The Character of Death

This article takes up early English drama’s figure of Death as a literary character. The study of character, grounded in the modern novel, has long based its assessment of value according to a system of interlocking hierarchies that prefers roundness to flatness, verisimilitude to type, consistency to incoherence, and development to stasis. Furthermore, character study has depended on sociological metrics of identity including age, gender, occupation, and social class. The figure of Death who appears in Everyman and its analogues and adaptations is neither round nor verisimilar nor developed across an arc, and therefore registers, according to these metrics, as a literary failure. Neither does Death have any coherent age, gender, occupation, or social class. And yet Death works. Few literary characters enjoy such longevity, ubiquity, or resonance. I suggest that we turn to media studies for answers, and specifically to what Jan-Noël Thon calls “transmedia characters”: serial figures who recur, expand, modify, and incoherently cohere across vast transmedia networks.