The Summoning of Everyman is one of the few known examples of dramatic literature in the form of a morality play, through which an understanding of the self-conceptualization of the 15th century English individual can be formed. Here the role of the protagonist is taken on by the character of Everyman, representative not of an individual person in the way contemporary Western drama often portrays its lead character, but rather of the entirety of the human species. The other characters he interacts with are all personifications of cultural concepts, such as Fellowship, Goods, and Knowledge. Everyman is summoned by God as he is reaching his inevitable meeting with Death, urged to find someone (or rather, some characterized facet of human culture) to travel into the afterlife with him, so as to not die “alone.”
It should be noted that from the beginning, it is made clear that there is a slight discrepancy between the literal “every man” (masculine pronouns, of course, denoting that the default human being is represented by maleness – a linguistic and cultural standard indicative of a patriarchal and male-centric society that still persists today) and the character “Everyman.” God states in his beginning monologue that “Every man liveth so after his own pleasure, / And yet of their life they be nothing sure,” denoting that God recognizes that individual persons have their own wants and desires, each not adhering to the same moral codes or life paths (40-41). He also states, “I proffered the people great multitude of mercy, / And few there be that asketh heartily,” showing acknowledgement of individual persons’ levels of piety toward him (58-59). Within the text itself, the symbolic representation of Everyman’s character is purveyed to the audience: Everyman is not meant to literally be every person in that his actions are not meant to be taken as the actions of every person. The text acknowledges that not every human has acted throughout their life together or in the same way – up until his “summoning” by God, it may very well be that Everyman was not a singular entity. However, because Everyman does end up representing the whole of humanity toward the end of his life, there is a metaphysical truth that the text implies, which is that all people, regardless of prior personhood, are rendered equal to each other before their inevitable fate: death.
What this speaks to in terms of selfhood is that within the worldview of 15th century England, personal identity is rendered null in the face of divine judgment. In the eyes of God, all human beings are unified in their mortality. What is ultimately expected of all persons regardless of prior states of being is penance. In her article “Death’s Arrival and Everyman’s Separation,” Julie Paulson makes the claim that through the portrayal of Everyman (every human) seeking penance, “the play emphasizes the impact of community on the formation of Everyman’s self-understanding” (Paulson, 121). His seeking accompaniment to the afterlife by other representative characters such as Fellowship, Kindred, and Cousin is indicative of the idea that in facing Death, all humans ultimately have is community – the “self” means nothing at this point. The journey that Everyman makes in the play is a journey that all persons in the audience must eventually undergo regardless of preconceived notions of selfhood, for at the end of this journey, the interconnectedness of human beings will reveal itself to be the only true identification of being before divine judgment.
The notion of fashioning a “self” in the individualized way it may be understood today throughout life is thus ultimately seen as pointless, considering the true self is the human self and nothing more. Consider Everyman’s interaction with Goods, the latter of which represents physical objects a person owns and could be understood to be all the things that make one person different from another (status, clothing, homes, etc.). After Goods tells Everyman they are not going with him to the afterlife, Everyman states, “Lo, now was I deceived ere I was ware, / And all I may wite misspending of time” (435-436). Everyman was so focused on collecting material markers of individual desire throughout his life that he did not stop to think that none of it would make a difference after death. To build the “self” in a material way is fruitless and a waste of time while living on the earth in corporeal form. Creating individual differences between one another should not be given any sort of precedence over communal penance.
In her essay “The Idea of a Person in Medieval Morality Plays,” Natalie Crohn Schmitt says that the part of the human makeup closest to God (and thus the most important part) is the mind, and all physical facets of human existence are secondary, so “self-expression, then, becomes associated with what we would think of as self-repression” (Schmitt, 24). The most important part of the self is unchangeable and intangible, connected to all other persons’ selves through God. Any attempt at differentiating oneself through physical elements is pointless and perhaps even seen as a distancing of oneself from God, who gave them their selfhood in the first place. What can then be gathered about conceptualizations of the self in 15th century England is that to be a human is to be a self, and to accessorize that state of being with other individualized elements is unnecessary and perhaps even unholy. Community in humanness and relationships with each other (and therefore God) are of utmost importance.
Works Cited
Everyman. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, The Sixteenth Century The Early Seventeenth Century. Simpson, James, et al. 10th ed., W.W. Norton, 2018.
Paulson, Julie. “DEATH’S ARRIVAL AND EVERYMAN’S SEPARATION.” Theatre Survey, vol. 48, no. 1, 2007, pp. 121–141., doi:10.1017/S0040557407000397.
Schmitt, Natalie Crohn. “The Idea of a Person in Medieval Morality Plays.” Comparative Drama, vol. 12, no. 1, 1978, pp. 23–34. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23293695.