The Somonyng of Everyman (The Summoning of Everyman), usually referred to simply as Everyman, is a late 15th-century morality play by an anonymous English author, printed circa 1530. It is possibly a translation of the Dutch play Elckerlijc (Everyman).
The plot is about how the good and evil deeds of one's life will be tallied by God after death, as in a ledger book. The play is the allegorical accounting of the life of Everyman, who represents all mankind. In the course of the action, Everyman tries to convince other characters to accompany him in the hope of improving his life. All the characters are also mystical; the conflict between good and evil is shown by the interactions between the characters. Everyman is being singled out because it is difficult for him to find characters to accompany him on his pilgrimage. Everyman eventually realizes through this pilgrimage that he is essentially alone, despite all the personified characters that were supposed necessities and friends to him. Everyman learns that when you are brought to death and placed before God, all you are left with are your own good deeds.
Sources
The play was written in Middle English during the Tudor period, but the identity of the author is unknown. Although the play was apparently produced with some frequency in the seventy-five years following its composition, no production records survive.[1]
There is a similar Dutch-language morality play of the same period called Elckerlijc. In the early 20th century, scholars did not agree on which of these plays was the original, or even on their relation to a later Latin work named Homulus.[2][3] By the 1980s, Arthur Cawley went so far as to say that the "evidence for … Elckerlijk is certainly very strong",[4] and now Davidson, Walsh, and Broos hold that "more than a century of scholarly discussion has ... convincingly shown that Everyman is a translation and adaptation from the Dutch Elckerlijc".[5]
Setting
The cultural setting is based on the Roman Catholicism of the era. Everyman attains afterlife in heaven by means of good works and the Catholic Sacraments, in particular Confession, Penance, Unction, Viaticum and receiving the Eucharist.
Synopsis
The oldest surviving example of the script begins with this paragraph on the frontispiece:
Here begynneth a treatyſe how þe hye Fader of Heuen ſendeth Dethe to ſomon euery creature to come and gyue a counte of theyr lyues in this worlde, and is in maner of a morall playe.
Here begins a treatise how the high Father of Heaven sends Death to summon every creature to come and give account of their lives in this world, and is in the manner of a moral play.
After a brief prologue asking the audience to listen, God speaks, lamenting that humans have become too absorbed in material wealth and riches to follow Him, so He commands Death to go to Everyman and summon him to heaven to make his reckoning. Death arrives at Everyman's side to tell him it is time to die and face judgment. Upon hearing this, Everyman is distressed, so begs for more time. Death denies this, but will allow Everyman to find a companion for his journey.[6]
Everyman's friend Fellowship promises to go anywhere with him, but when he hears of the true nature of Everyman's journey, he refuses to go. Everyman then calls on Kindred and Cousin and asks them to go with him, but they both refuse. In particular, Cousin explains a fundamental reason why no people will accompany Everyman: they have their own accounts to write as well. Afterwards, Everyman asks Goods, who will not come: God's judgment will be severe because of the selfishness implied in Goods's presence.[7]
Everyman then turns to Good Deeds, who says she would go with him, but she is too weak as Everyman has not loved her in his life. Good Deeds summons her sister Knowledge to accompany them, and together they go to see Confession. In the presence of Confession, Everyman begs God for forgiveness and repents his sins, punishing himself with a scourge. After his scourging, Everyman is absolved of his sins, and as a result, Good Deeds becomes strong enough to accompany Everyman on his journey with Death.[8]
Good Deeds then summons Beauty, Strength, Discretion and Five Wits to join them, and they agree to accompany Everyman as he goes to a priest to take sacrament. After the sacrament, Everyman tells them where his journey ends, and again they all abandon him – except for Good Deeds. Even Knowledge cannot accompany him after he leaves his physical body, but will stay with him until the time of death.[9]
Content at last, Everyman climbs into his grave with Good Deeds at his side and dies, after which they ascend together into heaven, where they are welcomed by an Angel. The play closes as the Doctor enters and explains that in the end, a man will only have his Good Deeds to accompany him beyond the grave.[10]
Adaptations
A modern stage production of Everyman did not appear until July 1901 when The Elizabethan Stage Society of William Poel gave three outdoor performances at the Charterhouse in London.[11] Poel then partnered with British actor Ben Greet to produce the play throughout Britain, with runs on the American Broadway stage from 1902 to 1918,[12] and concurrent tours throughout North America. These productions differed from past performances in that women were cast in the title role, rather than men. Film adaptations of the 1901 version of the play appeared in 1913 and 1914, with the 1913 film being made with an early color two-process, Kinemacolor.[13][14]
1917 Jan 5 Los Angeles Evening Express ad for world premiere of The Play of Everyman by Sterling
Another well-known version of the play is Jedermann by the Austrian playwright Hugo von Hofmannsthal, which has been performed annually at the Salzburg Festival since 1920,[15] and adapted into film several times. Jedermann received an English language adaptation in 1917, The Play of Everyman. The 1917 adaptation was performed at the Trinity Auditorium in Los Angeles, followed by a run at the Burbank Theater in Burbank, California, and was translated and adapted by George Sterling with "Richard" Ryszard Ordynski and music by Victor Schertzinger. The Sterling adaptation was performed again in 1936 at the Hollywood Bowl with music by Einar Nelson.
