Women and the English Morality Play

Abstract

orality plays like Mankind and Everyman seem to have an awkward relation to issues of gender. Their titles alone are quaint if not regrettable, setting out as they do oldfashioned, universalizing designations for humanity that have begun their exits from the language. In fact, when the submission guidelines of journals like this one advise scholars to employ inclusive language, the term flagged as most obviously wrong is “mankind.” Add to this these works’ male protagonists and their sermonic motives, and the two dramatic moralities—plays at the heart of the genre as it unfolded in England—can strike readers as virtually defining a male-centered aesthetic and worldview. Co-editing these two plays for an edition in the new Arden Early Modern Drama series, however, I have been struck by some things that complicate this picture and suggest that feminist attention to Mankind and Everyman is far from misguided. First, despite their titles, and however masculine the environments that produced them, Mankind (most likely a monastic work) and Everyman (a translation of the Dutch chambers-of-rhetoric play, Elckerlijc ) acknowledge the importance of female labor in society. Second, the performance history of these plays reveals an unexpected reliance on actresses in their lead roles. Third, the critical histories of Mankind and Everyman are also surprisingly gendered, with a majority of the more important statements on these moralities coming from female scholars. I will suggest in the conclusion to this essay that one of these scholars, Sister Mary Philippa Coogan, needs to be credited with staking out an important position in the study of early English drama. Her 1947 dissertation on Mankind offered an anti-evolutionary reading of medieval theater history even as it engaged in a pioneering, cultural-studies treatment of the morality play. M