43 pages • 1 hour read
AnonymousEveryman
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1485A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Literary Devices
Allegory and Personification
An allegory is a narrative that conveys an abstract or moral lesson via its plot, setting, or characters. Everyman, like most morality plays, operates as an allegory. Specifically, the play is an allegory for Christian notions about death, reckoning, and salvation as achieved through repentance. As an allegory, Everyman employs personification, a literary device in which an idea or abstraction is given human qualities or even turned into a character. Most of the characters in the play are personifications of various abstract qualities—Death, Fellowship, Kindred, and so on. These are thus not characters in the typical sense; they don’t have true personalities, emotions, or character arcs. Rather, they represent 15th-century English worldviews and advance the allegorical moral of the play.
Juxtaposition
Juxtaposition is a literary device involving the side-by-side comparison of concepts or entities generally seen as opposites. Everyman develops many of its central themes through juxtaposition—the primary example being the juxtaposition of the earthly and the eternal. This is itself explored through various other juxtapositions scattered throughout the play—material body versus eternal soul, good versus evil, God versus man, earthly “Goods” versus spiritual “Good Deeds,” and so on.
Everyman seeks and achieves balance in its use of juxtaposition. For example, the first four false friends who forsake Everyman (Fellowship, Kindred, Cousin, and Goods) are juxtaposed with another set of false friends who forsake him later in the play (Beauty, Strength, Discretion, and Five Wits). Whereas the first set of personifications represent external objects or relationships, the second represent personal qualities—neither of which Everyman can take with him when he dies. Only Good Deeds, whose loyalty to Everyman contrasts with his abandonment by the other personifications, can accompany and represent Everyman in his reckoning before God.
Metaphor
A metaphor is a literary device or figure of speech that establishes a comparison between two things that are not comparable in a literal sense. Unlike similes, metaphors do not use “like” or “as” to create a comparison but rather suggest an identification of the two things being compared. Everyman is dense with metaphors, which it deploys as one of the literary tools in its symbolic repertoire. Everyman’s reckoning—and on some level the entire play—is metaphorically conceived as a “pilgrimage.” Other metaphors include the characterization of Goods as a “thief” of the soul; of Confession as a “cleansing river” and later as a “glorious fountain”; and of “penance” or repentance as a “precious jewel” by which human beings can attain the “oil of forgiveness” (572). These metaphors reflect contemporary Christian symbolism and build on the allegorical message of the play. The comparison of penance to a jewel, for example, throws the contrast between spiritual and material value into sharper relief and harkens to Matthew 13:45-46: “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant man, seeking goodly pearls: Who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it.”
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