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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.”