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Everyman: Morality Play

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• Everyman: Morality Play Summary

A prologue, read by the Messenger asks the audience to give their attention and announces the purpose of the play, which will show us our lives as well as our deaths (“our ending”) and how we humans are always (“all day”) transitory: changing from one state into another.

God speaks next, and immediately launches into a criticism of the way that “all creatures” are not serving Him properly. People are living without “dread” (fear) in the world without any thought of heaven or hell, or the judgment that will eventually come to them. “In worldly riches is all their mind”, God says. Everyone is living purely for their own pleasure, but yet they are not at all secure in their lives. God sees everything decaying, and getting worse “fro year to year” (from year to year) and so has decided to have a “reckoning of every man’s person”. Are they guilty or are they godly – should they be going to heaven or hell?

God calls in Death , his “mighty messenger”. People who love wealth and worldly goods will be struck by Death’s dart and will be sent to dwell in hell eternally – unless, that is, “Alms be his good friend”. “Alms” means “good deeds”, and it is an important clue even at this stage that good deeds can save a sinner from eternal damnation.

God exits, and Death sees Everyman walking along, “finely dressed”. Death approaches Everyman, and asks him where he is going, and whether he has forgotten his “maker” (the one who made him). He then tells Everyman that he must take a long journey upon him, and bring with him his “book of count” (his account book as per God’s “reckoning”, above) which contains his good and bad deeds.

Everyman says that he is unready to make such a reckoning, and is horrified to realize who Death is. Everyman asks Death whether he will have any company to go on the journey from life into death. Death tells him he could have company, if anyone was brave enough to go along with him.

Fellowship enters, sees that Everyman is looking sad, and immediately offers to help. When Everyman tells him that he is in “great jeopardy”, Fellowship pledges not to “forsake [Everyman] to my life’s end / in... good company”. Everyman describes the journey he is to go on, and Fellowship tells Everyman that nothing would make him go on such a journey. Fellowship departs from Everyman “as fast as” he can. Kindred and Cousin enter, Everyman appeals to them for company, and they similarly desert him.

Everyman next turns to his “ Goods and richesse” to help him, but Goods only tells him that love of Goods is opposite to love of God. Goods too forsakes Everyman and exits. Everyman next turns to his Good Deeds , but she is too weak to accompany him. Good Deeds’ sister Knowledge accompanies Everyman to Confession , who instructs him to show penance. Everyman scourges himself to atone for his sin. This allows Good Deeds to walk.

More friends – Discretion , Strength , Beauty and Five Wits – initially claim that they too will accompany Everyman on his journey. Knowledge tells Everyman to go to Priesthood to receive the holy sacrament and extreme unction. Knowledge then makes a speech about priesthood, while Everyman exits to go and receive the sacrament. He asks each of his companions to set their hands on the cross, and go before. One by one, Strength, Discretion, and Knowledge promise never to part from Everyman’s side. Together, they all journey to Everyman’s grave.

As Everyman begins to die, Beauty, Strength, Discretion and Five Wits all forsake him one after another. Good Deeds speaks up and says that she will not forsake him. Everyman realizes that it is time for him to be gone to make his reckoning and pay his spiritual debts. Yet, he says, there is a lesson to be learned, and speaks the lesson of the play:

Take example, all ye that this do hear or see How they that I loved best do forsake me, Except my Good Deeds that bideth truly.

Commending his soul into the Lord’s hands, Everyman disappears into the grave with Good Deeds. An Angel appears with Everyman’s Book of Reckoning to receive the soul as it rises from the grave. A doctor appears to give the epilogue, in which he tells the hearers to forsake Pride, Beauty, Five Wits, Strength and Discretion – all of them forsake “every man” in the end.

Everyman: Morality Play Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Everyman: Morality Play is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Discuss Everyman as an Allegorical play?

Everyman uses allegory as a means of teaching moral lessons. Everyman's journey, his life and death, allegorically represents Christian's journey. Everyman represents humanity as a whole,

In the play Everyman, what is common to Discretion, Strength, Five Wits, and Beauty?

