

Everyman's state is now designated “true contrycyon” (650) because it connects Everyman's awareness of God's judgment and mercy with a new understanding of “Iesu, Maryes sone” (649). “Swetenes of loue” alludes to Everyman's new inward, emotional response to God's saving action in Christ. This is the action of the human God: Everyman had at first come to acknowledge God as “Iherusalem kynge” and only later, in confession and penance, to hear of the suffering Christ:

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.(9)

(561-65)

Confession speaks of God's mercy as well as judgment (569-70), but the emphasis is at first negative, on escaping a painful pilgrimage. So, having asked for mercy, Everyman still shows fear as he steps into the water of penance in order to save himself from “that sharpe fyre” (618). Penitential fear and imitation of Christ's suffering, however, prompt something more positive: as he experiences new strength and begins to absorb its theological import—“for the is preparate the eternal glory” (631)—he is conscious of being loved. He hears Good Deeds' voice and says, “I wepe for very swetenes of loue” (635). He is now both active and emotionally responsive to Christ's suffering. The scourge is thus the link between man and Christ. By imitating Christ, man comes to know love: he comes to act gratefully and feel fully in sympathetic response to the human God.

Knowing and acting are raised to a new level of adequacy. As Everyman moves to a more reflective command of his new strength and its theological meaning, he is capable of a more founded act—more inward and more active—than he was when “holy content” without the emotional knowledge of the human Christ. By the time he reaches understanding of contrition there is special stress on the act of assuming meaning—whereas he had at first simply been given “cognycyon” about confession, he now puts on the garment of contrition as a successful act of will:

GOOD Dedes:
Eueryman, wyll you were it for your hele?
EUERYMAN:
Now blessyd be Iesu, Maryes sone,
For now haue I on true contrycyon;
And lette vs go now without taryenge.

(648-51)

Like putting on the coat, adding friends articulates Everyman's progress. The departure of Fellowship, Kindred (and Cousin), and Goods was a stripping down culminating in the first stage of self-understanding; the second large section (through the eucharist) consists of successive additions in two stages: first Knowledge and Good Deeds, then Beauty, Strength, Discretion, and Five Wits.

Like the learning of contrition, adding friends is a progress of inwardness as well as of will. The false friends to whom Everyman first turns form a sequence from that resource most accidental and external, Fellowship, to that apparently most one's own (though still “external”), Goods, Beauty, Strength, Discretion, and Five Wits are not external helps but personal resources, the natural physical and mental qualities of the individual himself.10 Everyman's new strength of will involves a command over his own natural self. The word “will” as verb and noun rings throughout a passage in which Everyman is instructed in the activity of leading, calling, having his resources ready, summarized by Everyman's statement at the end of the passage:

Almyghty God, loued may thou be!
I gyue the laude that I haue hyder brought
Strength, Dyscrecyon, Beaute, & V. Wyttes. Lacke I nought.
All be in company at my wyll here.(11)

(679-82)

Everyman's gain in purpose had first an inward-looking emphasis as he learned contrition of soul; now there is a turning outward as love becomes active in the world. Having command over his natural self gives Everyman a new relation to the world. Of his own volition he makes restitution and gives alms.

This inwardly based initiative turned outward meets a new challenge as Everyman encounters the sacramental words and acts of the priest. Knowledge as verbalization, as explicit formulation, is always being tested, qualified, deepened, and fulfilled by feeling and act. Words for Everyman always present the danger of superficiality. Five Wits is subject to the potential irony surrounding all speakers of fair words since so many words in the play prove untrustworthy. Everyman had learned early to distinguish mere words from deeds: “Lo, fayre wordes maketh fooles fayne; / They promyse, and nothynge wyll do, certayne” (379-80).12 And his own words, we have seen, are corrected and tempered by action. The issue is brought to bear, therefore, even on the sacramental action of the priest, where words are boldly equated with an effective act: “With v. wordes he may consecrate, / Goddes body in flesshe and blode to make” (737-38).

