Everyman

The literary and historical context in which Everyman was composed informs the play in crucial ways. Everyman is a morality play of unknown authorship, preserved in four printed editions published in the period between 1510 and 1535 but believed to have been first produced at the end of the 15th century. Everyman bears significant resemblances to the Flemish play Elekerlijc (“Everyman”), first printed in 1495; scholars have sometimes argued that the Flemish play was produced first and influenced the English play (though the reverse could also be true).

Morality plays, which were popular in England during the Tudor period of the 15th and 16th centuries, employed allegory and personified abstractions to explore predominantly Christian questions (the nature of good and evil, the roles of God and humanity in the universe, repentance and salvation, etc.). There are about 60 surviving examples of morality plays—many of them, like Everyman, of unknown authorship. Other types of religious plays were also popular at the time, including “miracle plays,” which dramatized religious events, and “mystery plays,” which also dramatized religious events (though often in a comical or irreverent manner). Morality plays, however, operate on a different level from miracle plays and mystery plays, reflecting on religious questions using literary devices such as personification and allegory. Morality plays also employ verse, with Everyman using irregular tetrameter or iambic pentameter and an end-rhyming scheme.

Everyman reflects the religious preoccupations of 15th-century England, not to mention most of Christian Europe. The play is fundamentally Christian, exploring questions about sin, judgment, repentance, salvation, and heaven and hell. Everyman’s journey takes the form of a pilgrimage, or a journey to a sacred site. These were an extremely important part of Christian life in the Middle Ages that were regarded as healing to the spirit (and, in some cases, the body). The play also engages explicitly with contemporary political and ecclesiastical issues. For instance, the dialogue in which Knowledge and Five Wits impugn corrupt priests addresses what were serious abuses at the time the play was written. In particular, Knowledge condemns priests who take bribes, who “God their Savior do buy or sell, / or they for any money do take or tell” (757-58). The notorious corruption of the Catholic priesthood was one of the factors that set the stage for the rise of Martin Luther and his Protestant Reformation, which occurred not long after Everyman is usually thought to have been composed (Luther’s Theses were published in 1517). Everyman thus reflects the rising discontent and disillusionment of the times, though its perspective remains distinctly Catholic; its emphasis on “Good Deeds” is especially noteworthy, as the question of whether good works or faith alone mattered would prove central to the split between Catholicism and Protestantism.

Everyman is fundamentally a play about sin and salvation, themes that were always central to Christianity. No doubt it was Christianity’s status as a popular salvific religion (i.e., a religion that promised salvation to all those who accepted its tenets) that contributed to its widespread diffusion in the final centuries of the Roman Empire. The “moral” of Everyman is that anybody can achieve salvation provided they genuinely repent their sins. Other Medieval European literature conveys a similar message, including Dante’s famous Divine Comedy, in which the repentant sinner Manfred speaks to Dante as follows:

[T]here is no one

so lost that the eternal love cannot

return (Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy. Translated by Allen Mandelbaum. New York: Everyman’s Library, 1995, pp. 229, Canto 3, ll. 133-35).