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Everyman: A Structural Analysis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Thomas F. Van Laan
Thomas F. Van Laan*
Affiliation:
Rutgees University, New Brunswick, New Jersey
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Extract

The high value of Everyman has been provocatively asserted in T. S. Eliot's description of it as “perhaps” the only English drama “within the limitations of art.” Eliot writes this while discussing the lack of form in post-Kydian drama and thus implies that the source of this value is the play's formal unity. David Kaula has taken Eliot to mean “that nothing in the play is extraneous to the central homiletic purpose, that all elements of style, structure, and theme are governed by the conventions of allegory.” Yet the emphasis on Everyman's homiletic purpose and allegorical conventions does not sufficiently explain either its critical esteem or its theatrical popularity. Fortunately, Eliot has enlarged upon his original assessment in a later work. He argues that religious drama, to be successful, must combine its doctrine with “ordinary dramatic interest.” Everyman fulfills his requirement:

the religious and the dramatic are not merely combined, 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—with as keen interest as that with which we wait for the escape of the film hero, bound and helpless in a hut to which his enemies are about to set fire.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 78 , Issue 5 , December 1963 , pp. 465 - 475
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1963

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References

1 “Four Elizabethan Dramatists,” Selected Essays (London, 1951), p. 111. A. C. Cawley's “Introduction” to his edition of Everyman (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1961) contains the best general discussion of the play's texts, meaning, style, versification, and staging. Cawley also conveniently summarizes (pp. x–xiii) and provides a bibliography of (pp. xxxii–xxxiii) the rather conclusive arguments for the priority of Elckerlijc. Since my focus in this study is a formal analysis of the English text, I have generally ignored the vexed question of its relationship to the Dutch play.

2 “Time and the Timeless in Everyman and Dr. Fauslus,” College English, xxii (Oct. 1960), 9.

3 Religious Drama: Medieval and Modern (New York, 1954).

4 The structure of Everyman has been examined by Cleanth Brooks and Robert B. Heilman (Understanding Drama, New York, 1948, pp. 104–108) and by Lawrence V. Ryan (“Doctrine and Dramatic Structure in Everyman,” Speculum, XXXII, 1957, 722–735). Brooks and Heilman discern a four-part structural scheme: (I) the fruitless conflict with Death, (II) the failure to find a companion, (III) the change from despair to joy through the arrival of worthy companions, and (IV) the new complication arising from the desertion by the worthy companions. In their view, the new complication is resolved when Everyman dies, “completely sobered and matured by his experience” (p. 105). Ryan distinguishes, roughly, a three-part scheme: “Structurally, the play turns on two climaxes, growing out of the abandonment of the hero by two theologically and dramatically distinct groups of ‘friends’ in whom he has placed his confidence” (p. 725). Both analyses present certain fundamental difficulties. Because of their emphasis on drama rather than doctrine, Brooks and Heilman isolate episodes where “the sermon takes precedence of the drama” (p. 106). Ryan, in seeing the theology of the play as the sole source of its “characters, structure, significance, and even its dramatic impressiveness” (p. 723), tends to obscure the dramatic artistry. In calling the later desertion a dramatic climax, both analyses distort its significance as a specific stage in a continuous pattern of action.

5 All citations to Everyman are to the text established by J. Q. Adams, Chief Pre-Shakespearean Dramas (Cambridge, Mass., 1924), pp. 288–303.

6 As Cawley points out (p. 29), this prologue has no parallel in Elckerlijc, and it erroneously anticipates the appearance of “Iolyte” and “Pleasure.” Such facts prompt him to suggest that “it may have been written by someone other than the translator.” Yet some introduction seems necessary to focus the attention of the spectators and to identify the first speaker. Furthermore, the speech has considerable dramatic value. It effectively anticipates the play's message without fully expounding it, and it requests without negating the emotion basic to the play's opening scenes.

