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

Comparative Drama, Fall-Wntr, 2002 by Sophie Oosterwijk

It was the appearance of Mors in the N-Town play that inspired Gail McMurray Gibson's remarks on the Dance of Death in East-Anglian drama and the connection with Lydgate, Long Melford, and Bury St. Edmunds. (57) A link between Death's concluding role in the N-Town Massacre play and the Dance of Death had already been made in 1903 by E. K. Chambers, who also drew attention to the fact that the danse macabre is known to have been enacted on the Continent on a number of documented occasions. (58) Of course, the personification of Death occurs in a number of morality plays across late-medieval Europe, and these include the Middle English Castle of Perseverance and Everyman. (59) The Chester play also features the death of Herod, but here instead of a personified Death it is a demon who comes to fetch the king directly to Hell. Herod's moans about his rotting legs and arms strangely conjure up an image of a semi-decomposing corpse--in fact, much like Death himself--although this is actually in line with medieval tradition. (60)

As Gibson has argued, a link between the appearance of Mors in the N-Town play and the danse macabre is not hard to accept, but is it possible to detect the same influence in the Chester mystery cycle?. Could the repeated joke made by the second soldier in the Chester Massacre play somehow have been inspired by the quip in the German Totentanz versions about teaching an infant to dance when he cannot yet walk? Moreover, could his spear have helped to reinforce his mocking impersonation of Death himself?. Rosemary Woolf simply preferred to interpret the soldier's words as a game metaphor that "very horribly conveys enjoyment in the savagery," while Lumiansky and Mills offer little comment on this repeated joke. (61) To interpret this Chester Massacre scene as carrying overtones of the Dance of Death--especially when one relates the soldier's actual words to a German Totentanz version of the early to mid-fifteenth century, around a century older than the extant versions of the Chester play--may seem far-fetched, even though there also appear to be echoes of this German quip in Lydgate's text. A visual link between the Massacre of the Holy Innocents and the Dance of Death was certainly made by artists on the Continent at a later date. The skeletal figure of Death is shown hopping around gleefully in a violent Massacre scene amongst a set of thirty danse macabre engravings with accompanying verses in Her schou-toneel des doors, of Dooden Dans by the Dutch physician Salomon van Rusting (1652-1709/13) which was first published in 1707 (fig. 10). (62) This sixth engraving with the caption "Geen wreder soort als Bethl'hems moort" (no fate more cruel than the Bethlehem murder) follows five earlier episodes from the Old Testament, from the Fall of Man to scenes of war and destruction upon the return of the Israelites to the promised land.

[FIGURE 10 OMITTED]

Although much later, Death's wild antics in the Dutch 1707 engraving are a reminder of another vital aspect, for dancing and jumping were originally an intrinsic part of the iconography of the medieval Dance of Death, but especially in the German tradition. The Chester soldier twice uses the Middle-English word "hop," which could have two distinct but related meanings: to dance, but also to hop, leap, bound, or bounce. It is found several times in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales as well as in Lydgate's work, albeit not in his Daunce of Death poem. (63) The Middle English verb "hoppen" is related to the Lower and Middle German verb hoppen, which is a variant of the modern German word hiipfen, meaning to leap or hop. It even occurs in the Totentanz version of the Heidelberg blockbook, although there it is not the child who is enjoined to "hop" Instead it is the cook whom Death orders to "hoppe off" and prepare a pepper sauce to liven up the sluggards in his dance. (64) In visual presentations of the Dance, the grim specter of Death is usually the more energetic dancer who forces along his reluctant partners from all ranks of society. Although Lydgate's elegant language makes it sound almost like a formal court dance, there are hints that it really is not quite so sophisticated, for example, when the king admits that "I haue not lerned/here-a-forne to daunce/No daunce in sothe/of fotynge so sauage." (65) Just like the infant, the king too must learn, albeit in his case a new "savage" type of dance more in line with the energetic depictions of the danse macabre in medieval art than with court entertainment.