reinvention of the danse macabre 185

Chapter Five

“My stile I wille directe”: Lydgate and the Bedford Workshop Reinvent the Danse Macabre

Between August 1424 and Lent 1425, an unknown artist, likely responding to a now-obscure theatrical tradition, painted the first known Danse Ma- cabre mural on the outer wall of the Cemetery of the Innocents, facing the Rue de la Ferronerie, at the thriving heart of medieval Paris.1 Though now lost (the Cemetery was destroyed in 1786),2 the painting depicted decaying corpses dancing amidst typological representations of late Medieval soci- ety: a Pope, an Emperor, a Bishop, a King, a Monk, a Minstrel, and many more, 30 figures in all, ambling diffidently while the corpses frolic and mock them with jeering expressions, piercing remarks and aping grotesque movements of their bodies, beautifully baroque and accentuated by stark contrasts of flesh and painted costume. The form stunningly reverses the valence of the communities of the living and the dead: the dead rejoice in an active life—playing musical instruments, dancing, making conversa- tion—while the living grow stiff, as their bodies rigidify and they lose their corporal identity. The alternation between dead and living creates a rhythm

1 I use the term Danse Macabre to refer to the original work and the genre; I use the term “Dance of Death” or “Daunce of Poulys” to refer to Lydgate’s Middle English transla- tion. The bibliography on the Danse Macabre is massive, but the seminal studies include Francis Douce, The Dance of Death (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1902); Florence Whyte, The Dance of Death in Spain and Catalonia (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1931); Leonard Kurtz, The Dance of Death and the Macabre Spirit in European Literature (New York: Colum- bia UP, 1934); Edward F. Chaney, La Danse Macabre des Charniers des Saints Innocents à Paris (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1945); Robert Eisler, “Danse Macabre,” Traditio 6 (1948); James M. Clark, The Dance of Death in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Glasgow: Uni- versity of Glasgow Publications, 1950). Of the new studies of the form, Elina Gertsman, Dance of Death, which emphasizes performance and civic context, stands out as the best synthetic critical assessment in decades. See, also, the work of Sophie Oosterwijk, who has published a series of articles on the dissemination of the Danse Macabre motif in late medieval English culture, most interesting of which are Oosterwijk, “Dethes Stroke,” and Sophie Oosterwijk, “Of Corpses, Constables, and Kings: The Danse Macabre in Late Medieval and Renaissance Culture,” Journal of the British Archaeological Association 157 (2004). 2 For an excellent history of the Cemetery of Innocents, see Michel Fleury et al, Les Saints-Innocents (Paris: Delegation a l’Action Artistique de la Ville de Paris, 1990). All understanding of the original form is mediated by Guyot Marchant’s print edition (1485). 186 chapter five of animation and stillness, of white and color, of life and death, a visual rhythm evocative of human culture itself. A new sense of community is achieved in and through the form, as the living face up to the dead, through whom they come to know concretely the abstraction of death. The social body is depicted in many of the murals as fluid and continuous, bound together by a common destiny that is re-enforced by the imagery of dance.3 The church at La Chaise-Dieu demonstrates the evocative power of the original conception of the form.4 The fresco, executed in the red and yellow chalk characteristic of the Puy-de-Dome region of south central France, presents the flowing lines of the corpses lithely bending their knees and inclining their bodies in a rhythmic movement to the right. [Fig. 1a-b] As the corpses grab the hands of the individual figures and lead them into the dance, a visual line is created in the piece that links the entire com- pany together. Dance is a compelling image in the symbolic language of the cultural imagination, potently evoking the complex overlapping signi- fications of continuity, festivity, immorality, corporeality, and group rituals of cohesion.5 That visual vocabulary is adapted to specific places and contexts in many extant examples of the Danse, offering the opportunity for a community to re-assert its continuity in the face of death.6

3 For an innovative early reading of the form’s social meaning, see André Corvisier, “Representation de la societe dans les danses des morts,” Revue d’histoire moderne et con- temporaine 16 (1969). Many approaches to the social meaning of the form neglect the artistic structure and result in reductionist historical explanations, usually rooted in the Black Plague, for an example of which see Johan Mackenbach, “Social Inequality and Death as Illustrated in Late-Medieval Death Dances,” American Journal of Public Health 85, no. 9 (1995). 4 For an overview of the painting at La Chaise-Dieu, see Boissé, et al, La Danse Maca- bre de la Chaise-Dieu. 5 Gertsman, Dance of Death has offered the best sustained reading of the Danse Macabre in terms of the cultural importance of dance as public performance, though an earlier form of the approach appears in Jane H.M. Taylor, “Que signifie danse au quinzième siècle? Danse la Danse macabre,” Fifteenth Century Studies 18 (1991). See also, the recent work by Seeta Chaganti, “Danse Macabre in the Virtual Churchyard,” postmedieval 3 (2012), who stresses iteration and repetition as key features of the form. 6 Amy Appleford, “The Dance of Death in London: John Carpenter, John Lydgate, and the Daunce of Poulys,” Journal of Medieval & Early Modern Studies 38 (2008) has written the most thorough examination of the function and meaning of space in the St. Paul’s cloister. In addition to the well-known places of the Cemetery of Innocents at Paris and the cloisters of St. Paul’s in London, the Danse at Lübeck was set against a landscape of the city, for which see Clark, Dance of Death, 78–83. For a study of Lübeck and Reval, see Gertsman, Dance of Death, “Reading the Dance of Death,” 190–233.