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In an important essay first published in 1972, V. A. Kolve pointed out that "the most distinctive part" of Everyman's language, "the essential verbal matrix of the play," deals with economic exchanges and the account book the protagonist must present to God at his special judgment. (1) Kolve's study, which draws on exegetical tradition to argue that the "source behind the sources" of Everyman is the Parable of the Talents found in Matthew 25:14-30, (2) does well to stress the foregrounding of financial terminology in Everyman, but notable aspects of that pervasive motif remain unexamined. Besides the language of accountancy and lending that it shares with the parable, Everyman also repeatedly invokes the concept of donation; and all of these ideas function in relation to material wealth, which also features prominently in the text but appears in Kolve's interpretation, like the coins in patristic readings of the parable, to represent human qualities, capabilities, and resources in general. (3) Moreover, the view of Everyman developed in relation to the Parable of the Talents joins most other discussions of the play, before and since, in making the protagonist's sinfulness seem unparticularized in nature and abstract in representation. Morality plays are intended to present matter of universal import, but this does not mean that their representations lack all specificity. While the events and characters in these works instantiate what their writers take to be general principles, the portrayals that illustrate those principles always proceed from and were understood within contexts investing them with cultural meaning. Interpretations of Everyman that consider only its theological ideas set aside many features of the text that contribute to the vision it promotes of the social world and the people who constitute it. In this essay we will suggest that the play's economic language has literal as well as metaphorical significance: there is good reason to believe that Everyman is less about mismanaging figurative assets than it is about loving the wrong kind of wealth.
This reading, too, has a scriptural foundation, also in the Gospel of Matthew:
nolite thesaurizare vobis thesauros in terra ubi erugo et tinea demolitur ubi lures effodiunt et furantur Thesaurizate autem vobis thesauros in caelo ubi neque erugo neque tinea demolitur et ubi lures non effodiufit nec furantur ubi enim est thesaurus tuus ibi est et cor tuum. (Matt. 6:19-21) (4) [Lay not up to yourselves treasures on earth: where the rust, and moth consume, and where thieves break through, and steal. But lay up to yourselves treasures in heaven: where neither the rust nor moth doth consume, and where thieves do not break through, nor steal. For where thy treasure is, there is thy heart also.] (Douay-Rheims)
Although Jesus' admonition has a metaphorical element (the idea that there is another kind of treasure more enduring than material riches), a firmly practical orientation underlies these words and their devaluation of earthly wealth. This passage's interest in social application is made even clearer by its context in Matthew 6, which includes statements that teach the observance of alms and declare that one cannot serve both God and money. (5) In not relying solely on theoretical formulation or figurative meaning, which may leave a challenging interpretive distance between the affirmation of principle and its practical realization, these verses from the Sermon on the Mount differ from the genre of the parable with its characteristically oblique logic. Indeed, the gospel accounts sometimes thematize the opacity of parables as their hearers ponder these compact narratives and struggle to grasp their bearing on lived experience. (6) Jesus' words here, by contrast, explicitly link attitude with action so as to demand not only reflection on the lesson, but its execution. We find the same practical orientation and the same moral in Everyman, which may almost be read as an extended gloss on this scriptural text.
Everyman's purpose is to dramatize spiritual peril and the means of salvation, but its method in doing so reflects earthly concerns that are both concrete and particular. It concentrates on the affairs and actions of persons in the world, whereas other morality plays often represent the interior drama of the soul as primary and treat outward aspects of life only as they proceed from it. What is more, these affairs and actions have a strongly economic aspect. The world of Everyman turns on an axis of the love of money. This misdirected desire must be supplanted by a different attitude toward wealth, one that subordinates material value to spiritual value and even finds ways of converting the former into the latter. In what follows we will show that these two qualities of Everyman--its persistent economic alertness, both in literal and in metaphorical terms, and its emphasis on behavior rather than the private life of the soul--are integral to the play's ways of making meaning. Moreover, these two qualities work together to connect the play with social commentary more closely than has so far been observed.
