Prof Klaudia Łączyńska
University of Warsaw
Death and Dialogue: An Everyman of the 21st Century in Carol Ann Duffy’s Modern Morality Play
ABSTRACT: Late medieval morality plays dramatise the struggle between powers of good and evil for the soul of the main protagonist, the action following a scheme of temptation, fall and redemption superimposed on allegorical representation of human life as a spiritual journey or a pilgrimage. But Everyman seems exceptional among the extant English moralities, as it focuses on the very last moment of that journey and in a tone more serious than other plays of the genre, This paper explores how a modern adaptation of medieval dramatic form of spiritual self-discovery in Carol Ann Duffy’s Everyman (2015) may produce different answers to the question of what it means to be human and how those answers might be affected by shifting emphasis from the dialogical to the lyrical in the modern text.
Klaudia Łączyńska is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of “Artes Liberales” at the University of Warsaw, where she teaches early modern and modern English drama, 17th-century literature and culture, literary theory. Her research interests include early modern and modern drama, early modern English poetry, philosophy of language in the 17th century, literary translation. She published a monograph on Andrew Marvell's poetry which focuses on the “echoing” quality and patterns of repetition and reflexivity in his poems.