Middle English Literature

The Fifteenth Century

The 15th cent. is not distinguished in English letters, due in part to the social dislocation caused by the prolonged Wars of the Roses. Of the many 15th-century imitators of Chaucer the best-known areJohn Lydgate andThomas Hoccleve . Other poets of the time includeStephen Hawes andAlexander Barclay and the Scots poetsWilliam Dunbar ,Robert Henryson , andGawin Douglas . The poetry ofJohn Skelton , which is mostly satiric, combines medieval and Renaissance elements.

The miracle play, a long cycle of short plays based upon biblical episodes, was popular throughout the Middle Ages in England. The morality play, an allegorical drama centering on the struggle for man's soul, originated in the 15th cent. The finest of the genre isEveryman (a 15th century English morality play).

Everyman is the best surviving example of the type of Medieval drama known as the morality play. Moralities evolved side by side with the mystery plays, although they were composed individually and not in cycles. The moralities employed allegory to dramatize the moral struggle Christianity envisions universal in every individual.

Everyman , a short play of some 900 lines, portrays a complacent Everyman who is informed by Death of his approaching end. The play shows the hero's progression from despair and fear of death to a "Christian resignation that is the prelude to redemption." First, Everyman is deserted by his false friends: his casual companions, his kin, and his wealth. He falls back on his Good Deeds, his Strength, his Beauty, his Intelligence, and his Knowledge. These assist him in making his Book of Accounts, but at the end, when he must go to the grave, all desert him save his Good Deeds alone. The play makes its grim point that we can take with us from this world nothing that we have received, only what we have given.

The play was written near the end of the fifteenth century. It is probably a translation from a Flemish play,Elckerlijk (orElckerlyc ) first printed in 1495, although there is a possibility thatEveryman is the original, the Flemish play the translation. There are four surviving versions ofEveryman , two of them fragmentary.