Frederick Franck published a modernised version of the tale entitled "Everyone", drawing on Buddhist influence.[16]
A direct-to-video film of Everyman was made in 2002, directed by John Farrell, which updated the setting to the early 21st century, including Death as a businessman in dark glasses with a briefcase, and Goods being played by a talking personal computer.[17]
In 2014, London theatre company Scena Mundi Theatre (then Little Spaniel Theatre) staged a production of Everyman at St Bartholomew the Great, a Church in the City of London. The play, directed by Cecilia Dorland, played on the church's medieval setting and kept the Middle English text intact. A strong ensemble piece using music and singing, it was very well received by critics.
The morality play is a genre of medieval and early Tudor drama. The term is used by scholars of literary and dramatic history to refer to a genre of play texts from the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries that feature personified concepts alongside angels and demons, who are engaged in a struggle to persuade a protagonist who represents a generic human character toward either good or evil. The common story arc of these plays follows "the temptation, fall and redemption of the protagonist".
Henry VI, Part 2 is a history play by William Shakespeare believed to have been written in 1591 and set during the lifetime of King Henry VI of England. Whereas Henry VI, Part 1 deals primarily with the loss of England's French territories and the political machinations leading up to the Wars of the Roses, and Henry VI, Part 3 deals with the horrors of that conflict, 2 Henry VI focuses on the King's inability to quell the bickering of his nobles, the death of his trusted adviser Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, the rise of the Duke of York and the inevitability of armed conflict. As such, the play culminates with the opening battle of the War, the First Battle of St Albans (1455).
Henry VI, Part 3 is a history play by William Shakespeare believed to have been written in 1591 and set during the lifetime of King Henry VI of England. Whereas 1 Henry VI deals with the loss of England's French territories and the political machinations leading up to the Wars of the Roses and 2 Henry VI focuses on the King's inability to quell the bickering of his nobles, and the inevitability of armed conflict, 3 Henry VI deals primarily with the horrors of that conflict, with the once stable nation thrown into chaos and barbarism as families break down and moral codes are subverted in the pursuit of revenge and power.
Elckerlijc is a morality play from the Low Countries which was written in Dutch somewhere around the year 1470. It was first printed in 1495. The play was extremely successful and may have been the original source for the English play Everyman, as well as many other translations for other countries. The authorship of Elckerlijc is attributed to Peter van Diest, a medieval writer from the Low Countries.
Georgius Macropedius was a Dutch humanist, schoolmaster and "the greatest Latin playwright of the 16th century."
Everyman is a stock character in drama, originally appearing in mediaeval morality plays.
Middle Dutch literature (1150–1500) is the Dutch literature produced in the Low Countries from the 12th century to the 16th century. It is preceded by only a few fragmentary texts existing in Old Dutch, and it was succeeded by Dutch Renaissance and Golden Age literature.
The everyman is a stock character of fiction. An ordinary and humble character, the everyman is generally a protagonist whose benign conduct fosters the audience's identification with them.
Everyman is a novel by Philip Roth, published by Houghton Mifflin in May 2006. It won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2007. It is Roth's third novel to receive the prize.
Medieval theatre encompasses theatrical in the period between the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century and the beginning of the Renaissance in approximately the 15th century. The category of "medieval theatre" is vast, covering dramatic performance in Europe over a thousand-year period. A broad spectrum of genres needs to be considered, including mystery plays, morality plays, farces and masques. The themes were almost always religious. The most famous examples are the English cycle dramas, the York Mystery Plays, the Chester Mystery Plays, the Wakefield Mystery Plays, and the N-Town Plays, as well as the morality play known as Everyman. One of the first surviving secular plays in English is The Interlude of the Student and the Girl.