Five Wits is theologically correct about the efficacy of the words of consecration, but the discussion between Five Wits and Knowledge does, in the context of this play, hinge on an implicit tension between an inadequate formalism and a deeper, inwardly founded action. The rhythm of act, learning, and corrected act can be understood as an increasingly inward and personal appropriation of acts initially more externally and formally performed. The distinction between outward act and inner feeling had been set out as Everyman gratefully prepared for his scourging:

For now I wyll my penaunce begyn.
This hath reioysed and lyghted my herte,
Though the knottes be paynful and harde, within.

(574-76)

Everyman obediently waded into the water of penance in response to Confession's direction to remember Christ, but this relatively formal act, directed by authority, led to the enhanced inward apprehension of Christ's love and a more fully willed action. So deeds as well as words may be superficial. The true deed is informed by personal knowledge and by feeling, just as true knowledge entails action. Five Wits, representing the five external senses, is the first spokesman concerning the sacraments since a sacrament is a spiritual sign evident to the senses.13 He reflects the bias of his nature, speaking for ritual formalism in which man's redemption is a matter for the priest who “bereth the keyes, and therof hath the cure / For mannes redempcyon—it is euer sure” (717-18). But the one-sidedness of this position is reflected in the assertion “euer sure”—so characteristic of Everyman's imperfect reactions, his premature claims. By the end of two lengthy speeches, Five Wits risks being superficially doctrinaire:

Thou arte surgyon that cureth synne deedly;
No remedy we fynde vnder God
But all onely preesthode.
Eueryman, God gaue preest that dygnyte,
And setteth them in his stede amonge vs to be;
Thus be they aboue aungelles in degree.

(744-49)

With priests displacing angels and with emphasis on “gracyous sacramentes of hye deuynyte” (727), Five Wits largely neglects man's (and even the suffering Christ's) part in man's redemption, where motivation, as Everyman's inward progress shows, is important for sinner and priest alike. It takes Knowledge to qualify Five Wits's statement about priests and, consequently, about what is “euer sure”: “If preestes be good, it is so, suerly. / … Synfull preestes gyueth the synners example bad” (750, 759).14

Everyman indicates that he has absorbed his lesson in the inner meaning of the outward sacrament by returning to echo his earlier setting out with Knowledge and Good Deeds (“Lette vs go now without taryenge” [651]):

And now, frendes, let vs go with-out longer respyte.
I thanke God that ye haue taryed so longe.
Now set eche of you on this rodde your honde,
And shortely folowe me.
I go before there I wolde be. God be our gyde!

(776-80)

This time, however, Everyman's active initiative has been qualified by the pause for his receiving these sacraments, and by his friends' tarrying.15 In a similar counterpoise of the active and passive, Everyman leads, but God, represented by the cross, is acknowledged the guide. A central paradox is now fully set out: personal strength and initiative—not weakness and passivity—matures out of an imitation which acknowledges “external” dependence; in addition, to be able to give is to be able to receive. The paradox of will is visually realized in stage action: Everyman demonstrates strength and mastery by leading his friends, but by bearing the cross (which each touches) he shows his disciplined subjection of personal powers to God's judgment and to the hope based upon Christ's sacrifice.

Knowing and acting are therefore now joined in an inwardness which is also outward in the largest, cosmic context. The paradox of will is the paradox of grace in which man's work and God's work come together. Everyman's act is joined to the mercy promised by Confession, for which Everyman had earlier expressed gratefulness:

Aske God mercy, and he wyll graunte truely.
Whan with the scourge of penaunce man doth hym bynde,
The oyle of forgyuenes than shall he fynde.
EUERYMAN:
Thanked be God for his gracyous werke!
For now I wyll my penaunce begyn.

(570-74)

Everyman's penance, then, became his own “work” in imitative and grateful response to God's “gracyous werke” in Christ. Although Everyman did do the asking for mercy (588), he understood the ability even to initiate penance as itself an indication of grace:

Knowlege, gyue me the scourge of penaunce;
My flesshe therwith shall gyue acqueyntaunce.
I wyll now begyn yf God gyue me grace.

