Contemporary social tensions are mentioned (27-39), and even the names of the shepherds are those of typical English peasants. Later, of course, these very English-sounding peasants find themselves visiting the Christ child in Bethlehem, but even in that section of the play the setting somehow seems more English than middle eastern.

Setting is much less important in Everyman than in The Second Shepherd’s Play. The focus in the former play is on human life in general, not so much the human lives of English people in particular. Everyman, as his name suggestes, represents all mankind. His encounters with Death and with the other allegorical figures he meets take place in settings that are rarely specified. There is little emphasis in this play on suggesting “local color,” as there is in The Second Shepherd’s Play. Admittedly, Everyman does at one point refer to leaving “the town” (291), but this reference, like most of the references to places in this play, is rather general and non-specific. Only at the very end of the play, when Everyman enters the grave, is a specific setting stressed very strongly, and even that setting seems far more abstract and symbolic than the kinds of settings one finds in The Second Shepherd’s Play. Everyman is ultimately more concerned with the afterlife than with life on earth; the latter is far less important than the former, and so it is not surprising that in Everyman earthly settings are far less significant than the spiritual journey Everyman must undertake.