SOURCE: Goldhamer, Allen D. “Everyman: A Dramatization of Death.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 59, no. 1 (February 1973): 87-98.

In the following essay, Goldhamer examines the psychological view of Everyman as a work regarding death as a learning experience.

Everyman is commonly regarded as the finest of morality plays and one of the greatest medieval dramas. Modern scholarship on the play has two general concerns. A long-standing question has been raised as to its relationship to the Dutch play Elckerlijc: there has been disagreement as to whether one was the direct source of the other or if both plays derived from a lost source.¹ A second question has been Everyman's position in medieval theology, particularly the play's presentation of the doctrine of salvation and its relation to or derivation from various medieval works on the subject of death, especially within the ars moriendi tradition. Many analogues have been found not...