They all forsake him on his final journey.

Importance of ending as reflected to the play, Everyman.

Everyman, as Good Deeds accompanies him to the grave, seems to speak directly to the audience – now, in the words of G.A. Lester “as firm in understanding as he was formerly in ignorance”:

Take example, all ye that this do hear or see How they...

Study Guide for Everyman: Morality Play

Everyman: Morality Play study guide contains literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About Everyman: Morality Play
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Essays for Everyman: Morality Play

Everyman: Morality Play essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Everyman and other Miracle and Morality Plays.

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Lesson Plan for Everyman: Morality Play

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This Morality Play Examines What Happens When Everyman Faces Death

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Written in England during the 1400s, "The Summoning of Everyman" (commonly known as "Everyman") is a Christian morality play. No one knows who wrote the play. Historians note that monks and priests often wrote these types of dramas.

Morality plays were vernacular dramas, spoken in the language of the people, rather than the Latin of the Church. They were meant to be seen by the common people. Like other morality plays, "Everyman" is an allegory. The lessons being relayed are taught by allegorical characters , each one representing an abstract concept such as good deeds, material possessions, and knowledge.

God decides that Everyman (a character who represents an average, everyday human) has become too obsessed with wealth and material possessions. Therefore, Everyman must be taught a lesson in piety. And who better to teach a life lesson than a character named Death?

Man Is Unkind

God’s chief complaint is that humans are ignorantly leading sinful lives; they are unaware that Jesus died for their sins. Everyman has been living for his own pleasure, forgetting about the importance of charity and the potential threat of eternal hellfire.

On God’s bidding, Death summons Everyman to take a pilgrimage to the Almighty. When Everyman realizes that the Grim Reaper has called upon him to face God and give a reckoning of his life, he tries to bribe Death to “defer this matter till another day.”

The bargaining doesn’t work. Everyman must go before God, never to return to Earth again. Death does say that the hapless hero can take along anyone or anything that may benefit him during this spiritual trial.

Friends and Family Are Fickle

After Death leaves Everyman to prepare for his day of reckoning (the moment in which God judges him), Everyman approaches a character named Fellowship, a supporting role that represents Everyman’s friends. At first, Fellowship is full of bravado. When Fellowship learns that Everyman is in trouble, he promises to stay with him until the problem is resolved. However, as soon as Everyman reveals that Death has summoned him to stand before God, Fellowship abandons him.

Kindred and Cousin, two characters that represent family relationships, make similar promises. Kindred declares, “in wealth and woe we will with you hold, for over his kin a man may be bold.” But once Kindred and Cousin realize Everyman’s destination, they back out. One of the funniest moments in the play is when Cousin refuses to go by claiming he has a cramp in his toe.

The overall message of the play’s first half is that relatives and friends (as reliable as they may seem) pale in comparison to the steadfast companionship of God.

Goods vs. Good Deeds

After getting rejected by fellow humans, Everyman turns his hopes to inanimate objects. He talks to a character named “Goods,” a role which represents Everyman’s material possessions and wealth. Everyman pleads for Goods to assist him in his hour of need, but they offer no comfort. In fact, the Goods chide Everyman, suggesting that he should have admired material objects moderately ​and that he should have given some of his goods to the poor. Not wanting to visit God (and subsequently be sent to hell), Goods deserts Everyman.​​

Finally, Everyman meets a character who will genuinely care for his plight. Good-Deeds is a character who symbolizes the acts of charity and kindness performed by Everyman. However, when the audience first meets Good-Deeds, she is laying on the ground, severely weakened by Everyman’s many sins.

Enter Knowledge and Confession

Good-Deeds introduces Everyman to her sister, Knowledge. This is another friendly character who will provide good advice to the protagonist . Knowledge serves as an important guide for Everyman, instructing him to seek out another character: Confession.