Everyman is a literary artifact of early Tudor England, written sometime after about 1485 and extant in four partial or complete texts printed between c.1515 and c.1535. (7) Accordingly, our analysis will take notice throughout of two overlapping discursive environments that are likely to have informed its reception. The first, a constellation of literary conventions coinciding topically with this play, can illuminate its probable meanings for an audience acquainted with late Middle English literary and dramatic traditions still viable at the time of Everyman's documented existence. The second context, one in which it has seldom been considered, is a group of mainly early sixteenth-century works with which the texts of Everyman share genre, time, place, and medium. Several printed plays having relevant affinities with Everyman, most of them morality plays, circulated simultaneously with it in London: Hick Scorner, The World and the Child, Youth, Henry Medwall's Nature, John Skelton's Magnyfycence, John Rastell's Nature of the Four Elements, and Gentleness and Nobility, possibly by John Heywood. (8) Our focus on Everyman's English contexts should not be seen as an attempt to suppress its derivation from the Middle Dutch Elckerlijc. (9) In fact, we will take cognizance of this source, because some previously unremarked departures from it may shed light on the construction and priorities of the English play. (10) But Everyman's texts nowhere indicate its origin in Dutch rhetoricians' drama such that an early English audience can be presumed to have known of it; (11) and even had they been aware of its roots, normal readers or viewers of Everyman would not have believed they could understand it only through critical comparison with Elckerlijc. They surely encountered it as a play in English, situated de facto within English social, dramatic, and literary milieux. Sensitivity to Everyman's place in the English literary landscape of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries reveals that the play is engaged with the discourse of social complaint more deeply than literary historians have yet observed. This engagement, we will argue, is encoded in Everyman's handling of his wealth.
I. Material Wealth and Avarice
The besetting sin in Everyman is avarice, the inordinate love of worldly goods. (12) God himself says so: his first statements sound the note of his displeasure that all creatures are
Lyuynge without drede in worldly prosperyte. Of ghostly syght the people be so blynde, Drowned in synne, they know me not for theyr God. In worldely ryches is all theyr mynde. (24-27)
This message is reinforced a few lines later when God describes humankind as "so combred with worldly ryches / That nedes on them I must do iustice" (60-61). When these generalizations about humanity take body and voice in the character of Everyman, signs immediately begin to appear that immoderate concern for wealth is indeed his own chief moral failing. In response to God's orders, Death says that he will search out every person who lives "beestly" (74) and does not fear God, but he singles out the avaricious ("he that loueth rychesse," 76); and immediately after saying so, he approaches Everyman, whose "mynde is on flesshely lustes and his treasure" (82). Everyman first appears fashionably dressed and insouciant, mindful of earthly contentments and preoccupied with wealth.
In the play's first major dialogue, Everyman's faith in riches leads to his ridiculous attempt to bribe Death. We will discuss this episode in some detail later. For now, what is most important is Death's revelation to Everyman that his wealth is not finally his at all:
[Dethe:] What, wenest thou thy lyue is gyuen the, And thy worldely gooddes also? Eueryman: I had wende so, veryle. Dethe: Nay, nay, it was but lende the; For as soone as thou arte go, Another a whyle shall haue it, and than go ther-fro, Euen as thou hast done. (161-67)
Death's mention of "worldely gooddes" at this moment is, strictly speaking, a non sequitur, he may naturally enough bring up the idea that Everyman's life is merely on loan, given that they are discussing its approaching end, but his association of wealth with it is arbitrary in the immediate context. The pairing suggests, however, that this news is on the same order of magnitude to Everyman--and to the play's didactic purposes--as the news of his mortality. Significantly, when Death expands on his own answer to his previous question, he resolves his ambiguous singular "it" in line 164 as wealth only, not life, in the explanation that it will pass on to others as if Everyman had never even had it. Death knows that this information hits Everyman where it hurts most.
