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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 April 2007
In the late medieval morality play Everyman, the character Death makes a grand entrance on stage only to be met with utter misrecognition and incomprehension. When Death explains that he is here to take Everyman on a “longe iourney” to make his “rekenynge … before God,” Everyman's incomprehension is humorous even as it reveals him to be deeply unready for Death's summons: he asks Death, “Sholde I not come agayne shortly?” Everyman's inability to recognize the permanence of Death's “journey” raises the question for the audience of what might constitute such a recognition. Depicting death as a presence initially inscrutable to its central character, Everyman asks what it means to make our own mortality present to us, to recognize our finitude, and to remember that we must die. The play presents a surprisingly circuitous answer to that question, first providing a sustained investigation into how one learns the meaning of a word, and then concluding that individual understandings of words, concepts, and mortality emerge through the interpersonal relations and communal rituals that reveal and guarantee their meanings. Through its focus on the interrelational dimensions of penance, the play emphasizes the impact of community on the formation of Everyman's self-understanding. By showing penance in performance, Everyman reveals penance itself to be performative, dynamic, and capable of changing Everyman's understanding of both himself and his relation to others. Attending to the play's investigation of language and penitential practice allows us to understand more fully the role of theatricality in medieval notions of subjectivity, wherein even the most individual of experiences are shown to rely on communal processes of generating meaning. By investigating Everyman's presentation of the communal dimensions of penance, we can develop a new understanding of a morality play itself as a deeply social drama.
1. Everyman, ed. A. C. Cawley (1961; repr., with corrections and additional biography, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1981), lines 103, 106–7, 149; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. The epigraph appears in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 1.2777–9. In the remainder of this essay, I translate Middle English texts when the original language of the passage differs significantly from modern English; accordingly, all Middle English quotations, with the exception of those taken from Everyman, are followed by a translation.
2. Foucault develops his theory of confession most famously in The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1978), see 18–21, 58–67.
3. See Patterson, , “The Subject of Confession: The Pardoner and the Rhetoric of Penance,” in Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 367–421Google Scholar; and Lochrie, , Covert Operations: The Medieval Uses of Secrecy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Katherine, C. Little has recently demonstrated the ways in which the Lollard rejection of auricular confession complicates our understanding of medieval discourses of the self in Confession and Resistance: Defining the Self in Late Medieval England (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 2006)Google Scholar.
4. A growing number of studies have emphasized the communal and public dimensions of medieval penance. See John Bossy, , Christianity in the West: 1400–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; idem, “The Social History of Confession in the Age of the Reformation,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 25 (1975): 21–38; Mansfield, Mary C., The Humiliation of Sinners: Public Penance in Thirteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995)Google Scholar; and Myers, W. David, “Poor, Sinning Folk”: Confession and Conscience in Counter-Reformation Germany (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996)Google Scholar. Sarah Beckwith reads the York cycle as an exploration of penitential community in Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi Plays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
5. Beckwith, 92–5, discusses the emphasis on communal reconciliation in medieval penitential manuals. Mansfield, 41–9, analyzes the early history of this classificatory scheme.
6. John Mirk, , Instructions for Parish Priests by John Myrc, ed. Peacock, Edward, Early English Text Society [hereafter, EETS], e.s., 31 (1902; reprint, New York: Greenwood Press, 1969), 70.Google Scholar
7. For descriptions of the ars moriendi tradition, see Mâle, Émile, L'Art religieux de la fin du moyen âge en France: Étude sur l'iconographie du moyen âge et sur ses sources d'inspiration (Paris: Librairie A. Colin, 1908), 412–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sister O'Connor, Mary Catherine, The Art of Dying Well: The Development of the Ars Moriendi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942)Google Scholar; Lee Beaty, Nancy, The Craft of Dying: A Study in the Literary Tradition of the Ars Moriendi in England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970)Google Scholar; Philippe Ariès, , The Hour of Our Death (New York: Knopf, 1981), 106–32, 300–5Google Scholar; Duffy, Eamon, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 301–37Google Scholar; Binski, Paul, Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 33–47Google Scholar; David Cressy, , Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 389–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Houlbrooke, Ralph, Death, Religion, and the Family in England, 1480–1750 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 183–219Google Scholar.
8. The Book of the Craft of Dying, in Yorkshire Writers: Richard Rolle of Hampole and His Followers, ed. C. Horstmann, 2 vols. (London: S. Sonnenschein, 1896), 2: 418.
9. Duffy, 317–18.
10. For recent work on the corporate and communal nature of medieval and early modern commemorative practices, see Geary, Patrick J., “Exchange and Interaction between the Living and the Dead in Early Medieval Society,” in Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 77–92Google Scholar; Binski, esp. 21–8, 70–122; Cohn, Samuel K. Jr., “The Place of the Dead in Flanders and Tuscany,” in The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Gordon, Bruce and Marshall, Peter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 16–43Google Scholar; and Clive Burgess, “‘Longing to Be Prayed for’: Death and Commemoration in an English Parish in the Later Middle Ages,” in ibid., 44–65.
