Everyman's Journey

Everyman's Journey

Everyman, a short play of around 900 lines, portrays the best surviving example of the Medieval Drama known as the morality play, which evolved side by side with the mystery plays, although written individually and not in cycles like the mystery play or ritual play. The morality play was a form of drama that was developed in the late 14th century and flourished through the 16th century in British Literature. The characterizations used in the works were typically based on the personifications of good and evil engaged in a struggle over the morality of the soul.

Everyman is every man’s journey to the spiritual unknown and the eventual reflection of one’s positive and negative actions in life, which dictate the offering of everlasting redemption. The play uses the literary technique of allegory to present the reader or audience a representation of man’s universal confrontation with the moral struggle that Christianity’s beliefs present to each individual. The traditional religious beliefs or moral structures are emphasized in parable form symbolizing life and investigating the qualities within every man, whether they be good or bad. Everyman challenges the means to the destined end of unrighteous and the failure of man’s nurturing of the spiritually cleansing good deeds, which in essence pulls man’s fate from the good to the bad or vice versa.

The play has been speculated to be a written product of an unknown author from around the end of the 15th century, however, its origin is still debatable among literary scholars because of the play’s similarities to other written works, orality characteristics, noetic economy and universality with the European socio-religious culture. According to literary scholars...

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This particular piece is a valuable step toward textuality. It test the barriers set by orality and attempts to expand the act of story telling by incorporating traits, which were further developed with the increase of textuality and later printing. For example, the development of characterization and the use of narration progression or multiple narration bring forth-new avenues of psychological roundness of characters in junction with traditional "heavy" and "flat" universal appeal. The play Everyman has established itself in the progression of literature and the word by its incorporation of hearing dominance, rhyme scheme progression (memory), characterization, and performance based manuscript production. Everyman is for everyman that wants to understand where the word has come from (orality) and how it has come to the point of print existence (textuality).