Lessons in "hopping": the Dance of Death and the Chester mystery cycle

Comparative Drama, Fall-Wntr, 2002 by Sophie Oosterwijk

The original French poet, who may have been Jean Gerson and who concentrated on the newborn's characteristic inability to talk, based the infant's response on the biblical text in Jeremiah: "et dixi a a a Domine Deus ecce nescio loqui quia puer ego sum" (1:6). (14) Marchant's first offering of 1485 was clearly a success, so a year later he published a new edition that included an all female danse macabre, its text usually ascribed to the poet Martial d'Auvergne. Further versions by other printers soon followed. The theme also became a beloved decorative motif in both printed and manuscript versions of books of hours. The wider range of printed danse macabre editions helped to popularize the theme while also providing models for new murals. (15)

It was the Parisian wall painting, which he must have seen during his stay in the city in 1426, that inspired the poet John Lydgate from Bury St. Edmunds to produce a Middle English "translation" in the early 1430s of which two distinct versions exist. (16) Lydgate's text was included in a famous series of Dance of Death paintings in the cloister at Old St. Paul's Cathedral in London; before this scheme was destroyed in 1549, it was vividly described by Sir Thomas More in his work The Four Last Things. (17) Because of this famous scheme at St. Paul's, the danse macabre came generally to be known in England as the "dance of Paul's,' and it inspired further (mostly lost) depictions of the same theme up and down the country. (18) Lydgate's poem was not a literal translation, but it largely followed the French model, even copying the infant's tentative first utterings:

Deth to the Chylde

   Litel Enfaunt/that were but late borne
   Shape yn this worlde/to haue no plesaunce
   Thow moste with other/that gon here to forne
   Be lad yn haste / be fatal ordynaunce
   Lerne of newe / to go on my daunce
   Ther mai non age / a-scape yn sothe ther fro
   Late eueri wight/haue this yn remembraunce

   Who lengest leueth / most shal suffre wo.

The Chylde answereth

   A a a/a worde I can not speke
   I am so zonge /I was bore zisterdai
   Dethe is so hasti/on me to be wreke
   And liste no lenger / to make no delai
   I cam but now / and now I go my wai
   Of me no more/no tale shal be tolde
   The wille of god/no man with-stonde
   mai
   As sone dyeth/a zonge man as an
   olde. (19)

Concerning Lydgate's translation, Philippa Tristram has commented that "Death's words to the Child, and the Child's reply, are so touched with tenderness that they merit full quotation.... To those neither humble nor proud, Death adopts an appropriate aspect." (20) Yet is there any tenderness in summoning a newborn baby to a dance when he cannot even walk?

In fact, there is a new element in Death's words to the child in Lydgate's text that cannot be traced back to the Parisian version: "Lerne of newe to go on my daunce." Whereas the French version focuses on the newborn's inability to speak, Lydgate's words seem to echo a different German tradition that addresses the infant's other natural characteristic: the inability to walk. The result is a morbid joke by Death at the infant's expense which first appears in the oldest surviving Latin-German text (Heidelberg Universitatsbibliothek, Codex pal. germ. 314, fols. 79-[80.sup.v]). (21) This manuscript version, which does not contain illuminations, was copied in Augsburg between 1443 and 1447. It contains the following lines: