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

Publication: Comparative Drama

Publication Date: 22-SEP-02

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The plays in the Chester mystery cycle may paint a vivid picture of religious belief on the eve of the Reformation, but they also contain many echoes of contemporary social customs as well as borrowings from other sources, both textual and visual. (1) Over the years, research into medieval drama has not just focused on the play texts themselves but also has taken into account the art of the period for visual parallels to the plays. W. L. Hildburgh and M. D. Anderson are but two in a long line of authors to draw valuable comparisons between medieval art and drama. (2) Similarly, Sally-Beth MacLean's Chester Art is among the early contributions to the Early Drama, Art, and Music series to list extant and lost art relevant to the study of early drama in the area. (3) The problem facing researchers is to identify such influences when the original sources have failed to survive. While many medieval texts have undoubtedly been lost to us over the centuries, the extent of the destruction of medieval art through iconoclasm at the time of the Reformation and again under Oliver Cromwell may well be far greater. (4) Inevitably, therefore, comparisons between the extant word and image are badly hampered in that they can only be based on what has actually survived or on other evidence of what once existed. Drama texts can be crucial in helping us obtain a better understanding of the imagery with which late-medieval viewers must once have been familiar but which has since been lost. One famous theme was the danse macabre, or Dance of Death, which was the subject of many examples in the visual arts across late-medieval Europe, although few appear to survive in Britain. In two of the Chester plays, however, it may be possible to detect references to this theme that would attest to its former popularity.

Play 10 of the Chester mystery cycle, in which the Goldsmiths (and possibly the Masons) enacted the Massacre of the Holy Innocents, presents viewers with a scene of brutal murder that is made even more horrific by an exceedingly cruel joke. The scene takes place after Herod has sent his soldiers to Bethlehem to slaughter "all knave-children within two yeere / and on daye ould" (179-80) in an attempt to kill the newborn Christ. The soldiers first demur slightly at the king's command, which they deem unfit for "knightes of great degree" (160), but it is the very extent of the killing that reconciles them to the task. Although not explicitly mentioned here, the total number of Innocents slain was traditionally held to be 144,000. (5) Primus Miles soon exults in the prospect of killing "[t]hese congeons in there clowtes" (209), as the infants are at one point described. At the start of the killing spree by Herod's soldiers, Secundus Miles, whose name is tellingly given as Lancherdeepe (58, 85), addresses the first Bethlehem mother thus:

Dame, thy sonne, in good faye, hee must of me learne a playe: hee must hopp, or I goe awaye, upon my speare ende. (10.321-24)

The threat of making this mother's son "hop" on the end of his spear would seem to describe simply a favorite mode of slaughtering the infants in Massacre scenes, as confirmed by the subsequent stage direction: "Tunc Miles trasfodiet primum puerum et super lancea accipiet" (344 s.d.). However, the joke about teaching his infant victims to "hopp" clearly proves irresistible to the second soldier, for he repeats it to Secunda Mulier prior to despatching yet another Innocent:

Dame, shewe thou me thy child there; hee must hopp uppon my speare. And hit any pintell beare, penis I must teach him a playe. (10.361-64)

The women try to ward off the soldiers with all their might, yet the outcome is the same, as the stage direction bears out: "Tunc Secundus Miles transfodiet secundum puerum" (376 s.d.). Both infants thus die impaled upon the soldiers' spears. (6)

In themselves, the lines appear simply to agree with the quite common iconography of the Massacre in medieval art. All too often one may see Herod's soldiers holding aloft an Innocent transfixed on a sword or spear. (7) Even the Chester soldier's crude reference to the gender of his intended victim has at least one blatant visual counterpart in the early-fourteenth-century mural on the north wall of the chancel at St. Mary's Church in Chalgrove, Oxfordshire (fig. 1). Still visible here is the outline of the lower part of a naked Innocent in red ochre, his genitals prominently displayed between his sprawling legs. (8) This scene also includes a soldier presenting to Herod the dripping corpse of an Innocent impaled on a spear. The blood pouring from the body of this skewered Innocent now has acquired a blackish color due to red lead alteration; the deliberate and copious use of a more vivid red pigment to represent blood would have emphasized the goriness of the event for the viewer. (9)

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Yet it is the repeated joke about "teaching an infant to hop" that is particularly striking in the Chester play. The very fact that it is made twice suggests that it had important resonances for the playwright--and presumably also for his audiences. The quip may actually be related to the way in which infants were perceived in medieval culture, for the Innocents were supposed to be mere babies who might not even have been weaned. (10) It was, of course, a universally recognized truth in the Middle Ages that infants under the age of two would as yet be incapable of walking or talking properly, if at all. This characteristic nature of the Innocents is confirmed in yet another Massacre play, the Coventry Pageant of the Shearmen and Taylors, where the first mother protests in vain at lines 797-800:

For a sympull sclaghtur yt were to sloo, Or to wyrke soche a chyld woo Pat can noder speyke nor goo Nor neuer harme did. (11)

In depictions of the Ages of Man, the first age of infantia is often represented by an infant lying in a cradle, occasionally followed by the slightly later stage of the toddler who is still learning to walk. (12) However, the Chester soldier takes this image one step further: he offers to teach the infants a "play," viz. to "hopp" on his spear. As we shall see, this repeated line seems to contain an echo of the words of Death to the infant in English and Continental versions of the Dance of Death.

The danse macabre was a very popular theme throughout late-medieval Europe. It presents Death appearing unexpectedly to summon both the mighty and the low to take part in his dance; each victim in turn is forced to acknowledge that death is grim but inevitable. The infant was a regular participant in the danse macabre from the earliest known examples onward. Perhaps this is not surprising if one considers the infant's common appearance in depictions of the Ages of Man, the high rate of infant mortality, and the ubiquitous Massacre scenes in medieval art and drama that presented viewers with a horrifying spectacle of infant death. However, the infant is unusual among Death's dancers not only because he holds no social status of his own (unlike the other participants from all ranks of society) but also because he is characterized as one who cannot yet walk, let alone dance. His helplessness is emphasized in the earliest known French printed edition of the danse macabre, published in 1485 by Guyot Marchant, which was based on the famous mural of 1424-25 on the cemetery walls of the Franciscan convent Aux SS. Innocents in Paris. The woodcut illustration in Marchant's version shows the infant in a cradle, while the dialogue between Death and his victim runs as follows:

Le mort Petit enfant na gueres ne: Au monde auras peu de plaisance A la danse seras mene Comme autres, car mort a puissance Seur tous: du iour de la naissance Conuient chascun a mort offrir: Fol est qui nen a congnoissance. Qui plus vit plus a a souffrir (Little infant barely born, you will find little pleasure in this world. You will be led to the dance, like the others, for Death has power over all: from the day of one's birth Everyone is subject to Death. A fool is he who does not know this. He who lives longest will suffer the more. Lenfant A. a. a. ie ne scay parler Enfant suis: iay la langue mue. Hier nasquis huy men fault aler Ie ne fais quentree et yssue Rien nay meffait, mais de peur sue Prendre en gre me fault cest le mieulx Lordonnance dieu ne se mue. Aussi tost meurt ieusne que vieux (13) A, a, a, I know not how to talk. I am an infant: my tongue is mute. Born yesterday, today I have to go. I only make my entrance and my exit. I have done no wrong, and yet I sweat for fear. I must comply willingly, that is best. God's decree does not change. The young die as soon as the old.)

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...

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