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

Comparative Drama, Fall-Wntr, 2002 by Sophie Oosterwijk

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[paragraph] But that ye now in thys world leuyng. [paragraph] afore be redy or I my belle rynge.

[paragraph] My drede full spere full sharpe y grounde.

[paragraph] Doth yow now lo here thys manate.

[paragraph] armour ys noon. that may withstande hys wounde.

[paragraph] Ne whom I merke, ther ys non other grace.

[paragraph] To fynde respite of day oure ne space.

Chaucer chose the spear as Death's weapon when describing him in the Pardoner's Tale as a "privee theef": "And with his spere he smoot his herte atwo." (51) The spear is particularly prominent in the so-called Carthusian Miscellany (British Library MS. Add. 37,049), a religious miscellany produced in northern England in the first half of the fifteenth century that contains multiple illustrations of Death wielding a spear as opposed to just a few instances where he is armed with arrows (fig. 8). (52) In the morality play The Castle of Perseverance of the same period, Mors uses a lance to strike his deadly blow at Humanum Genus, as the latter exclaims: "Deth hathe lacchyd me wyth hys launce!" (53) In Holbein's 1538 woodcut series, Death relinquishes his musical approach to transfix the knight with his own lance, which leaves the victim twitching desperately in his final agony as if in a parody of Death's usual dance (fig. 9).

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The spear is thus a weapon often given to Death as his attribute, especially in English culture, and also as used by Herod's soldiers in the Chester Massacre play. From a theatrical point of view, shaking a puppet impaled on a spear would have been a very effective way of enacting the Massacre of the Innocents onstage, and this device was used in mystery plays elsewhere. (54) In the N-Town play, the first soldier presents an impaled Innocent to Herod with the words "Upon my spere/A gerle I bere" (20.109-10), while there is also mention slightly later of "boys sprawlyd at my sperys hende" (220). As the latter words are spoken, however, another crucial event is about to occur in the N-Town play: the despatch of Herod and his soldiers by Mors himself. Although the death of Herod often served as the conclusion of Massacre plays in medieval drama, the N-Town play is unusual in presenting a personified figure of Death. Mors appears on the scene after Herod's vainglorious words "In joy I gynne to glyde" (167) in the foolish belief that Christ has indeed been killed. His sense of triumph is, of course, both false and short-lived, as Mors himself reminds the audience. Mors turns out to be a more effective killer even than Herod or his soldiers. His ominous line "Wher I smyte per is no grace" (190) may suggest that he, too, uses a spear to dispatch the tyrant and his henchmen before handing them over to the devil, who promises to "teche [hem] pleys fyn" (235). (55) One might even wonder whether Herod mistakes Mors for one of his minstrels when he issues his last command to "[b]lowe up a mery fytt!" (232)--prophetic words, considering the dance he is about to face. Yet Mors is in no way disguised; (56) his description of himself as naked and worm-infested in his final speech conforms to the traditional image of Death as found in depictions of the danse macabre and elsewhere in medieval art--and to the late-medieval phenomenon of the cadaver effigy.