Everyman is led to Confession. Many readers expect to hear scandalous “dirt” on the main character, and expect him to beg forgiveness, or hope he will at least apologize for whatever sins he has committed. Such readers will be surprised here. Instead, Everyman asks for his vices to be wiped clean. Confession says that, with penance, Everyman’s spirit may become clean once more.

What does penance mean? In this play, it means that Everyman undergoes a severe and purifying form of physical punishment . After he suffers, Everyman is amazed to discover that Good-Deeds is now free and strong, ready to stand by his side during his moment of judgment.

The Five-Wits

After this purging of the soul, Everyman is ready to meet his maker. Good-Deeds and Knowledge tell Everyman to call upon “three persons of great might” and his Five-Wits ( his senses ) as counselors.

Everyman calls forth the characters Discretion, Strength, Beauty, and Five-Wits. Combined, they represent the core of his physical human experience.

Unlike the first half of the play when he begged for help from his friends and family, Everyman is now relying on himself. However, even though he receives some good advice from each entity, he realizes that they will not go the distance as he journeys closer to his meeting with God.

Like previous characters, these entities promise to stay by his side. Yet, when Everyman decides that it is time for his body to physically die (perhaps as part of his penance), Beauty, Strength, Discretion, and the Five-Wits abandon him. Beauty is the first one to leave, disgusted by the idea of lying in a grave. The others follow suit, and Everyman is left alone with Good-Deeds and Knowledge once again.

Everyman Departs

Knowledge explains that he won’t be going into the “heavenly sphere” with Everyman, but will stay with him until he departs from his physical body. This allegorically implies that the soul does not retain its Earthly knowledge.

However, Good-Deeds (as promised) will journey with Everyman. At the end of the play, Everyman commends his soul to God. After his departure, an angel arrives to announce that Everyman’s soul has been taken from his body and presented before God. A final narrator enters to explain to the audience that all should heed the lessons of Everyman: Everything in life is fleeting, with the exception of acts of kindness and charity.

Overall Theme

As one might expect from a morality play, "Everyman" has a very clear moral , one that is delivered at the beginning, middle, and end of the play. The blatantly religious message is simple: Earthly comforts are fleeting. Only good deeds and God’s grace can provide salvation.

Who Wrote 'Everyman?'

Many morality plays were a collaborative effort by clergymen and residents (often tradesmen and guild members) of an English town. Over the years, lines would be changed, added, and deleted. Therefore, "Everyman" is probably the result of multiple authors and decades of literary evolution .

Historical Context

When Everyman summons the Five-Wits, a fascinating discussion about the importance of the priesthood follows.

FIVE-WITS: For priesthood exceedeth all other thing; To us Holy Scripture they do teach, And converteth man from sin heaven to reach; God hath to them more power given, Than to any angel that is in heaven

According to the Five-Wits, priests are more powerful than angels. This reflects the prevalent role of priests in medieval society. In most European villages, the clergy were the moral leaders. However, the character of Knowledge mentions that priests are not perfect, and some of them have committed egregious sins. The discussion concludes with a general endorsement of the Church as the surest path to salvation.

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Drama Criticism › Analysis of the Morality Play Everyman

Analysis of the Morality Play Everyman

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on August 2, 2020 • ( 0 )

The great vice of English drama from Kyd to Galsworthy has been its aim of realism was unlimited. In one play, Everyman, and perhaps in that one play only, we have a drama within the limitations of art. . . . It is essential that a work of art should be self-consistent, that an artist should consciously or unconsciously draw a circle beyond which he does not trespass:  on  the  one  hand  actual  life  is  always  the  material,  and  on  the  other  hand  an  abstraction from actual life is a necessary condition to the creation of a work of art.

