ABSTRACT
The newspapers of London in the summer of 1901 were concerned with casualty lists from the Boer War and announcements of charity drives in the name of the late Queen Victoria, who had died early in the year. Poel’s idea, pursued with inadequate resources in a succession of impromptu halls and theaters, was to present the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries under an approximation of Elizabethan conditions. In Poel’s performance the ‘lifeless abstractions’ of the medieval text turned out to be what they must always, invisibly, have been — not walking categories, but realized figures, parts in a play. Everyman is a play about the moment of death and thus, from the medieval perspective, a play about the shape and meaning of life. The structure is inevitable, and the final movement of the play brings Everyman to his grave. The Poel production of Everyman went on to tour the provinces and America, and to become an international success.