Everyman's subsequent dialogues with Fellowship and with Kindred and Cousin offer only hints of excessive reliance on riches within the playtext itself, as when it is insinuated that Fellowship is a bought friend. (13) But to any audience familiar with the widely distributed exemplary tale of the Unfaithful Friends or with the ars moriendi tradition, both of whose close affiliations with Everyman have been obvious to modern readers, implications of avarice would hover around these scenes. In both edited versions of the Gesta Romanorum, at the beginning of the Unfaithful Friends analogue the principal character sets out to buy friends in order to provide himself with help in any future time of need. (14) More generally, all the English analogues to Everyman's abandonment by Fellowship, Kindred, and Cousin are moralized to exemplify the futility of trust in earthly riches as well as in human companions. (15) In all of them, the first of the friends to renege--a friend whom, we are told in most versions, the protagonist loves as much as or more than himself--is allegorized as worldly wealth. And while some of these parallel tales identify the friend who finally proves to be faithful with Christ, in others he turns out to represent good works, particularly almsgiving, the standard remedy prescribed for avarice in moral literature. (16) The distress Everyman feels at the desertion of Fellowship, Kindred, and Cousin itself confirms the imputation to him of worldliness. Here the very popular ars moriendi literature of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries becomes informative. (17) These works counsel contemptus mundi, the avoidance or renunciation of temporal attractions whether material or human, and assert that in the series of temptations preceding death, the love of family and friends is essentially identical to the love of possessions in the nature of the danger it poses to the soul. While present-day readers might not readily group human attachments and greed for riches under the same heading, the writers of artes moriendi did: both signaled spiritually perilous devotion to the things of the world. (18)
Of central importance in dramatizing Everyman's principal failing, of course, is his encounter with Goods. The first notable fact in this scene is simply the quantity of wealth at Everyman's disposal. Goods' description of his position and posture (an implicit set of directions for a stage property) emphasizes a sprawling, bulky arrangement that seemingly answers any doubt as to whether Everyman could back up his offer to pay Death the sum of a thousand pounds:
I lye here in corners, trussed and pyled so hye, And in chestes I am locked so fast, Also sacked in bagges. Thou mayst se with thyn eye I can not styre; in packes, lowe I lye. (394-97)
Goods has the final place in the play's first succession of disappointments for Everyman, following the desertion of Fellowship, Kindred, and Cousin, because it is the "friend" he has most set his heart on. Everyman expresses stronger attachment to Goods than to the others:
All my lyfe I haue loued ryches. (388) ... all my lyre I haue had ioye & pleasure in the. (408) Alas, I haue the loued, and had grete pleasure All my lyfe-dayes on good and treasure. (427-28) A, Good, thou hast had longe my hertely loue; I gaue the that whiche sholde be the Lordes aboue. (457-58)
As the last extract shows, he has even set riches in the place of God, as sure a sign of avarice as one could ask for. (19)
Everyman begins in the belief that his love for Goods is reciprocated, and his attitude toward wealth is summed up by his perverse creed that "money maketh all ryght that is wronge" (413). It is in accordance with this conviction that Everyman asks Goods to help his cause when he presents his account book before God. His faith in wealth has not been sufficiently shaken by Death's earlier correction, and now, when Goods himself must set Everyman straight, the unqualified wrong-headedness of his love of riches becomes inescapable. Perhaps Everyman was misled into placing excessive trust in Fellowship, Kindred, and Cousin by promises of their allegiance, the kinds of promises we see them make in ludicrous profusion before they understand where he must go. But in contrast to these figures, with their extravagant talk of loyalty, Goods has made no professions of friendship, and such cautious distinctions and qualified affirmations as he does make seem more consistent with the careful words of a contract: "Syr, & ye in the worlde haue sorowe or aduersyte, / That can I helpe you to remedy shortly" (401-2);
wenest thou that I am thyne? ... Naye, Eueryrnan, I saye no. As for a whyle I was lente the; A season thou hast had me in prosperyte. ... Wenest thou that I wyll folowe the? Nay, fro this worlde not, veryle. (437-45)
Whereas the human companions make excuses, Goods insists that he has done all he is obliged to do, and he will not pretend to have anything but a business relationship with Everyman. The friends were fickle, but Goods has simply acted according to his nature, which Everyman might have discerned had he been wiser:
Everyman: O false Good, cursed thou be, Thou traytour to God, that hast deceyued me And caught me in thy snare! Goodes: Mary, thou brought thy selfe in care, Wherof I am gladde. I must nedes laugh; I can not be sadde. (451-56)
The final lines quoted replace the earlier characters' hypocritical bonhomie with an unimpeachably honest sneer. As the scene ends and Everyman laments his predicament, he states once again that he has loved Goods the most, but sees that he has found the least comfort there in his moment of need (472-73).