—T. S. Eliot, “Four Elizabethan Dramatists”

For T. S. Eliot the greatness of Everyman —the most famous medieval drama in English and the best example of the morality play—rests in its totality of vision,  in  its  joining  powerful  spiritual  and  human  insights  with  “ordinary  dramatic interest.” “The religious and the dramatic are not merely combined,” Eliot asserts, “but wholly fused. Everyman is on the one hand the human soul in extremity, and on the other any man in any dangerous position from which we wonder how he is going to escape.” A dramatized parable or allegory of the final judgment of a soul, Everyman achieves its sustaining force by the skill with which it embodies its abstractions in the particular to reach the universal. Everyman accordingly serves as a crucial prototype for Western drama and a key link between classical drama and the extraordinary flowering of Renaissance drama.

Possibly  an  English  translation  of  the  Dutch  work,  Elckerlijc   (or  Elckerlijk ),  published  in  1495  and  attributed  to  Petrus  Dorlandus,  Everyman  may  also have been adapted, along with the Dutch play, from an earlier, now-lost common  source.  There  are  no  records  of  actual  performances  of  Everyman but printed versions of the play, first appearing in 1508, were popular through the 16th century, even as religious dramas in England became seditious during  the  Reformation  and  were  banned  when  Elizabeth  I  took  the  throne  in  1558. Although the morality play is an unmistakable influence on Elizabethan drama, Everyman disappeared from view. It would not be reprinted until 1773. In 1901, it became the first medieval play to be revived in a modern production. Directed by William Poel, the revised Everyman was praised for its “naïve simplicity and uncompromising sincerity,” and the play became the sensation of the London theater season. William Butler Yeats and George Bernard Shaw admitted to being influenced by Poel’s successful production. After seeing it German director  Max  Reinhardt  commissioned  Austrian  playwright  Hugo  von Hofmannsthal to write a German adaptation, Jedermann, which was first produced in Berlin in 1911 and, after its debut in 1913 at the Salzburg Cathedral square, would ever after become a featured part of the annual Salzburg Festival.  Echoes  of  Everyman  are  detectable  in  the  existential  plays  of  Jean-Paul Sartre and Samuel Beckett and in Bertolt Brecht’s expressionistic dramas, and the play continues to be performed around the world, a testimony to its ability to communicate a powerful vision of the human condition that transcends the era and the doctrines of its origin.

Everyman serves as well as an essential text for illustrating the evolution of drama in western Europe in the period between the classical age and the Renaissance. What is most striking in considering the reemergence of drama in the Middle Ages is the role played by the Christian Church both in halting the classical dramatic tradition and in fostering the conditions for drama’s revival. The number of theaters and performances of Roman drama reached a high point in the fourth century before significantly waning. Drama’s decline to near extinction was precipitated both by the breakup of the Roman Empire and the bur-geoning Christian Church’s opposition to an art form with distinctively pagan roots. Theologians regarded drama as an illusionist art allied to idolatry, magic, and  devilry.  Church  authorities  actively  dissuaded  Christians  from  attending  performances, threatening excommunication of anyone who went to the theater rather than to church on holy days. Actors were forbidden the sacraments unless they foreswore their profession. The last recorded dramatic performance in the classical  tradition  occurred  in  Rome  in  549,  and  for  almost  a  half-millennia  organized  theatrical  performances  effectively  disappeared  in  western  Europe,  with the remnants of an acting tradition fitfully maintained by traveling entertainers. Ironically the church, which had played such a decisive role in closing the  theaters  and  halting  a  literary  dramatic  tradition,  returned  drama  to  the  similar initial conditions preceeding the emergence of formal drama in Greece in the sixth century b.c. As classical comedy and tragedy originated from religious celebrations and rituals, Western drama would be restored in the Middle Ages from a comparable spiritual foundation to serve a parallel religious need. Antiphonal  songs,  sung  responses  or  dialogues,  like  the  dithyramb  in  Greek  protodrama,  were  eventually  incorporated  into  celebrations  from  the  liturgical calendar, such as Christmas, Epiphany, and Easter. Short illustrative scenes evolved to vivify worship for a congregation that did not understand Latin, the liturgical language. First performed in the monasteries and churches around the 10th century, with clergymen or choir boys as actors, liturgical dramas would by the 13th century grow far too elaborate—with multiple scenes, actors, and stage effects—for proper staging indoors. Performances moved outdoors with nonclerical actors and secular organizations such as trade guilds producing vernacular mystery plays, scriptural dramas representing scenes from the Old and New Testament; miracle plays, dramatizing incidents from the lives of the saints; and morality plays, enacting the allegorical spiritual struggle of an average individual.  Like  Attic  Greek  plays,  medieval  drama  therefore  evolved  out  of  religious observances, was supported by wealthy citizens or organizations to serve both a civic and religious function, and, just as the Greek choral performances in honor of Dionysus were expanded to enact the stories of multiple gods and heroes,  medieval  drama  gradually  became  more  secularized  by  incorporating  aspects  of  familiar  life  and  recognizable  situations  and  characters  in  its  performances. Enacted episodes from the liturgical calendar were joined to form complete cycles of biblical plays in increasingly more complicated productions involving  realistic  stage  effects.  Religious  dramas  became  all-purpose  moral  entertainments  combining  serious  devotional  and  didactic  purposes  with  low  comic, often bawdy farce. By the 15th century religious drama had established a strong, robust theatrical tradition in western Europe that would be combined with  the  rediscovery  of  the  classical  dramatic  tradition  in  the  Renaissance  to  create the greatest explosion of dramatic achievement in history.

