Everyman

Everyman is a morality play, a dramatic genre popular in England between the 14th and 15th centuries. As the term implies, a “morality play” sets out to teach a moral lesson, usually one inspired by Christian doctrine. Morality plays typically feature a protagonist who represents humanity or the average human being, alongside supporting characters who take the form of allegorical or personified concepts.

Like other morality plays of the period, Everyman explores themes of sin, repentance, and salvation. The play assumes a Christian perspective, promoting an emphatically Christian message about “our lives and ending” and “how transitory we be all day” (5, 6). As the Messenger explains in the very first lines of the play (which serve as a prologue), the play will illustrate why those worldly goods such as “Fellowship and Jollity, / Both Strength, Pleasure, and Beauty” do nothing to prepare human beings for death and for their final “reckoning” with God (16-17).

God’s lament, which immediately follows the Messenger’s brief speech, further develops these themes of Sin and Repentance, Death and Reckoning, and The Earthly Versus the Eternal. God is deeply upset at the sinful lives of human beings, who pursue “worldly prosperity” with no thought to him and to their inevitable deaths: “Drowned in sin,” God complains, “they know me not for their God” (26). Human beings, in other words, are preoccupied with transient goods at the expense of the eternal and the spiritual—a foolishly shortsighted way of living that does nothing to prepare human beings for their deaths and the judgment that will follow.

The Everyman who first comes on stage is hardly an exception to the disappointing rule lamented by the Messenger and God: He is in this sense a true “everyman.” When Death first spots Everyman, he notes that “Full little he thinketh on my coming; / His mind is on fleshly lust and treasure” (81-82). Everyman is not ready for his reckoning and in vain asks for more time, even trying to bribe Death, fundamentally misunderstanding that material riches cannot help him in spiritual matters. As Everyman seeks somebody to accompany him to his reckoning, he discovers the true worth of that which he once considered valuable: Friendship and Kinship, he learns, are friends only in pleasure, not in hardship. They are not willing to accompany him to the grave, suggesting that even human relationships cannot substitute for orientation toward God. Likewise, Goods—the friend that Everyman valued above all else—is revealed to have represented mere temptation, deceiving Everyman into thinking him truly valuable when in fact he cannot accompany him after death and is indeed a “thief” to the eternal soul.

As Everyman finally comes to understand, only Good Deeds can accompany him on his final journey. But when Everyman first calls out to his Good Deeds, she is literally buried beneath his sins. As Good Deeds herself says to Everyman,

Here I lie cold in the ground;

Thy sins hath me sore bound,

That I cannot stir (486-88).

Here Knowledge enters to guide Everyman, explaining that he must repent because Goods Deeds is no use to him in a state of sin: Indeed, it is only after Everyman visits Confession that Good Deeds rises and walks. Reinvigorated by Everyman’s repentance, Goods Deeds alone accompanies Everyman as he enters his grave and stands before God for his reckoning; even Discretion, Strength, Beauty, and Five Wits, who at first promise to remain with Everyman, abandon him as he begins to die, and Knowledge admits that she can accompany Everyman to the point of death but no further. The play thus illustrates that external (Friendship, Kinship, Goods) as well as internal (Discretion, Strength, Beauty, Five Wits, Knowledge) properties desert human beings when they die. Everyman recognizes this lesson at last as he enters the grave accompanied only by Good Deeds to stand before God and to ask for salvation. Having finally renounced all earthly connections, Everyman is admitted into heaven as a Doctor comes on stage to reiterate the moral in an epilogue that mirrors the Messenger’s prologue: If they hope for salvation, human beings must repent, remembering that all earthly qualities—Fellowship, Goods, Beauty, and so on—are as transient as their lives, and that only Good Deeds is eternal.