Clearly it is avarice that has gotten Everyman into trouble, and this fact combines with other details in the text to tell us more than has usually been recognized about the protagonist. While his recovery from sin to grace through the standard penitential procedures traces a path available to all of humankind, he himself is not wholly generic. (20) He has a particular place in the earthly economy: Everyman's powerful confidence in goods would have made him recognizable to early audiences as a prosperous member of the mercantile and commercial class, a class particularly given (according to late medieval stereotypes) to avarice. (21) Of course, anyone can be too fond of possessions, even meager or merely desired ones, and not only entrepreneurs might be rich. But Everyman is rich, and the play offers no reason to suppose he has inherited old family wealth. Given his firm faith that money makes right what is wrong, it seems very likely not only that he is interested in money, but that it holds a central place in his consciousness. The imagery with which Goods is first presented--in the form of cash, heaped and stacked, bagged and locked in strongboxes--is the imagery of wealth in whose gain and management much care has been taken: wealth of achieved prosperity, not hereditary place.
One of the more recent analysts of the play has suggested that Everyman is a different kind of character altogether: the idle dandy or gallaunt, (22) who is conventionally a rakehell, a profligate country heir, a class-climber with courtly pretensions, or all of the above. The claim that Everyman fits this type is based mainly on the fact that he is dressed "gaily," or fashionably, at the start of the play. But aside from the mention of his dress, the associations are all wrong; Everyman's actions and attitudes are typical of the profit-seeker, not the gallant. He is defined by his wealth and his reliance on it, whereas wealth per se is incidental to portrayals of the dandy. (23) Elegant clothing is standard equipment for the gallant, certainly, but it is no less consonant with Everyman's identification as avaricious (in the moral landscape) or as a successful man of commerce (in the socioeconomic one). Long before Everyman walked the earth, Chaucer's pilgrim Merchant dressed nattily but behaved with a sober focus on the getting and keeping of wealth. (24) Similar is Margery Kempe's son, "dwellyng wyth a worschepful burgeys in Lynne, vsyng marchawndyse" whose "clothys wer al daggyd" and whom she urges "pat he xulde fie pe perellys of pis world & not settyn hys stody ne hys besynes so mech perup-on as he dede"; (25) and Gentleness and Nobility, a play contemporary with Skot's editions of Everyman, features a Merchant who enjoys "fyne cloth & costly aray" (326) but opens the play by emphasizing his skillful acquisition of wealth: he has "vsyd & the verey fet found" of commerce "and thereby gotton many a thousand pownd / wherfore now be cause of my grete ryches" (6-8). While stylish dress often functions as a convenient symbol of pride (normally the defining sin of the gallant) in the drama of the late Middle Ages, (26) in conjunction with other cues it can equally traditionally be connected with either lust or avarice, and dramatic contexts in which it has a clear association with the latter help to determine the glancing references to elegant dress in Everyman as a further marker of his wealth and his enjoyment of it. (27) The isolated fact of Everyman's fine appearance need not link him closely with the vainglorious, reckless gallant any more than the combination of fine dress and wealth must link him with the overweening tyrants of the late medieval stage, whose sumptuous clothing and riches are treated as a symbol of the temporal power in which they chiefly delight. (28)
Everyman's orientation to wealth--conceiving of it not primarily as a token of power, a concomitant of social station, or a disposable means to rowdy pleasure, but as a carefully tended store of pounds and pence--is far more likely to be associated with "getting" or commercial enterprise. The spendthrift gallant...
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