Everyman is the best-known example of the morality play, the late-developing medieval dramatic genre that is the essential bridge between religious and secular drama. If mystery plays treated the divine as revealed in the Bible, and miracle plays, the saintly, morality plays took for their subject the spiritual struggles of representative and recognizable mixed human characters. Morality  plays,  which  flourished  between  1400  and  1550,  are  didactic  allegories  enacting the combat between Vice and Virtue for the possession of a human soul. Examples in English include Pride of Life (c. 1410), Castle of Perserverance (c.1425),  and Mankind  (c.  1475).  Everyman   is  actually  atypical  of  the  form  due  to  its  restricted  scope.  Instead of  covering  the  temptations  of  an  entire  life, as do most morality plays, Everyman achieves its unity and intensity by concentrating only on the preparation for death, on the last act in the story of salvation or damnation. The usual enacted battle between Vice and Virtue for possession of an individual soul is over at the play’s outset. Everyman is a confirmed sinner who is to be shocked into a reevaluation of his life and values. As the play opens, God, disappointed in humankind’s sinfulness, in which “Every man liveth so after his own pleasure,” ignoring their inevitable end and purpose on earth, proclaims a final reckoning. He orders Death to summon Everyman to “A pilgrimage he must on him take, / Which he in no wise may escape.” Everyman greets this news with a range of psychologically believable reactions from incredulousness, delusion, and self-pity to rationalization that it might not be as bad as he fears, even attempting to bribe Death to “defer this matter till another day.” Death is implacable but agrees to allow Everyman to gather whomever he can persuade to accompany him on his journey to the grave.

Having lost his initial battle with Death to avoid his reckoning, Everyman is next reduced to helpless, isolated despair as one by one his expected faithful and steadfast companions—Fellowship, Kindred, and Cousin—abandon him. Forced  to  forego  human  companionship  from  friends  and  relatives  on  his  journey, Everyman next turns to his Goods, which he had valued most of all, for support. Convinced that money is all powerful, Everyman is corrected by Goods, who says that love for him is “contrary to love everlasting”:

A season thou hast had me in prosperity. My condition is man’s soul to kill; If I save one, a thousand I do spill. Weenest though that I will follow thee? Nay, not from this world, verily.