(605-07)

It was a revived Good Deeds who then came to mark a confluence of human and divine action. On the one hand, she was the extension of Everyman's initiative in wading the water of penance, testifying to Everyman's “good workes”; on the other, she voiced the gratefulness which acknowledged God's work, the help beyond human work:

GOODE Dedes:
I thanke God, now I can walke and go,
And am delyuered of my sykenesse and wo.
Therfore with Eueryman I wyll go, and not spare;
His good workes I wyll help hym to declare.

(619-22)

Confession had called God's mercy “the oyle of forgyuenes” (572). Last unction is therefore the fit conclusion to Everyman's penance. Mercy as a spiritual deed of God seals the human deed of Everyman. And God's deed is itself one which acknowledges the inner human motive demanded both of Everyman and of the priest who administers God's sacraments. Knowledge persists in linking sacramental action and inner motive by basing the sacraments on Christ's own experience of suffering. She distinguishes a formalistic exchange from the willing inner experience of the heart:

There he gaue out of his blessyd herte
The seuen sacramentes in grete tourment;
He solde them not to vs, that Lorde omnypotent.

(752-54)

So Christ himself embodies the inwardness which is Everyman's link with God's grace.16

Good Deeds clearly assumes primacy by the time Everyman sets out for the final phase of his progress. Knowledge has corrected the external formalism of Five Wits in conceptual debate, but it is Good Deeds who confirms Everyman's reentrance with a pun on “deed” which signals her dominance for the remainder of the play:

V. Wyttes:
Peas! For younder I se Eueryman come,
Whiche hath made true satysfaccyon.
GOOD Dedes:
Me thynke it is he in dede.

(769-71)

Such firmness combined with measured qualification contrasts with Five Wits's hyperbole with its tendency toward the too-easy certainty which Everyman, even after penance, did not entirely shed. Despite his real achievement in calling together his natural powers, he was as lax as he had been when “holy content” (525) at Knowledge's first promise of assistance: “I desyre no more to my besynes” (683). He was still too susceptible to their exaggerated claims that they would not depart and their insistence, “We all gyue you vertuous monycyon / That all shall be well” (692-93). To be stripped of such susceptibility is not to be weakened and limited but rather strengthened in action. The pun on “deed” is made repeatedly in order to suggest how it comes to include all that is in man's right relation to God: the understanding and affirmation of a truth which must be made real by the whole, inward man “in deed.” In an early example Fellowship learns that Everyman is going to death and judgment, and he calls attention to a truth (“mater”) which is to provoke all of Everyman's actions: “That is mater in dede” (248). The issue of deed is the issue of will, and even Everyman can see the irony of Fellowship's promise:

But and thou wyll murder, or ony man kyll,
In that I wyll helpe the with a good wyll.
EUERYMAN:
O, that is a symple aduyse in dede.(17)

(281-83)

The epitomizing deed is to be the opposite of killing: it is courageous dying, the visible act which is also fully inward and knowledgeable, and the personal initiative which yet depends on grace.

In this third and last section, as in the first section, the deed is accompanied by ironic reversal: all the friends fall away except for Knowledge and Good Deeds. The departure of Everyman's natural gifts is partly a dramatization of aging: Everyman recognizes his faintness (788). But the falling away of friends is also an image of the integration of human purpose, through the process of correction, in the individual soul. Despite the fact that Good Deeds is still standing and that Everyman does have faith in a life “in heuen before the hyest Lorde of all” (799), he still exhibits some questionable legalism as he learns of Strength's defection: “Wyll ye breke promyse that is dette?” (821). He also overreacts, characteristically—“All hath forsaken me” (851)—only to be corrected by Good Deeds: “Nay, Eueryman, I wyll byde with the” (852). The final deed must be confirmed as the act of the individual man in whom knowing and doing are one.

