While Everyman was a fairly easy read for me, and I wasn't exactly bored while reading it, after I finished the text, I found myself wondering why I'd even bothered to read it. Don't get me wrong, it was mildly amusing, and certainly pointed to some accurate characteristics of human nature - most notably the recurring theme that one will promise companionship and devotion all day long, but once a situation arises in which this devotion is actually NEEDED, many people are suddenly hard to find. Other than that, however, the characters just seemed to lack depth. Really, to me, they weren't even characters, but obvious potrayals of man and his various vices and personality traits.

The introduction to the text explains that this play is a "morality play"... this, of course, is fairly easy to deduce. My problem with this was that the moral is seemingly predictable; I'd even go as far as to say it should be common sense, at least to anyone with the appropriate religious beliefs. If you forget about God, and if you live a life of lust, greed, and apathy, your judgement day will come, and when it does, you can't rely on other men, wealth, beauty, strength, etc. to bail you out. How clever is it, really, to have a protagonist, "Everyman," who represents the average man; then have "Everyman" have a meeting with "Death," and learn that he is about to meet his judgement with God? And the other characters don't seem any deeper to me. The first character that Everyman tries to convince to accompany him, for instance, is Fellowship. His name connotes friendly relations, jolly companionship, and the like. Fellowship claims to be a true friend, but then when he discovers that Everyman needs him to accompany him out of this life and into the next, Fellowship bails awfully quickly. Is this a rather accurate portrayal of the average man? Yes; still, in my opinion, this doesn't make it particularly insightful or funny. Another character, Goods, represents the wealth that Everyman has accumulated throughout his life, and doted upon and loved. When Everyman asks for his company on his trip, however, Goods proclaims that he was only deceiving Everyman, and that it was Everyman's incessant focus ON wealth that has gotten him into the predicament he's currently in. Along with an array of other characters, there is, of course, Good Deeds, the only one who is willing to go on the trip, but who has been trampled into the ground by Everyman through his sinful lifestyle. After attending Confession and doing his penance, though, Good Deeds is revived, and becomes the only one to follow through on the journey to the end with Everyman, eventually saving him from eternal damnation. It's a cute story, but again, not exactly rocket science.

So imagine how elated I was to turn to the final page of the play, relieved that I'd managed to work through an entire play of obviousness, and to find the text of the Doctor. The footnote describes him as "the learned theologian who explains the meaning of the play." So now I need someone to explain to me the lesson I just learned? At this point, I was just feeling insulted. Sure enough, the doctor reiterates the point that one cannot rely on such forces as pride, beauty, strength, etcetra come judgement day. Only by doing good deeds can one attain his own salvation. Really? Wow, thanks doc.

I guess the question that all of this leaves me with is really, what is the point of this play? To convey something that virtually all God-fearing people already know through shallow characters with little to no humor? I simply can't believe that people of the time were so stupid that they couldn't deduce the moral of this morality play on their own. Was it propoganda, endorsed by the church in order to encourage men to live generous and ethical lives? But if this were the case, I doubt that we'd be reading this play centuries later. Is there some hidden meaning that I'm missing, or some subtle yet effective humor that I'm not picking up on? I sure hope so.