7 The two-part movement in Everyman may also be distinguished by comparing the play with a Scottish narrative poem of ca. 1480–85, “The Thrie Tailes of the Thrie Priests of Peblis.” The third tale tells the same story, but the action in the poem focuses almost exclusively on the ever-increasing decline in the hero's fortunes, with only a perfunctory conclusion to restore him to his original position. H. deVocht, an advocate for the priority of Everyman over Elckerlijc suggests that this poem may be the source from which the dramatist worked (Everyman: A Comparative Study of Texts and Sources, Materials for ihe Study of the Old English Drama, n. s. xx, Louvain, 1947, pp. 192–201). The poem is available in Early Popular Poetry of Scotland and the Northern Border, ed. David Laing, Re-arranged and Revised by W. Carew Hazlitt (London, 1895), i.127–168.

8 See Cawley, p. xxi, on Everyman's riches and friends being gifts of fortune.

9 Parallel noted by Cawley, p. xxvi.

10 Cf. Ryan, p. 725: Everyman's “excessive love of passing things has placed him in danger of hell-fire.”

11 The Seven Deadly Sins (East Lansing: Michigan State College Press, 1952), p. 147.

12 On Avarice's replacing Pride as Chief Sin, see The Castle of Perseverance, where Sir Covetous has a scaffold of his own, as do God, Flesh, World, and Devil, and has command over the other Sins (cf. J. Wilson McCutchan, “Covetousness in ‘The Castle of Perseverence’,” Univ. of Virginia Studies, iv, 1951, 175–191). For this development in non-dramatic literature, see Bloomfield, pp. 74, 95, 183, 189, 222–223, 237. For this development in the sermons, see G. R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England (Cambridge, England: University Press, 1933), pp. 307–308.

13 This is a frequent motif of the moralities. In The Castle, Sir Covetous wins back the hero after he has grown so old as to be immune to the other Sins. In Henry Medwall's Nature, Man at first ignores Covetousness, but his fellow Sins have no fear because they know Man will turn to him “whan hys hed waxeth hore” (1.1243 f.). For this motif in non-dramatie literature and in the sermons, see Bloomfield, pp. 76, 165, 432; Owst, p. 535.

14 See Owst, p. 460. In Chaucer's “Parson's Tale” (The Poetical Works of Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson, Boston, 1933, x [i], 570), advising murder is treated as a major characteristic of Wrath.

15 Bloomfield, passim.

16 See Bloomfield, pp. 177, 181, 221, 433.

17 Chaucer, x (i), 492. On this, the reverse aspect of Envy, see also Owst, p. 457.

18 Even though Sir Covetous is the obvious Chief in The Castle, it is nevertheless Pride who, in keeping with tradition, launches the first attack upon a Virtue. See the references in n. 12.

19 Chaucer, x (i), 450–456; Owst, pp. 308–312.

20 The Tudor Interlude (Leicester: Leicester Univ. Press, 1958), pp. 78–79. Since no concrete evidence concerning Everyman's costume exists, Death's line may in fact characterize only his attitude. For confirmation of Craik's interpretation, see Fellowship's hint that Everyman is in the habit of bribing his friends with new clothes (292) and Everyman's later reference to his body's delight in going “gay and fresshe” (614). Moreover, gay and colorful array is perfectly in keeping with Everyman's personality; it would enhance the developing emotional effect, for the costume must remain while the hero's inner gaiety diminishes; such a costume is especially necessary for the full significance of the contrast achieved when Everyman changes into the garment of sorrow (643).

21 Chaucer, x (i), 412; Owst, pp. 82, 404–407. Cf., in Med-wall's Nature, Pride's characterization as the typical dandy.

22 Cf. Nature (i.955 ff.) where Pride flatters Man's superior intelligence.

23 The Pride of Life, 11. 175–178, ed. Alois Brandl, in Quellen des weltlichen Dramas in England vor Shakespeare (Strass-burg, 1898). Bloomfield (p. 188) refers to a treatment of this condition in religious prose.

24 The tradition of the Seven Deadly Sins accommodates their representation by characters with other and more attractive names. Familiar in the sixteenth-century morality, this device occurs much earlier in religious prose (see Owst, p. 96). Desertion of their victims by characters personifying the Sins is also a known motif, occurring in the morality tradition as early as The Castle, where Mundus and Sir Covetous desert Man once his complete submission fulfills their purpose. See also Bloomfield, pp. 204–205.