The play finds this culmination in another sequence of stripping away. That Good Deeds alone enters the grave with Everyman does not mean that “knowledge”—awareness of all that has been learned about God as judge, redeemer, and suffering man—is not needed for the final act of dying. Instead, the reduction to a single figure suggests that the perfect act depends on a fine alliance of awareness and willing. The last three-speech dialogue of Good Deeds and Everyman begins with Everyman's summary of the meaning of all the preceding experience.

EUERYMAN:
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.
GOOD Dedes:
All erthly thynges is but vanyte:

.....

All fleeth saue Good Dedes, and that am I.

(867-70, 873)

In this interchange Good Deeds expresses maximum summary definition not only by surveying the action backwards to the beginning but by finally naming himself. The next speeches make the transition from awareness to act. Good Deeds voices the courage which is based on Everyman's faith both in the mercy of God “most mighty” and the complementary human resource of mother and maid, Mary:

EUERYMAN:
Haue mercy on me, God moost myghty,
And stande by me, thou moder & mayde, Holy Mary!
GOOD Dedes:
Fere not; I wyll speke for the.

(874-76)

Finally comes the climactic resolve:

EUERYMAN:
Here I crye God mercy.
GOOD Dedes:
Shorte our ende and mynysshe our payne;
Let vs go and neuer come agayne.

(877-79)

Good Deeds has taken knowledge, courage, and will into herself, but there is one more consolidation. Everyman himself takes on this final integration of awareness and resolve in the concluding prayer:

In to thy handes, Lorde, my soule I commende;
Receyue it, Lorde, that it be not lost.
As thou me boughtest, so me defende,
And saue me from the fendes boost,
That I may appere with that blessyd hoost
That shal be saued at the day of dome.

(880-85)

The perfect act—courageously giving oneself to God in the confidence of being received—is based on awareness both of God's merciful action for man (the soul bought by the suffering Christ) and the fearful acknowledgment of creaturely need. The angel promises the heavenly sphere because of Everyman's “synguler vertue” (896). Everyman has not only achieved something singular in the sense of extraordinary and praiseworthy. His virtue does become visibly one in the figure of Good Deeds, then fully assimilated to Everyman himself in the last speech. When the personifications resolve into a single figure, Everyman becomes the completed individual, with an inwardness now perfectly focussed in an act in the world—down into the grave and upward to God at the same time. There had earlier been only imperfect conjunctions of knowledge and act, and of outer and inner. But now there is minimal distinction between outward and inward, and act is based on all that knowledge can offer.

Although the play brings knowledge and act together, it is Good Deeds who is the singular virtue. She, not Knowledge, is the comprehensive figure. Knowledge takes her place to the side finally because at that moment she is the cognitive, observing function anticipated when assuring Everyman, “I wyll not from hens departe / Tyll I se where ye shall be-come” (862-63).18 What is demanded is not knowledge alone but knowledge enacted. Everyman's final speech is an act of asking and self-giving. Although perfectly founded in self-knowledge and faith, it admits fear and pain and does not lose the human tension which has been characteristic of the settings forth throughout the play. Knowledge's last speech belongs to the observer detached from the tensions of the concrete, individual action, showing general awareness of death and faith in the efficacy of Good Deeds: “Now hath he suffred that we all shall endure; / The Good Dedes shall make all sure” (888-89). But since the final act is, after all, death, an individual's venture takes place with knowledge but not with certainty—and not with Everyman's premature certainties which have been constantly qualified. The final going is based on spiritual realities, yet it is at the irreducibly earthly and threatening “here” of the grave. Knowledge gives indirect testimony to the persisting nature of human risk and of man's limited point of view by her modest statement—which echoes Good Deeds' modest correction of Five Wits—about what lies beyond any setting out:

Me thynketh that I here aungelles synge
And make grete ioy and melody
Where Euerymannes soule receyued shall be.

