“Men and Women o’the Time”: Allegory in Three 2015 Productions

Abstract

This essay starts with a comment from a choric figure in Jonson’s The Staple of News (1626): that the Vice and other figures from the older moral drama now appear onstage “attired like men and women o'the time.” After a review of contemporary evidence, the focus is on three 2015 productions. First is a clearly allegorical script, Carol Ann Duffy’s adaptation of the best known moral play, Everyman , at the National Theatre where a relatively short early Tudor play, with its homily linked to the protagonist’s preparation for Death and a final reckoning, was transformed into a much longer polemic against today’s abuse of the environment. The other two items singled out are the RSC productions at the Swan of The Jew of Malta and Volpone , neither of which contains overt allegory yet both include sections that may have been understood then in near allegorical terms, whether to depict a sleeping Christianity in Marlowe’s Malta or an ejection of Conscience in Jonson’s Venice. The goal is to call attention to the possibility of new possibilities and meanings lurking behind a familiar episode or configuration so that theatre history, rather than being reductive, can display how the play of ideas in a scene or sequence could be both entertaining and meaningful in their theatrical terms and--perhaps--still translatable into ours.