ABSTRACT
How to understand the Middle English morality play, Mankind, written c. 1466, has presented various problems for academics throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries because of its mix of religion and bawdry, and early editors who printed the text expurgated it. David Bevington’s influential book, From “Mankind” to Marlowe (1962), has convinced many that Mankind is the earliest surviving evidence of professional players. A recent thought-provoking essay on Mankind is that of Anthony Gash (1986), “Carnival against Lent: The Ambivalence of Medieval Drama.” I have various reservations about much that has been written about Mankind, which I will detail below, but I want to avoid the common rhetorical practice of beating up on the stimulating work of others in order to further one’s own project. Instead, I offer correctives and alternatives, these from the perspective of an academic Catholic, however wavering, whose class-identity and life-experiences suggest an alternative approach as well as make the critical question of considerable interest. My approach, as critical of Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World (1968) as of Gash’s application of it because I do not see in the play the degree of social protest which breaks open whole systems, is intended to open up a more wide-ranging discussion of Mankind and Early English drama generally.
