The Covidian Everyman

by Daniel Hadas

The king of kings and the world’s great ruler of all

has sent me as a messenger to you, and has ordered you without delay

to stand before his tribunal, and, of all that you have used

and abused, and all that you possess, rightly or wrongly, under the heavens,

to render an account to him.

These words are spoken by a mysterious messenger to the eponymous hero of the play Hecastus, published in 1539 by the Dutch schoolteacher Georgius Macropedius (Joris van Lanckvelt). “Hecastus” is the Latinized form of the Greek word “hekastos”, meaning “each, every”, and the play is a Latin version of the “Everyman” morality play. The plot is brutally simple: Everyman is a rich young householder revelling in the good things of life. The messenger arrives as the play opens, to tell Everyman that he will, that very day, die and appear before God for judgement. Everyman begs his friends, his family, his servants, even his personified Wealth, to come with him before God, to help plead his cause – in vain, of course. Death and the Devil come for Everyman, but in the end he is protected by his Faith and Virtue (both also personified), confesses and repents of his sins, and so his body dies, but his soul is saved.

Hecastus is hardly a familiar text today, but I came across it because, from 2010 onwards, I was made responsible for the annual production of King’s College London’s Latin play. This Latin play was quite a unique event: it was performed by students, in the original Latin, and the plays chosen were not the famous texts of classical antiquity, but little known ones from the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

History rarely provides perfectly neat ironies. Hecastus was not the Latin play scheduled to be performed by my students in 2020: we had produced it in 2016. But a Latin play was scheduled for March 2020 (the 1581 Pedantius of Edward Forsett), and was cancelled at the last moment, as the UK entered its first covid lockdown. We locked down, of course, because it was felt that otherwise that messenger who came to Everyman would come to far too many, and that the gates had to be closed to him.

The cancellation of the Latin play was heart-breaking. The young cast and director had put months of preparation into this odd endeavour, and now it was all to be for nothing. We spoke for a while of moving the performance to later in the year, but as lockdowns and “social distancing” dragged on, it became clear there was to be no 2020 Latin play. Indeed there has been no Latin play since that 2020 one was cancelled, although I am hopeful we will be able to revive the tradition one day.

This may seem a trivial incident, but I believe that, in its significance, it is at the heart of the dilemma of covid lockdowns. From one perspective – the one that won out in 2020 with barely a struggle – the sacrifice of the Latin play was entirely just and reasonable. In order to protect their elders and medical infrastructures, a handful of young, healthy students, with their whole lives before them, had been asked to forego a fringe extracurricular performance for a small and select audience. Had the event, and millions like it, gone ahead, more people might have died from covid. Surely performing under these circumstances was unthinkable.

But, from another perspective, the cancellation of the Latin play was terrifying, because it meant that our society had suddenly declared to be inessential all that was involved in such an event, such as the flourishing of individual young people in the here and now; the living transmission of the knowledge and wisdom received from our ancestors; the conviviality of the shared experienced of art. Of course, my students’ amateur efforts would hardly have been immortal theatre, but that only made matters worse: it showed how immediately a new definition of what was essential had gripped the entirety of society. All that was now essential was to eat, sleep, produce, and stay alive.

That is fairly similar to how Everyman thought before God’s messenger came for him:

No one amongst all mortals is more fortunate than I

anywhere in the world, since I don’t know

if anything could be added

to my happiness. My wife is beautiful, my sons clever,

my daughters attractive, my servants numerous.

All sorts of furniture adorn my splendid house.

My moneyboxes swell with gold, silver and platinum,

and my chests and shelves are stuffed

with countless garments of purple, scarlet and silk.

Fine sheep in rich pastures, fertile fields, ready

income, also countless possessions,

and whatever can add to the good fortune

of a healthy, safe young man – all this abounds at once.

Macropedius’ Everyman has to learn that all of this is not enough, indeed that it is all nothing, because Death will sweep it away that very day. Every man or woman, rich or poor, is ultimately as Job: “Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return”. But for the Covidian Everyman, the arrival of Death on the horizon meant something else. For him, the goods of the body, and first of all bodily life itself, were indeed all there was, and all he could do in response to death’s imminence was what Macropedius’ Everyman also tried at first: play for time.

Many, including some who oppose lockdowns as ineffective, will maintain that this was the right way of thinking about disease and death, that Latin plays are indeed frivolities that should be cancelled if the best epidemiological models show their cancellation will save a satisfactory number of lives. I don’t really know how to reach such people. But I do know that the messenger of the great king is coming for each of us soon enough, and that when we render our account, we will not be asked how many lives we saved by staying home, masking, social distancing or getting vaccinated, but rather how we loved our brothers and sisters, those whom we can only love if we treat them and ourselves as men and women, not as vectors of disease.

One learns such things even from amateur student performances of Latin plays. They and all the other ‘trivial’ events which constitute everything it really means to be human should not be cancelled lightly.