(891-93)

Everyman thus stops short of the perfection of beatific vision. Even the angel's address to Everyman's soul (only now separated from body) as “excellente elect spouse” of Jesus (894) is an invitation to a future and to one last going: “Here aboue thou shalte go / Bycause of thy synguler vertue” (895-96). Acting as venturing is informed by a retrospective wisdom and a prospective hope, but it is finally a volition which faces the fearful possibility of being lost.

Everyman's experiential, man-inclusive theology was both philosophically old—at least as old as Abelard and the twelfth-century renaissance—and more current, at least in respect to the heightened subjectivism encouraged by the philosophical nominalism of the late Middle Ages.19 However much the play is unlike other English moralities, in the context of fourteenth-century non-dramatic English literature—the ironies of Chaucer, the learning of Sir Gawain and the Pearl dreamer, or the restless process of definition and redefinition of truth in Piers Plowman—we find a generally supportive background a century earlier for a work which is at once both Christian and centered in man's temporal processes and initiatives. The play encourages its audience to see that to affirm Christian truth is to affirm the process of venturing—with its inevitable uncertainty—and of learning. In Everyman's success it shapes the understanding that a saving deed is, in the end, possible.

Notes

  1. Robert Potter, The English Morality Play: Origins, History and Influence of a Dramatic Tradition (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), pp. 53, 57. In his wide-ranging survey, Potter distinguishes Everyman as the “most imaginative and philosophical in dramatizing repentance in human terms,” yet he calls morality plays “one in their praise and demonstration of repentance,” “a single act, variously celebrated.”

  2. Thomas J. Jambeck, “Everyman and the Implications of Bernardine Humanism in the Character ‘Knowledge,’” Medievalia et Humanistica, NS 8 (1977), 109. The stages alluded to are preparatory steps in a self-knowledge phase of the total progress. See n. 5.

  3. Everyman, ed. A. C. Cawley (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1961). Hereafter, references are to this edition.

  4. My effort is to argue inductively from the play's vocabulary. Pairing, with a consequent sense of interplay, is often explicit: understanding versus making, doing, and going (492-97); “counseyll” (516-17) or “aduysement,” “delyberacyon,” and “monycyon” (691-93) versus going. This is not to prejudge the bearing of any of the subtly rationalized philosophical distinctions available to the fifteenth century, such as intellect versus will as faculties of the soul.

  5. Although it coincides only partially and yields different emphases, the division based on internal evidence of going and reflecting does not conflict with Jambeck's exposition of the articulation based on Bernardine stages of knowledge. The Bernardine ascent in broadest outline goes from self-knowledge of one's own wretchedness to that knowledge of God which is also active love (Jambeck, p. 106). Three “preparatory stages” are apparently part of the first, self-knowledge, phase: (1) the penitent's cognition of what he has done; (2) the dissipation of pride, humility for what is deserved, and recognition of Christ's mercy as the only recourse; (3) the fear of damnation and intention to recover what has been lost. Everyman, perceiving and consenting to the good, after these steps “fervently desires justice and resolves to perform the good works of active charity” (p. 109). The first corresponds to Everyman's first reflective self-blame (478); the second and third are compressed between lines 479 and 517, where Knowledge is introduced, and form the small sub-section discussed above, following. For Jambeck the crucial juncture is Knowledge's first appearance signalling Everyman's knowledge that Good Deeds as “a personal act of satisfaction” is required (p. 111). Here knowledge of self and fear of God change to knowledge of God and love to be expressed through penance, the Eucharist, and alms (p. 112). The sacraments completed make the terminus of division II; the last setting out and desertion get less emphasis in Jambeck than they do as division III (see n. 18).