If  the  material  fails  him,  Everyman  next  turns  to  his  virtuous  accomplishments on earth, to Good Deeds, who is willing to accompanying him but is constrained by Everyman’s sins, and the pilgrim is sent to Good Deeds’s sister, Knowledge, to learn what he must do. At this point in the drama Everyman’s spiritual  journey  has  forced  him  to  look  from  exterior  support  to  internal  resources. Knowledge provides the key to Everyman’s salvation, leading him to Confession and Penance that releases Good Deeds to accompany him to his  reckoning.  The  play  thus  embodies  essential  Christian  doctrine—that  a  person’s life on earth is fl eeting and deceptive, that all must face death alone, and that good deeds are worthless without self-knowledge, faith, contrition, and absolution—in understandable human terms that invite audience identification. The play’s message is delivered not through direct statement but in the interaction of a psychologically understandable Everyman with the personified and magnified abstractions that underscore a universal meaning.

No  longer  reluctant  and  despairing,  with  a  renewed  faith  and  self-understanding,  Everyman  now  feels  comforted  and  confident  to  undertake  his  journey, summoning Beauty, Strength, Discretion, and Five Wits to join Good Deeds as his companions. Doctrinally the play seems to have reached a secure moral conclusion. Everyman is no longer deceived about the world or himself and is now ready to face his final reckoning aided by worthy intrinsic companions. The play, however, delivers a surprising dramatic reversal. The companions that Everyman has counted on one by one fall away as he comes closer and closer to his journey’s end at the grave. The allegory here captures an entire life in miniature in which a person’s essential attributes eventually are defeated by time along life’s journey: the beauty of youth fades, the strength of manhood weakens, mental acuity in maturity declines, and the senses of old age fail. In a neat, structural parallel the excuses of Fellowship, Kindred, Cousin, and Goods not to accompanying Everyman on his journey are matched by the regrets of Beauty, Strength, Discretion, and Five Wits for failing to complete the pilgrim-age. Once again Everyman is stripped of support to face death alone, forced to give up his dependence not only on the externals of life but the internal faculties and attributes as well. Everyman reaches an existential moment of dreadful isolation that prompts his cry, “O Jesu, help! All hath forsaken me.” But he is consoled by Good Deeds, who alone will stay with him to the end:

All earthly things is but vanity: Beauty, Strength, and Discretion do man forsake, Foolish friends, and kinsmen, that fair spake— All fleeth save Good Deeds, and that am I. . . . Fear not; I will speak for thee.

Good  Deeds  will  make  the  case  for  Everyman’s  salvation,  and  the  pilgrim  seeking God’s mercy is shown sinking into his grave. An Angel is heard welcoming his soul to his heavenly reward:

Now shalt thou into the heavenly sphere, Unto the which all ye shall come That liveth well before the day of doom.

Everyman  converts  the  theological  doctrine  of  a  soul’s  recovery  and  redemption into a series of strikingly dramatic conflicts, each pushing Every-man  to  a  greater  understanding  of  the  world  and  himself.  What  contrasts  Everyman from other morality plays in which Vice and Virtue contend for the possession of a man’s soul is that the forces that essentially divide Everyman and imperil his salvation reside within him, personified both in the external aspects of a man’s life and his inherent attributes. The play takes its audience deeply  into  a  moral  and  psychological  arena  that  will  increasingly  form  the  theater to follow as religious drama gives way to the secular. Dramatic allegory is to be dressed in the costumes and traits of the particular and the individual. Notably, Everyman  puts  an  average,  representative  man  at  center  stage  for  one  of  the  first  times  in  theatrical  history  and  considers  his  self-knowledge  and salvation as its central issue. Neither a divinity nor a paragon, Everyman is  made  recognizable  to  every  member  of  the  audience—noble  and  peasant  alike—and psychological realism, even in an allegory of contending abstractions, makes a powerful theatrical debut. Everyman proves triumphantly that the sufferings of someone like the rest of us can engage us emotionally and intellectually while supplying a crucial lesson on how the real, the symbolic, and insights into human nature and human existence—the key components of all drama—can be effectively combined.