25 Kaula, p. 11.

26 Parallel noted by Cawley, p. xxv.

27 DeVocht, pp. 59 ff.; Ryan, p. 728.

28 E. N. S. Thompson (“The English Moral Plays,” Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, xiv, 1910, 353) mentions without developing the idea the presence of a Psychomachia in Everyman. Cf. deVocht, p. 187.

29 The Moral Virtues should be distinguished from the well-known Seven Cardinal Virtues, which do not satisfactorily correspond to the Sins. The list of Moral Virtues was never as rigidly formulated as that of the Sins. For a typical list, see The Castle, which presents Meekness, Patience, Charity, Abstinence, Chastity, Industry, and Largilas. In Nature, “almes dede” replaces Largitas and “good besynes” Industry. Chaucer's Parson lists “humylitie, or mekenesse” (opp. Pride), love (Charity; opp. Envy), “Debonairetee and Pacience” (opp. Wrath), “fortitudo or strengthe” (opp. Sloth), “misericorde, pitee, and largesse” (opp. Avarice), abstinence (opp. Gluttony), “chastitee and continence” (opp. Lechery).

30 For the various aspects of Christ's Passion interpreted as remedia, see The Caslle, 11. 2083 ff. (cf. Chaucer, x [i], 255 ff.). Each of the seven parts of the Pater Noster was conceived as a remedium for a specific Sin. See Thompson, p. 334; Hardin Craig, English Religious Drama of the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), p. 338.

31 Bloomfield, pp. 97–99, 149; Chaucer, x (i), 958 ff.

32 The whole point of the sermon by Chaucer's Parson is the remedial function of penitence.

33 Bloomfield, pp. 214, 217.

34 Chaucer, x (i), 1030.

35 Cf. Cawley's suggestions concerning the original staging, pp. xxix–xxx. The “house” of Confession was probably a castle with heaven located at its top. The grave, then, would be at the bottom, “so that Everyman could enact his own salvation by entering his grave and ascending from it to the heights of the ‘heuenly spere’ (899)” (p. xxx).

36 Shakespeare and lite Allegory of Evil (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1958), pp. 101–103. Cf. David M. Bevington, From Mankind to Marlowe (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1962), p. 117, passim. The pattern is occasionally made explicit. In Nature, Reason points out that through accepting the Virtues, Man is “lykely to aryse / From the vale of syn whyche ys full of derknes / toward the contem-placyon of lyght that ys endJes” (Nature, ii.1384–86).

37 See 11. 29–31, 512, 563–565, 582–585, 603, 751–754, 812, 882.

38 On the Christie pattern, see William F. Lynch, S. J., Christ and Apollo (New York, 19(50), pp. 13, 15, 40–41.

39 See especially ll. 561–565: “Here shall you receyue that scourge of me, / Whiche is penaunce stronge that ye must endure / To remembre thy Sauyour was scourged for the / With sharpe scourges, and suffred it pacyently; / So must thou, or thou scape that paynful pylgrymage.” On the Christian's imitation of the Christie pattern, see Lynch, p. 50.

40 Archetypal Patterns in Poetry (New York, 1958), pp. 52–53: “Within the image-sequences examined the pattern appears of a movement, downward, or inward toward the earth's centre, or a cessation of movement—a physical change which … appears also as a transition toward severed relation with the outer world, and, it may be, toward disintegration and death. The element in the pattern is balanced by a movement upward and outward—an expansion or outburst of activity, a transition toward redintegration and life-renewal.”

41 Bodkin, pp. 50–51, 69–70.

42 Cf. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957). Frye's accounts of the quest-romance (p. 187) and comedy (p. 171) give some suggestion of the universality of this pattern.

43 On Dramatic Method (New York, 1956), pp. 42–44.

44 Cawley, pp. xxiv, xxviii.

45 “Poetry and Drama,” On Poetry and Poets (New York, 1957), p. 78.