Everyman

"Everyman lyveth so after his owne pleasure, And yet of theyr lyfe they be nothynge sure. . . ." The Cardinal Archbishop, settling his dalmatic more comfortably, arranged himself to listen, his small brown face screwed into a mask of naive anticipation. Nobody else moved. Behind him the burgesses of Salzburg listened respectfully; his Abbot sat upon his right; in front of him his four sturdy bastards awaited God's next word in a glitter of green and silver buckram. That was in the year . . . Nothing much had changed. Once more sunset powdered with golden dust the Cathedral Square of Salzburg; once more the monks looked down from their barred windows; once more, on a bare plank stage, God, the Father, in false hair delivered the speech that begins "the morall playe of Everyman." To be sure, the present prelate, Ignace Rieder, together with his Abbot, Peter Klotz, were more godly churchmen than their somewhat ribald predecessors; to be sure the waiting burgesses were mostly U. S. visitors; to be sure the play presented for their entertainment was a version modernized by Hugo von Hoffmannstal and staged by Max Reinhardt. But the place, the atmosphere, the story, were little changed. It is a story that relates how God sends Death into the world to get a reckoning from Everyman, and how Everyman beseeches all friendly shapes for aid who have attended him until that time, and how all forsake him. Fellowship bids him farewell; Kindred has a cramp in his toe--he cannot go with Everyman; and as for Good Deeds, his last love, she is so faint that she can hardly stand. Knowledge alone will help him over the way that he must go. Knowledge is as good as her word. She takes Everyman to Confession, and when he has scourged himself, brings him to Good Deeds who has won strength now to go along with him. He receives the sacrament, bequeathes his property, prepares to climb into his grave. Alas! Whereto may I truste? Beaute gothe fast awaye fro me. . . . Why, than ye wyll forsake me all! Swete Strengthe, tary a lytel space. . . . Why, Dyscrecyon, wyll ye forsake me? . . . O, all thynge fayleth, save God alone. Voices call to Everyman; out of the darkening air fall their farewells--from the Cathedral, from the tower of the monastery, mocking and sad and sonorous. The Cardinal Archbishop and the rest of the notable company listened to an Epilogue ,that made clear the already too obvious moral of the piece and then hurried off to dress for a performance of Don Juan in the Salzburg theatre that evening. Messrs. Reinhardt and Gest returned to a rehearsal of Turandot. Critics next day were loud in praise of the "medieval color" of Herr Reinhardt's arrangement, of the quality of the musical accompaniment (by Einar Nilson, musical director of The Miracle). Only one commentator ventured to suggest that "most miracle plays are dull. . . ." Everyman amused people very long ago. The earliest edition of the text is that "imprynted at London in Flete Strete by Richarde Pynson prynter to the Kynges moost noble grace" in 1509, but for almost a century before that it had trundled up and down England in creaking "pageant wagons." Entertainments of another sort wandered the countries also--the mummeries perpetrated by troubadours and tattered knaves who sang sweetly in the halls of great peers and bawdily for shillings under the windows of burgesses. Agobard, Archbishop of Lyons, was moved as early as 836 to discuss the situation in a scathing paragraph: "The actors, the mimes, and the deceiving and infamous joculators are given money to get drunk on, while the poor of the Church are dying in the agonies of hunger " It was a pretty pass. People, apparently, would rather hear some pinchbeck fellow gurgle a roulade than listen to the best constructed sermon. When, therefore, the guildsmen of prosperous towns began to give simple dramas, inspired by the magnificent theatricality of Mass, and evolved from Bible story, prelates everywhere came gradually to value their spiritual uses. Soon Herod was thumping his spear on the boards, and Judas went about his betraying in a long red beard, and Pilate could earn as much as ten shillings a week if he told his lines with a swaggering tongue. . . . In the Fifteenth century, roles were cast with a nice eye to harmony between the part itself and the trade of the man who was to play it. Plasterers created the world, shipwrights built the Ark, the chandlers were the Shepherds who carried the Star, butchers assisted in the Crucifixion. Christ, in one French play, had to recite 4,000 verses; in 1437 at Metz, during the Crucifixion scene, both Judas and Christ were prostrated by emotional strain. But of all the many Miracle plays, so rigorously acted, Everyman alone has a plot that holds together. "Inasmuch as the play represents a struggle, it is drama, and it matters little li you call it Hamlet or Everyman, the abstract instantly becomes the concrete, and the symbolism of an idea becomes changed into a human fact."