110  The doleful Dance, and Song of Death; Intituled, Dance after my Pipe [Pepys 2.62]

This ballad was almost certainly not the ‘The Daunce and songe of Death’ that was entered in the Stationers’ Register in 1569. A different broadside was issued under exactly this title (see Related texts) and the ballad in which we are currently interested mentions in its fourth verse an event that had not occurred in 1569: the famously disastrous meeting of the assizes court at Oxford  in 1577, when an outbreak of ‘gaol fever’ killed hundreds of people, including several important officials (see Walsham).

The ballad was definitely in circulation and attracting attention by c.1580, when a wealthy man named John Heyricke wrote from Leicester, asking his brother in London to send ‘one hundred of ballits [ballads]’, including ‘as many of shocking of the shits as yow can get’. Despite the idiosyncratic and somewhat unfortunate spelling, we can be certain that this was our song, which opens, 'Can you dance the shaking of the sheets'. Such clear evidence of personal ballad-acquisition is highly unusual and therefore precious. It also reminds us that ballads were performance-texts, often remembered by their opening lines, rather than by their titles.

The probability that the ballad was composed in the late 1570s is further reinforced by the switch of a single letter that occurred at some point between this date and the 1650s. The oldest surviving version appears in a British Library manuscript of the early seventeenth century, and the first line of the verse about the Oxford catastrophe runs, ‘Thinke on the solempe syses last’ but in surviving printed versions, all of which were issued at least eighty years after the event, the word ‘last’ has been changed to ‘past’. This alteration was probably designed to suit the perspectives of later generations, for whom the ‘Black Assize’ of 1577 was a historical curiosity rather than a fresh memory.

Another puzzle surrounds the song’s composer. None of the surviving printed texts carries the name of an author but the British Library’s manuscript version attributes it to Thomas Hill. This early seventeenth-century text was very similar to surviving printed copies and it therefore seems likely that the compiler of the manuscript was transcribing a published broadside, now lost, that included the author’s name. It has sometimes been suggested that this was the Benedictine monk, Edmund Hill (also known as ‘Thomas of St. Gregory’), but he was in his early teens in 1578-79 and therefore seems a most unlikely candidate.

Another possible candidate is the man named Thomas Hill who wrote and translated several books about dreams, gardening, astrology, chemistry and medicine in the mid-sixteenth century. Unfortunately for us (and for him), Hill died around 1574 and so cannot have written the verse about the Oxford assizes. It is of course possible that a now lost text, composed before 1577, was merely updated by the addition of a single, topical verse.

Although surviving copies of the ballad all seem to date from the mid- or late-seventeenth century, it had certainly been in circulation for many decades already. There were several editions between the 1650s and the 1680s, and those issued after c.1664 usually included a second piece – A Godly Ballad of the Just Man Job – on the same sheet (an essay on patient suffering to add to the main song’s darkly humorous call for contemplation of mortality). The popularity of the The doleful Dance seems to have declined somewhat after the 1680s and there is no evidence that it survived in the repertoires of folk-singers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

This decline may reflect an eventual fading of the pre-modern notion that death could and should be discussed openly and with humour. The ballad is a highly compelling example of the ‘dance of death’ tradition that is often associated with the late-medieval fixation on demise and decay in the wake of the cataclysmic Black Death of 1346-53. As The doleful Dance suggests, however, the representation of Death as a scary skeleton who worked his way through society without fear or favour was alive and kicking throughout the early modern period. ‘The shaking of the sheets’ was also a well-known dance, though it is not entirely clear whether it preceded the ballad or grew out of it (see Featured tune history).

The culture of death changed in many significant ways as a consequence of the English Reformation (see Gittings, Houlbrooke and Marshall) but the ‘dance of death’ tradition appears to have been relatively untouched. It had the advantage of denominational neutrality because it said nothing about controversial issues such as intercession for the souls of the dead. The figure of Death was neither Catholic nor Protestant, and the basic responsibility of clergymen and moralists to urge awareness of mortality pertained on either side of the divide. Similarly, the dance’s potent message about the socially levelling effects of death retained its force throughout the turbulence of the Reformation.

Admittedly, England’s most famous visual representation of the ‘dance of death’, in the Pardon Churchyard at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, was destroyed in 1549 on the orders of the committedly Protestant Duke of Somerset, but it seems that the pictures were caught up in the assault upon a controversial tomb, rather than targeted because of their content (Appleford). Zealous Protestant divines were surely less likely than their late-medieval priests to treat the subject of death with knockabout humour, and they generally did not wish to see such macabre mirth on the walls of churches, but the ‘dance of death’ motif was not of itself a cause of particular concern.

