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EVERYMAN and the ENERGIES of STASIS Richard Hillman

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EVERYMAN and the ENERGIES of STASIS Richard Hillman EVERYMAN AND THE ENERGIES OF STASIS Richard Hillman The well-known "lacks" — of conflict, characterization, comedy, colourful language, and so on — that set Everyman apart from the other English morality plays are now widely recognized as sources of, not obstacles to, its acknowledged dramatic impact and didactic efficacy. But merely to translate absences into corresponding presences and to speak of such values as simplicity, starkness, unity, naturalness is to leap over, without even taking for granted, the play*s most significant achievement. In the follow­ ing pages, I wish to suggest that the central strategies of representation are active ones, best described in terms of resistance, subversion, and disruption practised upon the text's own potentialities and tendencies, and so upon its audience’s expectations. By substituting pilgrimage for psychomachia, while flattening itself out in presentational technique, Everyman makes our own journey, the aesthetic journey, deceptively easy-going, if not bland.·1· Unquestionably, 2 there is more "drama" than meets the eye, and an audience will be alert to the spiritual vicissitudes inherent, too, in the concept of pilgrimage. But holy dying simply does not offer the salient dramatic possibilities of the struggle during life between good and evil — the focus of all the other extant moralities.^ And as the action unfolds, in measured fashion, from God's determining speech, the residual potential for the usual kinds of dramatic engagement is consistently negated and suppressed. In fact, the terrain through which we seem to pass so smoothly has been wrested, as if by domestic rebellion, from higher dramatic authority; it is very much up for grabs, and so we are co ntin ua lly reminded in ways that press home the know- 4 ledge that, even for an audience, ‘'security / Is mortals' chiefest enemy." Such knowledge, of course, implies acknowledgment of mortality itself. Through our dramatic experience, then, the play subjects us to something like the experience of its central character, keeping its audience close enough throughout to the initial naive position of Everyman, unconscious of his "endynge," to involve it disturbingly in the unfolding and deepening of 5 consciousness . These effects and the techniques that produce them are shared, by and large, with the Dutch Elckerlijc, and so in all probability derive from that work.** They are extended, however, and made to permeate the play even more thoroughly by the most distinctive feature of the English version — its quite unsystematic versification. This basic and tangible element offers a convenient starting point for assessing the play's uniqueness. Given the presumed translator's verbal skill and the influence both of the putative original and of English morality convention, we are clearly dealing with a calculated refusal to conform, not with mere ineptitude. In this light, A.C. Cawley’s defence of the functionality of the play's irregular rhyme and metre7 — an argument persuasive in its own terms — seems unduly apologetic. Behind it lie unquestioned assumptions about the value of regularity and, more largely, about decorum, the relation between style and content. That g the versitication of Everyman "closely resembles" that of Hickscorner in exhibiting a similar diversity of patterns is true enough. But more signifi­ cant, surely, is the fact that the latter play is quite conventional — much closer to other English moralities than to Everyman — in what it seeks to do with verse. However inconsistent the practice, the aim in Hickscorner is consistently to suit the form to the speaker and the nature of the speech in order to reinforce the contrast between good and evil principles. This is so basic and natural a technique as to qualify, I should argue, as an inherent tendency of morality plays, sanctioned by both dramatic and didactic con­ siderations. It is a function of the texts' own impulse to make themselves, according to the expectations of their audiences, livelier and more forceful. Hence it actually belongs to the text — to any text in the genre, that is, in c lu d in g Everym an. Y et Everyman offers so little in the way of adaptation ot verse-form to character, doctrine, or even dramatic occasion that Cawley can only tentatively identify "signs that the author-translator . is 9 feeling his way towards a dramatic use of different verse-forms. " This "lack" amounts to a rupture of the connection between sign and signified, a withholding of consent to the code binding spectacle and spectator. The result is an undercurrent disturbing the smoothly tlowing surface — the sign ot the hidden rock. Ihe play’s versification is merely a quantifiable aspect of its broader linguistic practices. It has become commonplace to think highly of Everyman's clear, plain, "neutral" style, which radically sets it apart from the other moralities.1^ Commentators are happy to forgo the usual