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Everyman is an allegorical work featuring a primarily metaphorical narrative. In this allegory, Everyman represents "every man"—or, in other words, all of humanity—in his reluctant journey towards death. A conversation between God and the allegorical figure of Death, a human-like figure who represents the abstract concept of death, introduces the play’s allegorical story: 

God They be so cumbered with worldly riches,  That needs on them I must do justice,  On Everyman living without fear.  Where art thou, Death, thou mighty messenger? Death. Almighty God, I am here at your will,  Your commandment to fulfil. God. Go thou to Everyman, And show him in my name  A pilgrimage he must on him take,  Which he in no wise may escape;  And that he bring with him a sure reckoning  Without delay or any tarrying. Cite this Quote

God argues that humans have become “cumbered” (or “encumbered” in modern English) with “worldly riches” and no longer “fear” God as they should. Instead of judging the souls of every individual person, God decides to focus on Everyman, one individual who represents all of humanity. He summons Death, his “mighty messenger,” to take Everyman on a “pilgrimage” in order to test his faith and virtue. In the allegory of the play, this is not a literal pilgrimage, but rather a spiritual journey towards death, a state that no man can “escape.” 

After Death announces that Everyman must undertake a journey in order to be judged by God, he receives permission to bring a companion with him on his journey, though Death seems skeptical that anyone will be willing to follow Everyman. He turns to Cousin, Kindred, and Fellowship, but they all turn down his request despite their earlier promises of loyalty. Afterward, a dejected Everyman reflects upon these personal betrayals in a soliloquy that clarifies the allegorical status of these characters, all of whom are personified versions of various human qualities, virtues, or vices: 

First Fellowship said he would with me gone;  His words were very pleasant and gay,  But afterward he left me alone.  Then spake I to my kinsmen all in despair,  And also they gave me words fair,  They lacked no fair speaking,  But all forsake me in the ending.  Then went I to my Goods that I loved best,  In hope to have comfort, but there had I least;  For my Goods sharply did me tell  That he bringeth many into hell. Cite this Quote

Fellowship, Everyman notes, spoke to him with words that were “very pleasant and gay,” and yet his close friend was unwilling to back up his promises with action. Shocked by this rejection, Everyman turns to his family members, Kindred and Cousin, who also soothed him with promises of loyalty but then similarly turned down his request. Even Goods, whom he “loved best,” confesses to have been sabotaging him. This soliloquy, then, provides an outline for the play’s central allegory.  Friends, family, and riches, the play argues, are “worldly” pleasures that are left behind at death.

After Everyman is rejected by his friends and family, who express reluctance and fear at the prospect of accompanying him to his death, he tries to think of someone else who might be willing to keep him company on his journey. Suddenly, he remembers two individuals whom he has “loved” all of his life and who might be able to make his “heart full light” in this difficult time: Goods and Riches. The scene in which these symbolic figures are introduced further develops the spiritual allegory central to the play: 

Yet in my mind a thing there is;— All my life I have loved riches; If that my good now help me might,  He would make my heart full light.  I will speak to him in this distress. — Where art thou, my Goods and riches?  Goods  Who calleth me? Everyman? what haste thou hast! Riches Who calleth me? Everyman? what haste thou hast!  I lie here in corners, trussed and piled so high,  And in chests I am locked so fast,  Also sacked in bags, thou mayst see with thine eye,  I cannot stir; in packs low I lie.  Cite this Quote

Goods and Riches are presented as human figures, longtime friends of Everyman. However, these figures are primarily allegorical, representing the material possessions that Everyman has accumulated throughout his life. Ultimately, Everyman discovers that he is not able to bring these possessions with him to the afterlife, as they are “worldly” rather than “heavenly.” 

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Death and Reckoning

The central themes of Everyman are announced in the play’s title page, which introduces the work as a “treatise how the High Father of Heaven sendeth Death to summon every creature to come and give account of their lives in this world […] in manner of a moral play” (1). These themes of death, reckoning, and salvation are further explored by the Messenger and later by God himself, both of whom deliver speeches at the beginning of the play that bemoan the reckoning or final judgment that human beings must face when they die. Death himself is soon brought on stage as a personified or allegorical character.

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