ABSTRACT
The medieval play of Everyman is synonymous with death—so much so that the American novelist Philip Roth, when he wrote his late-in-life meditation on death, named it for the fifteenth-century play. Everyman searches with increasing desperation for volunteers to accompany him on his journey to the grave, yet all but Good Deeds desert him along the way. Everyman makes the dying self the central focus of its drama, highlighting death as a personal and intimate crisis of the individual soul. Everyman’s death is arguably problematized by the English play in a more intense way than is the case in Elckerlijc, so that the former offers a distinct and markedly more vivid picture of the contradictions inherent in the late-medieval view of death. The play begins and ends with moralizing sermons that announce the point of the play as one that applies to the entire human race and seems to minimize the impact of Everyman’s travails as having any individual significance.