11. Duffy, 474–5.
12. Ibid., 475. Such accounts of the impact of the abolition of the doctrine of purgatory during the Reformation have been influential in recent studies of early modern drama; see, e.g., Neill, Michael, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in Early Modern Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Greenblatt, Stephen, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001)Google Scholar.
13. Spivack, , Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil: The History of a Metaphor in Relationship to His Major Villains (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), 226Google Scholar.
14. The narrative of the rise of the individual in the Renaissance originates in Burckhardt, Jacob, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. Middlemore, S. G. C. (New York: Harper, 1958Google Scholar; German original, 1860). For the argument that the abstract, allegorical personifications of the medieval morality play progressively develop into the concrete, individualized characters in early modern drama, see in particular Spivack. A number of other critics have variously traced the morality play's influence on Elizabethan dramatic structure, characterization, and stagecraft, including Tillyard, E. M. W., Shakespeare's History Plays (New York: Macmillan, 1946)Google Scholar; Ribner, Irving, The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957)Google Scholar; Bevington, David, From Mankind to Marlowe: Growth of Structure in the Popular Drama of Tudor England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Potter, Robert, The English Morality Play: Origins, History, and Influence of a Dramatic Tradition (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975)Google Scholar; Weimann, Robert, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978)Google Scholar; and Belsey, Catherine, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London: Methuen, 1985)Google Scholar.
15. Belsey, 43.
16. Kolve, , “Everyman and the Parable of the Talents,” in The Medieval Drama: Papers of the Third Annual Conference of the Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, ed. Sticca, Sandro (Albany: SUNY Press, 1972), 69–98, at 74Google Scholar. John Watkins cites this passage as an instance of a larger critical tendency to incorporate Everyman into a progressivist literary history in “The Allegorical Theatre: Moralities, Interludes, and Protestant Drama,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 767–92, at 774.
17. Spinrad, , The Summons of Death on the Medieval and Renaissance Stage (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1987), 68Google Scholar.
18. Ariès, 112.
19. See in particular ibid., 107–18.
20. The narrative of the rise of the individual is thoroughly critiqued in two well-known essays: Patterson, Lee, “On the Margin: Postmodernism, Ironic History, and Medieval Studies,” Speculum 65 (1990): 87–108Google Scholar; and Aers, David, “A Whisper in the Ear of Early Modernists; or, Reflections on Literary Critics Writing the ‘History of the Subject,” in Culture and History, 1350–1600, ed. Aers, David (Detroit: Wayne State Press, 1992), 177–202Google Scholar. For important challenges to the morality theory, see Wasson, John, “The Morality Play: Ancestor of Elizabethan Drama?” in The Drama in the Middle Ages: Comparative and Critical Essays, ed. Davidson, Clifford, Gianakaris, C. J., and Stroupe, John H. (New York: AMS Press, 1982), 316–27Google Scholar; Norland, Howard, Drama in Early Tudor Britain: 1485–1558 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995)Google Scholar; and Cartwright, Kent, Theatre and Humanism: English Drama in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
21. Watkins, 773.
22. It is of course a central project of poststructural criticism to undo the division between individual and society, inner and outer, public and private, and so on. It is also a central insight of Foucauldian forms of analysis that the concepts central to our self-understanding are the product of social and discursive practices. What I wish to emphasize in this essay, however, is the degree to which Everyman points us to the Wittgensteinian insight that our understandings of the meanings of the words we use are bound up with our specific interactions with others. In this vein, Rowan Williams provides a particularly illuminating account of how the picture of a private, interior self emerges through human interactions in “Interiority and Epiphany: A Reading in New Testament Ethics,” Modern Theology 13 (1997): 29–51; as well as in his Lost Icons: Reflections on Cultural Bereavement (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse, 2000). See also Cavell's, Stanley commentary on Wittgenstein and the idea of the privacy of the soul in The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), esp. 329–61Google Scholar.
23. Burckhardt, 143.
24. Muldrew, , “From a ‘Light Cloak’ to an ‘Iron Cage’: Historical Changes in the Relation between Community and Individualism,” in Communities in Early Modern England: Networks, Place, Rhetoric, ed. Shepard, Alexandra and Withington, Phil (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 156–77, at 159Google Scholar.
25. Of course, Everyman may never have been staged; more than one critic has pointed out that the subtitle of the Skot edition of the play announces itself as a “treatyse … in maner of a morall playe.” However, I follow Mills, David in “The Theaters of Everyman,” in From Page to Performance: Essays in Early English Drama, ed. Alford, John A. (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1995), 127–49Google Scholar, in arguing that, at the very least, Everyman's dramatic form encourages its reader to respond to the text as a theatrical work and according to contemporary theatrical conventions (128). For the argument that Everyman's translator has emended the original Dutch play for a reading audience, see Vanhoutte, Jacqueline, “When Elckerlijc Becomes Everyman: Translating the Dutch into English, Performance into Print,” Studies in the Humanities 22 (1995): 100–16Google Scholar.
