SOURCE: Mills, David. “The Theaters of “Everyman.” In From Page to Performance: Essays in Early English Drama, edited by John A. Alford, pp. 127-49. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1995.

In the following essay, Mills argues that the success and effectiveness of Everyman lies in the “skillful allusions to a range of different kinds of drama and allegory.”

Everyman occupies a special place in the revival of medieval drama in England in the twentieth century. The success it has enjoyed since the time of Edward Poel's revival of the play at London's Charterhouse in 1901 has not only made it, in the words of Arnold Williams, “the morality play best known and most widely performed in modern times”;¹ its repeated revivals have also shaped the popular idea of the morality play and set a standard by which other plays in that nebulous genre are judged. Students of medieval drama...