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.
Type Research Article Information Theatre Survey , Volume 48 , Issue 1 , May 2007 , pp. 121 - 141 Copyright © The American Society for Theatre Research, Inc. 2007Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)
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 – 421 Google 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 – 47 Google 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 – 219 Google 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.