26. For a discussion of the spatial semiotics of medieval theatre, see Fischer-Lichte, Erika, The Semiotics of Theater (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992), esp. 93–114Google Scholar.
27. Ryan, , “Doctrine and Dramatic Structure in Everyman,” Speculum 32.4 (1957): 722–35, at 723CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
28. Hunter, “Making Meaning,” interview with Jays, David, in Moral Mysteries: Essays to Accompany a Season of Medieval Drama at the Other Place, ed. Jays, David (Stratford-upon-Avon: RSC Publications, 1997), 81–92, at 83Google Scholar.
29. For the texts of these three fifteenth-century East Anglican morality plays, see The Macro Plays: “The Castle of Perseverance,” “Wisdom,” “Mankind,” ed. Mark Eccles, EETS, o.s., 262 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969).
30. For a study of the implications of the quite literal ways in which medieval theatre put death onstage, see Enders, Jody, Death by Drama and Other Medieval Urban Legends (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002)Google Scholar.
31. In my account of the shifting semiosis of the names of Everyman's characters, I draw on Emmerson's, Richard “The Morality Character as Sign,” Mediaevalia 18 (1995): 191–220Google Scholar.
32. Other characters refer to Good Deeds using feminine pronouns; see, e.g., 484.
33. The precise doctrinal identity of the character of Knowledge has been the subject of some debate in Everyman criticism: for a survey of the critical discussion surrounding the nature of the character Knowledge, see Warren, Michael J., “Everyman: Knowledge Once More,” Dalhousie Review 54 (1974): 136–46Google Scholar.
34. On Everyman's education as self-knowledge, see, e.g., Jambeck, Thomas, “Everyman and the Implications of Bernardine Humanism in the Character ‘Knowledge,” Medievalia et Humanistica, n.s., 8 (1977): 103–23Google Scholar; and Munson, William, “Knowing and Doing in Everyman,” Chaucer Review 19 (1985): 252–71Google Scholar.
35. Munson, 261.
36. The ars moriendi exhibits a similar preoccupation with the solitary character of death. Even as the Craft of Dying stresses the responsibilities of the living and the dying to each other, it instructs the dying to renounce inordinate love of temporal things, including love of one's spouse, children, friends, and worldly riches (412). In both Everyman and the ars moriendi, this isolation is necessary to recognizing one's correct relationship to the world of others.
37. Munson, 261.
38. Ibid., 266–7. Munson's reading of this moment in the play is by no means pervasive. Contrast it, e.g., with Ryan, 730–5; and Kolve, 81.
39. See Ryan, 730–5.
40. See Comper, Frances M. M., “The Book of the Craft of Dying” and Other Early English Tracts Concerning Death (New York: Arno Press, 1977), 137–68Google Scholar.
41. The Legenda aurea's “faithful friend” story is quoted in A. C. Cawley's introduction to Everyman, xviii–xix.
42. The “faithful friend” tales that identify the Good Deeds figure with Christ can be found in The Early English Versions of the “Gesta Romanorum,” ed. Sidney J. H. Herrtage, EETS, e.s., 33 (London: N. Trübner, 1879), 131–2. For a more complete description of Everyman's influences and analogues, see Cawley's introduction to his 1961 edition of Everyman, xiii–xix; and Kolve, esp. 74–75, 87–88.
43. See I John 4: 7–21.
44. See his discussion of the theological virtues in Summa theologiae, Latin and English, ed. T. Gilby and T. C. O'Brien (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1969), 1–2.62.1.
45. Langland, William, “The Vision of Piers Plowman”: The B Version, ed. Kane, George and Donaldson, E. Talbot (London: Athlone, 1975), 15.161–2aGoogle Scholar. The translation is from Donaldson, E. Talbot, trans., “Piers Plowman”: An Alliterative Verse Translation, ed. Kirk, Elizabeth D. and Anderson, Judith H. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990)Google Scholar.
46. Mirk, John, Mirk's Festial, ed. Erbe, Theodor, EETS, e.s., 96 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1905), 76Google Scholar.
47. See, e.g., “The Last Judgement,” The Chester Mystery Cycle, 2 vols., ed. R. M. Lumiansky and David Mills, EETS, s.s. 3 (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), 1: 452–84.
48. Paxson, , The Poetics of Personification (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 46CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
49. See Kolve's discussion (82–4) of how the play's grammatical ambiguity serves to implicate the audience both individually and collectively.
50. Cavell, , “The Avoidance of Love,” in Disowning Knowledge: In Six Plays of Shakespeare (1987; repr., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 39–123, at 108–9Google Scholar. See also Mulhall's, Stephen lucid discussion of this passage in Stanley Cavell: Philosophy's Recounting of the Ordinary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 196–201CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
51. See Cavell, “Avoidance of Love,” 103–5.
52. Here, I draw on Cavell, Claim of Reason, 361.