Martin Chuzzlewit is a 1994 TV serial produced by the BBC, based on the 1844 novel by Charles Dickens, adapted by David Lodge and directed by Pedr James. The music was composed by Geoffrey Burgon.
The Wakefield or Towneley Mystery Plays are a series of thirty-two mystery plays based on the Bible most likely performed around the Feast of Corpus Christi probably in the town of Wakefield, England during the Late Middle Ages until 1576. It is one of only four surviving English mystery play cycles. Some scholars argue that the Wakefield cycle is not a cycle at all, but a mid-sixteenth-century compilation, formed by a scribe bringing together three separate groups of plays.
Jedermann. Das Spiel vom Sterben des reichen Mannes is a play by the Austrian playwright Hugo von Hofmannsthal. It is based on several medieval mystery plays, including the late 15th-century English morality play Everyman. It was first performed on 1 December 1911 in Berlin, directed by Max Reinhardt at the Circus Schumann. Since 1920, it has been performed regularly at the Salzburg Festival.
Sinnekins are stock characters often found in medieval drama, especially morality plays. They most often occur as pairs of devilish characters who exert their perfidious influence on the main character of the drama.
Arthur Clare Cawley was Professor of English Language and Medieval English Literature at the University of Leeds.
The Brome play of Abraham and Isaac is a fifteenth-century play of unknown authorship, written in an East Anglian dialect of Middle English, which dramatises the story of the Akedah, the binding of Isaac.
Everyman is a modern play produced by Charles Frohman and directed by Ben Greet that is based on the medieval morality play of the same name. The modern play was first performed in 1901 on tour in Britain. It opened in the United States in 1902 on Broadway, where it ran for 75 performances, followed by tours over the next several years that included four Broadway revivals.
Everyman, Op. 83, is a theatre score—comprising 16 numbers—for soloists, mixed choir, orchestra, piano, and organ by the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius; he wrote the music in 1916 to accompany a Finnish-language production of the Austrian author Hugo von Hofmannsthal's 1911 play of the same name.
Everybody is a play written by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. It is a modern adaptation of the 15th-century morality play Everyman, one of the first recorded plays in the English language. The play premiered Off-Broadway at the Irene Diamond Stage at Signature Theatre Company on February 21, 2017 with previews beginning January 31, 2017 and a closing date of March 19, 2017. The play features the unique casting quirk of using a lottery system to define the roles of the play. Each actor must memorize the entire script and be prepared to play any role. This is meant to symbolize the randomness of death. The original production was directed by Lila Neugebauer and featured an ensemble of nine performers.
The Play of Everyman is American poet and playwright George Sterling's adaptation of Austrian writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal's 1911 German play Jedermann. Lavish productions of The Play of Everyman in 1917 and 1936 were acclaimed by critics and boosted the careers of people involved. Sterling's adaptation was also staged in 1941 in New York City and 1977 in Brentwood, Los Angeles.
Cawley, A. C. (1984), "Rev. of The Dutch Elckerlijc Is Prior to the English Everyman, by E. R. Tigg", Review of English Studies, 35 (139): 434, JSTOR515829
Speaight, Robert (1954), William Poel and the Elizabethan revival, London: Heinemann, pp.161–168.
Tigg, E. R. (1939), "Is Elckerlyc prior to Everyman?", Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 38 (4): 568–596, JSTOR27704551
de Vocht, Henry (1947), Everyman: A Comparative Study of Texts and Sources, Material for the Study of the Old English Drama, vol.20, Louvain: Librairie Universitaire
Wilkie, Brian; Hurt, James, eds. (2000). Literature of the Western World, Volume I, The Ancient World Through the Renaissance (5thed.). Longman. ISBN978-0130186669.
Davidson, Clifford; Walsh, Martin W.; Broos, Ton J., eds. (2007). "Everyman and Its Dutch Original". Robbins Library Digital Projects, University of Rochester. Retrieved 20 February 2016.
Meijer, Reinder (1971), Literature of the Low Countries: A Short History of Dutch Literature in the Netherlands and Belgium, New York: Twayne Publishers, pp.55–57, 62, ISBN978-9024721009
Takahashi, Genji (1953), A Study of Everyman with Special Reference to the Source of its Plot, Ai-iku-sha, pp.33–39, OCLC8214306
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