The Pride of Life, Everyman i The Sun's Darling: temat życia i śmierci oraz przemijania

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to show in the first place that, owing to the theme of death, The Pride of Life and Eyeryman differ from other moralities. The allegory off life and death in The Pride of Life, and that of death in Everyman have been integrated with the moral one based on psychomachia. Thus the stereotyped morality machinery with the personifications of virtues and vices appearing in the fifteenth century moralities is absent here. Other characters and a different imagery have been used, though they also serve a moral purpose. Both moralities are indebted to the medieval motif of the Dance of Death# and, in connection with it, satire and both the grotesque and realistic or naturalistic presentation of the motif of death in the respective moralities have been discussed. The theme of the passing away of life, which is integrally connected with that of death, is partly dramatized in Everyman and two other moralities, The Castle ol Perseverance and Mundus et Inf ans. It is dealt with in a different way in The Sun's Darling, a seventeenth-century masque or mnsque-like play recalling the moralities. The medieval vision of death expressed through the grotesque (macabre) image of Death in the moralities (plastic arts) has been modified in The Suns's Darling by another formula and imagery strictly associated with plastic arts. The personifications of time and seasons dramatize the theme of mutability. The attribute of Time (whip), similarly as the scythe oh the Death, signifies his moral function.