  6. Michael J. Warren, “Everyman: Knowledge Once More,” Dalhousie Review, 54 (1974), 146, mentions the available usage of “consciousness' for the Knowledge figure. However, in local situations Knowledge is not limited to expressing cognition alone since she also prompts, for example, actions like setting off to Confession and kneeling; likewise the figure Good Deeds constantly embodies moments of perception. Jambeck, p. 108, applying Bernardine terminology, points out that self-knowledge involves both cognition and the exercise of will in penance. The association of Knowledge with cognition and Good Deeds with volition I do not take to exclude other meanings so long as these are not taken as definitive. Lawrence V. Ryan, “Doctrine and Dramatic Structure in ‘Everyman,’” Speculum, 32 (1957), rpt. in Edward Vasta, ed., Middle English Survey: Critical Essays (Notre Dame: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1965), p. 296, understands Good Deeds to serve a doctrine concerning the operation of grace through the sacraments: penance restores a man to a state of grace so that good deeds can have value toward salvation. Such a formulation does not explain how Good Deeds can be helpful, as she is, before Everyman goes to Confession; and it throws emphasis on the sacramental acts of Everyman at the expense of others. John Conley, in “The Doctrine of Friendship in Everyman,Speculum, 44 (1969), 379, identifies Good Deeds with a doctrine of supernaturally virtuous friendship; specific good deeds are Everyman's reception of three sacraments, his almsgiving, and his final prayer. As for Knowledge, the more recent tendency has been to identify her very broadly: as knowledge of God which includes self-knowledge of sin (Cawley, pp. xxi-xxii), or “knowledge of God or knowledge of what is necessary for salvation” (Conley, 380n.). See also V. A. Kolve, “Everyman and the Parable of the Talents,” in Medieval English Drama, ed. Jerome Taylor and Alan Nelson (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1972), pp. 325, 331.

  7. Compare the two scenes: Everyman (516; 617-18); Good Deeds (517-21; 619-22); Knowledge (522-23; 623-26); Everyman (524-26; 627-28); Good Deeds (527-31; 629-33); Everyman (532-34; 634-35); Knowledge (535-36; 636-41); Everyman (537-39; 642); Knowledge (540-44; 643-47).

  8. As a general characteristic of Everyman, this includes, but is somewhat broader than, the “latent impetuosity” which Jambeck, p. 115, here identifies with the overzealous charity needing to be tempered by Bernardine “discretion.”

  9. Everyman's earlier exclamation and first reference to Jesus, “Our Lorde Iesus help me!” (506) was a significant anticipation; but the change from “Lorde” to “Maryes sone” tells also the difference.

  10. Ryan, p. 2. Jim Corder, “‘Everyman’: The Way to Life,” in Studies in Medieval, Renaissance, American Literature: A Festschrift, ed. Betsy F. Colquit (Fort Worth: Texas Christian Univ. Press, 1971), p. 54, sees in the departure of the friends a psychological maturing process in which Everyman learns the insignificance of externals and reliance on his own character. Such psychological interpretation is an adaptation of a metaphysical and theological classification of goods, going back beyond Aristotle, summarized by Conley, p. 380. The ancient classification into external goods, goods of the body, and goods of the soul had a Christianized version, which Conley takes to accord with Everyman's: goods of fortune, nature (subdivided into goods of the body and goods of the soul), and grace.

  11. The importance of will had first been suggested when Everyman was promised, “Knowledge shall gyue you counseyll at wyll / How your accounte ye shall make clerely” (579-80).

  12. A distinction made at lines 228, 237-38, re-emphasized at 469-71, 871-72, and made in reference to Good Deeds at 483.

