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The Story

The author of the play is unknown, but the story probably originates from a parable of Buddha about a man who, when summoned by death, turns to his four wives for companionship, but is accepted only by the one he loves least. The first three wives, who refuse him, represent the man’s friends and relatives, worldly goods and bodily powers, and the fourth wife represents his moral qualities. In the Christian tradition, John Damascene, an eight-century theologian, tells about a man with three friends, two who abandon him and one who remains faithful and represents the company of good deeds — faith, hope, charity, alms, kindness and other virtues. Although the play is ina way a typical medieval Catholic morality play, it can be seen as a universal allegory about the vanity of life, certainty of death and the undying power of virtue.

Death

The play embodies the anxieties of its age, the time when people were preoccupied with death and afterlife. The reasons for these fears and hope lie in the eschatological nature of the medieval spirit and the threat of the ever-present threat of the plague, the Black Death. This obsession is manifested in various art forms representing a skeletal figure in front of a group of people in a macabre ceremony, the dance of death. The behaviour of the characters reminds of the stages of the mental, emotional and spiritual process of accepting death defined by clinical psychology: the initial denial (and/or anger), the wish for postponement, the bargaining, the anxious but futile clinging to life, the acceptance of death, the spiritual preparation for it, and, finally, the experience itself.

The Play

Everyman exemplifies the allegorical form of morality plays with characters as personified abstractions. Unlike most plays from the period, it has only a few comical moments in the behaviour of the characters who refuse to follow Everyman, which are meant less to entertain than to exemplify types of worldly temptations. It is relatively easy to stage, because it requires a few props and it specifies only one location. The main difficulty lies in balancing its abstract and concrete elements, “the ritual and the realism.”

The Wakefield Master

The language of his plays suggests that he wrote in the first half of the 15^th century and that he had a thorough religious education.

He contributed five plays to the Wakefield Cycle, which consisted of 32 plays originating about fifty years before his time.

Versification

Nine-line stanzas, unique in medieval literature

The first four lines have identical end and internal rhymes; the fifth line rhymes with the ninth; and the sixth, seventh and eighth line rhyme with each other: aaaabcccb

The first four lines contain four beats; the fifth consists of only one stressed syllable; the sixth of two; the seventh and the eighth have three stresses; and the ninth has two beats: 444412332

Contents

The dialogue of the three shepherds distinguishes them from each other. The first shepherd, Coll, is obsessed by his poverty and outraged by the nobility who exploit him and his fellows; the second shepherd, Gib, is preoccupied by the afflictions of married life; and the third shepherd, Daw, is fed up with his job of tending other’s sheep. They are united by their social plight, their dissatisfaction with the weather, and their mutual friendship. Their combined suffering dramatically presents the image of a world in need of salvation that announces the subsequent birth of the saviour.

A line from the Gospel according to Luke, “And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flocks by night,” is taken as the background and basis for the plot. The birth staged by the thief, Mak, and There is a sharp contrast of mood and action between the first part of the play, the birth staged by the thief, Mak, and his wife, Gill, and the nativity scene at the end, which is characteristic of the entire Wakefield cycle.

Because of the small cast, short parts, few required locations and few props, the play is relatively easy to stage. It has been widely performed, especially by student groups during the Christmas season.

Important dates to remember:
1066 Norman Conquest of England
1533 Breakaway from Rome, establishment of the Church of England by Henry VIII
1642 The closure of London theatres, end of the Renaissance drama

The Development of Middle English Plays

Folk Plays: energetic dances, fighting and buffoonery, a thread of dramatic action
Tropes: Gospel dialogues exchanged between a priest and a the church choir
Liturgical Plays: Dramatisation of Biblical scenes usually performed during festivals
Mystery Plays: a series of connected plays with elements of comedy and farce
Morality Plays: dramatized moral allegories with characters personifying human features

Characteristics of Medieval Drama inherited by the Elizabethan theatre

- Lack of unity, partly of action, but especially of time and place
- Mixing of comedy with even the most intense tragedy
- Nearly complete lack of stage scenery
- Presence of archetypal characters, like the clown (rogue, buffoon)
- Presentation of women’s parts by men and boy
- Entire dramas written in verse