extreme contrasts between aureate piety and oombastic wickedness, especially since the play’s substitution of the journey motif for the mode of conflict seems to call for a correspondingly sustained and subdued tone. Certainly, too, the style is sufficiently flexible to convey the relatively narrow range of dramatic nuance required of it. This is most apparent where the action makes its closest approach to the conventionally dramatic, as when Everyman is deserted by those on whom he has relied — Kynreae, tor example. Yet even as the contrary emotional states of the characters at such a moment mirror their physical parting of the ways, the stark uniformity of the diction, together with the parallel syntax, strongly links them: Everym an. Alas, that euer I was bore! For now shall I neuer be mery, It that you forsake me. K ynrede. A, syr, what ye be a mery man! Take good herte to you, and make no mone. But one thynge I wame you, by Saynt Anne — As for me ye shall go alone. (lines 348-54)11 What has not received due attention is the way in which such linkage, reinforced by the formulaic repetition and the use of proverbs praised by 12 Cawley and others as dramatically effective, works on a deeper level to create an anti-dramatic stasis — again, the rock in the stream. This dimension of the play actively resists the twin dynamics of action — forward motion, with its implication of linear time, and what may be thought of as differentiation, the continual bringing to birth of new meaning through the making of distinctions. The play's handling of time is an important index of its method, as I hope to show later. For the moment, I wish to concentrate on the latter concept. We are used to thinking of conflict as the language of drama, but perhaps this language too, as Saussurean linguistics posits of those languages we speak, is generated by difference — by successively giving figures on stage, of whom we might imagine anything and everything, things to wear, do, and say that restrict our possible interpreta­ tions and lend them distinct identities. In a way reminiscent of those myths of creation in which conflict arises after the birth of the "other," drama creates itself by the creation of difference. In a sense, then, the action o f Everym an, in constituting itself as a sequence of "partings," the splitting off of parts from a whole, harnesses itself to the essential processes of drama even more directly than do the moralities that deal in conflict. By simultaneously denying difference through its language, the text is exposing the reality of connectedness that underlies both its method and the divine purpose: Kynrede does indeed belong to Everyman, and Everyman is us. But this truth does not simply loom through the limpidity of the linguistic medium — it is hard won. Nor is "neutrality" — because it implies passivity — an adequate description of the medium itself. In differentiating characters and moral stances by forming patterns — of aureation, alliteration, and elaborate stanzaic forms — language in the other moralities is following its natural bent as a means to a dramatic end. In order for language to make itself disappear, as it seems to do in Everyman, the inherent tendency toward such patterning must be constantly disrupted. Paradoxically, repetition itself is made disruptive. The insistent recurrence in different contexts and the speech of different characters of key words ("rekenynge"), phrases ("moost nede"), and formulas ("begynnynge . endynge") serve to break down barriers or, perhaps more precisely, to prevent them from forming despite an audience's natural preference for distinctions and compartments. When a character uses such a familiar tag, we see through the stage identity, which we are eager to accept on its own terms, and willy-nilly find ourselves confronted by the universal non-dramatic meaning beyond. A similar effect is produced by the proverbs, whose prevalence clearly reflects a policy of the translation. It makes obvious didactic sense for Everyman to express himself, at moments of both folly and wisdom, in the collective common language of the audience he represents. His own fumbling attempts at understanding are a way of making us equally dependent upon Knowlege for spiritual guidance. But his use of proverbs (and the proverbial mode generally) also becomes a way of maintaining a dual role, as he moves back and forth between concrete character and abstract symbol. Thus in addressing the departing Strength, he begins by speaking out of a discrete identity, next dissolves into abstraction through his third- person moralizing, then re-materializes as an individual fictional entity: I had wende surer I sholde you haue founde. He that trusteth in his Strength, She hym deceyueth at the length. Bothe Strength and Beaute forsaketh me; Yet they promysed me fayre and louyngly. (lines 826-30) It is as if he hangs up his costume for a moment on an aphoristic hook, not interrupting the dramatic illusion in a Brechtian way, but rather withdraw- 13 ing more deeply within it, for without his costume he is invisible.
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