SOURCE: Kolve, V. A. “Everyman and the Parable of the Talents.” In Medieval English Drama: Essays Critical and Contextual, edited by Jerome Taylor and Alan H. Nelson, pp. 316-40. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1972.

In the following essay, Kolve considers the Parable of the Talents as a possible source for some of the topics discussed in Everyman.

Many scholars at work over several decades have done much to discover the sources of Everyman. We have learned that it owes something to the traditions of the Dance of Death, to confessional manuals, to treatises on the art of holy dying, to a medieval schema that divides all human endowments into gifts of Nature, Fortune, and Grace; and most important of all, we have been shown its likeness to a testing-of-friends story (Buddhist in origin) that appears first shaped to a Christian moral in the Greek Barlaam and Ioasaph...