  13. Ryan, p. 306.

  14. Five Wits's statement parallels the eucharistic doctrine in Wynkyn de Worde's Festyvale, in Lay Folks Mass Book, ed. Thomas F. Simmons, EETS, OS 71 (London, 1879; repr. 1968), p. 121: “this is made thrugh the vertue of goddes wordes of the priest that hath power, which power neyther aungel ne archaungel hath, but only man in mynde of hymself.” However, another treatise covering reception of the sacrament adds stress on the special moral responsibility of priests, that they may be “myche more stiffeloker groundyd in goddis seruise … þenne eny oþur seculer man” (Lay Folks Mass Book, p. 123). Readings well-informed in doctrine tend to ignore the qualifications of dramatic irony. Ryan, p. 306, taking Five Wits at face value, calls the dialogue “a sermon designed to stress the validity of the sacraments regardless of the moral condition of the minister.” Jambeck, p. 117, reads Five Wits as Bernardine scientia, the wisdom which is the product of the five senses and which enables the penitent to recognize and practice the good when it appears. Everyman does need an “antidote” to his difficulty in sorting the “ephemeral from the spiritual,” but Knowledge, and then Good Deeds, provide that antidote dramatically, not Five Wits.

  15. Everyman's absence during the sacraments reinforces the sense of his being object of the action, twice described by the verb “receyue” (708, 773). Grace as the present but more-than-visible promise of this divine action upon man reaches its climax when Knowledge hears the singing “where Euerymannes soule receyued shall be” (893).

  16. The implicit view of atonement and salvation is here decidedly more subjective and man-centered—more Abelardian—than legalistic: Christ's sacrificial act is for the purpose of awakening the act of love in man. Gustaf Aulen, in Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of Atonement, trans. A. G. Herbert (New York: Macmillan, 1961), pp. 95-96, discusses Abelard's subjective reaction, with its emphasis on what man does, to what he treats as the dominant high medieval jurisprudential model, associated with Anselm, of Christ's work of satisfaction. Everyman, however, seems very inclusive in its theology of redemption. Abelard himself insisted on Christ's human work of satisfaction as a legal recompense for man's fall, fulfilling, that is, a requirement of justice alluded to at lines 563 and 882. Everyman does follow a formal obligation to imitate Christ's example (565), which comes to include receiving sacraments; but this duty is prompted by gratefulness and leads to the more fully felt imitation, the sweetness of love.

  17. At 228 “in dede” is already linked to the saying versus doing issue. Compare 263-64, 303, 459-60, 653.

  18. The final separation of the two figures has not been much interpreted. Ryan, pp. 301-02, taking a narrow interpretation of Knowledge as “acknowledgment of sin,” explains that she is necessary only up to the moment of death; afterwards there is nothing but rejoicing. He considers Knowledge the chief guide and her importance to be emphasized by her remaining on stage. Conley, p. 380, on the contrary, gives Good Deeds primacy for remaining with Everyman, which he explains by a hierarchical distinction among goods: Knowledge is a spiritual good “by contrast with the even more precious good, the lasting good” exemplified by Good Deeds. The Bernardine model, perhaps the one most adequate to the play yet suggested, is based on cognitive knowledge and active charity (Jambeck, p. 108; see n. 5). Bernard's identification of a penultimate stage of “good works” (in a seven-stage scheme) preceding final happiness in God's presence is particularly suggestive. Jambeck, p. 119, sees Everyman's address to the audience (867ff.) as the attainment of this stage through his taking the role of spiritual adviser; the penitent thus assumes Christ's pastoral function and is purged of the ignorance which has damaged his soul's true nature as imago dei.

  19. Erwin Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (1951; rpt. N.Y.: Meridian Books, 1957), pp. 1-20, writes of the break-up of the high Gothic synthesis after Ockham (d. 1349), when knowledge of particulars was split from faith regarding universals and focus was on the multiplicity of particular things and on psychological processes. Everyman's subjectivity does not seem to arise, however, out of the sense of God's inscrutable will, an aspect of nominalism as background for late medieval English drama discussed by Kathleen M. Ashley, “Divine Power in the Chester Cycle and Late Medieval Thought,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 39 (1978), 387-404. Everyman's accommodations of sacramentalism and human action, and of jurisprudential and subjective Christologies, suggest a remarkable inclusiveness of the subjective and individual, on the one hand, and the objective and the universal, on the other.

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.

Get 48 Hours Free Access
Previous

The Last Temptation of Everyman

Next

Everyman's Last Rites and the Digression on Priesthood

Loading...