There is no record of Everyman being produced on stage during the medieval period. The title page refers to the work as a treatise, and occasionally such works were fashioned as dialogues between characters. This was especially true when the author intended the work to provide a moral lesson. Whether Everyman was ever performed or not, it proved popular among readers, achieving four reprintings in the first years following its publication. But with the move to a Protestant religion in England—and the development of the more sophisticated Elizabethan theatre—the morality plays of the medieval period were forgotten. Everyman was not reprinted again until 1773 and was then regarded as an artifact of the ancient past. However, by the nineteenth century, medieval drama became an important topic of study, and eventually interest in Everyman surged enough to warrant a production in 1901.

In William Poel's 1901 staging in...