Everyman: A Structural Analysis

The high value of Everyman has been provocatively asserted in T. S. Eliot's description of it as “perhaps” the only English drama “within the limitations of art.” Eliot writes this while discussing the lack of form in post-Kydian drama and thus implies that the source of this value is the play's formal unity. David Kaula has taken Eliot to mean “that nothing in the play is extraneous to the central homiletic purpose, that all elements of style, structure, and theme are governed by the conventions of allegory.” Yet the emphasis on Everyman's homiletic purpose and allegorical conventions does not sufficiently explain either its critical esteem or its theatrical popularity. Fortunately, Eliot has enlarged upon his original assessment in a later work. He argues that religious drama, to be successful, must combine its doctrine with “ordinary dramatic interest.” Everyman fulfills his requirement:the religious and the dramatic are not merely combined, but wholly fused. Everyman is on the one hand the human soul in extremity, and on the other any man in any dangerous position from which we wonder how he is going to escape—with as keen interest as that with which we wait for the escape of the film hero, bound and helpless in a hut to which his enemies are about to set fire.