Late-medieval church murals of the ‘dance of death’ sometimes survived the Reformation – in the Guildhall chapel at Stratford (Warwickshire), for example – and representations of the figure of Death were occasionally painted on church walls even after the mid-sixteenth century (Watt). It seems likely, however, that many visual versions of the 'dance of death' shared the fate of the one at St. Paul's, caught in the Reformation crossfire.

We might therefore think of The doleful Dance as a multi-media successor to these ecclesiastical murals.  The ballad-makers avoided all the references to the popes and cardinals that characterised late-medieval works in the genre, and they also steered well clear of the fierce sectarian controversy that surrounded the ‘Black Assize’ (Walsham). In all other respects, however, they followed the established patterns of the ‘dance of death’ very precisely. Like other religious tropes, the ‘dance of death’ skipped out of the church to find a new life on the printed page. Admittedly, ballad-consumers had to use their imaginations because the woodcut actually represents Death and Time rather than the 'dance of death' but it was close enough (see Featured woodcut history). The ballad provided something familiar in a changing world, and it may therefore have played a small part in helping the people of England to negotiate their way through the Reformation.

The success of The doleful Dance should also be related to the skilful and witty manner in which its creators went about their task. The opening verse, for example, is deliberately provocative and ear-catching. ‘The shaking of the sheets’ was normally a metaphor for sexual intercourse (see, for example, the anonymous Humble petition) but here it is re-purposed to describe the physical fits that often accompanied death. Of course, the connection between sex and death was an Elizabethan favourite, and the song’s opening lines were cleverly constructed to confuse and amuse. The opening question (‘Can you dance the shaking of the sheets, a dance that every one must do?’) clearly implies sex but very soon we realise the dreadful truth (‘Make ready then your winding sheet’).

The song also presents an impressively concise survey of society from the king to the beggar and we might imagine consumers listening out for the types most relevant to them. Some of Death’s warnings were also stylishly menacing in the great tradition of the ‘dance of death’: ‘And all good fellows that flash and swash,/ In reds and yellows of revel dash,/ I warrant you need not be so rash’. Bob Dylan could hardly have put it more effectively.

Christopher Marsh

References

Anon, The humble petition of many thousands of wives and matrons of the city of London (1643), p. 6.

Amy Appleford, ‘The dance of death in London: John Carpenter, John Lydgate, and the Daunce of Poulys’, Journal of medieval and early modern studies, 38.2 (Spring, 2008), pp. 285-314.

Broadside ballads from the Bodleian Library: http://ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/

John Considine, ‘Hill, Thomas [pseud. Didymus Mountaine] (c. 1528-c.1574)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

English Broadside Ballad Archive: https://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/

English Short Title Catalogue.

Clare Gittings, Death, burial and the individual in early modern England (1984).

John Heyricke, letter to William Heyricke (c. 1580), MS Eng. Hist c.474, no. 159, Bodleian Library, Oxford.

Ralph Houlbrooke, Death, religion and the family in England, 1480-1750 (Oxford, 1998).

Peter Marshall, Beliefs and the dead in Reformation England (Oxford, 2002).

Religious poems and songs (c. 1616), British Library, Add MS 15225, fos. 15r-16r. For a transcript, see the University of Rochester’s Middle English Texts series: https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/cook-and-strakhov-dance-of-death-shaking-sheets

Hyder E. Rollins, An analytical index to the ballad-entries (1557-1709) in the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London (1924; Hatboro, Pennsylvania, 1967), no. 2408 (see also 480).

Alexandra Walsham, Providence in early modern England (Oxford, 1999), pp. 234-36.

Many other texts of the period addressed the ‘dance of death’ theme. These reveal general similarities to The doleful Dance but precise verbal affinities are not very common. One important work was The dance of death (c. 1426), written by John Lydgate, the ‘monk of Bury’ and a prolific poet. This was a translation of a French text about the newly fashionable ‘danse macabre’ and it clearly remained well-known in England during the sixteenth century.

In 1549, for example, Lydgate’s contribution to the genre was published as ‘The daunce of Machabree’ at the end of his translation of Boccaccio’s Fall of princes (see Boccaccio). At one point, Lydgate’s figure of Death warns an archbishop that he ‘pursueth every coast’, an expression echoed in the fifth verse of the ballad when Death asks  ‘am I not in every Coast?’ It is unclear whether this indicates that the ballad-maker was aware of Lydgate’s text; many tropes moved freely through the ‘dance of death’ literature without necessarily indicating the direct influence of one particular source on another (references to ‘winding sheets’ were common, for example).

Another relevant work was The Daunce and Song of Death, an anonymous Elizabethan broadside that presented the famous metaphor in pictorial form with explanatory boxes of text (see also Marke well the effect, 1580). It is also worth mentioning a ballad called Deaths Dance, registered with the Stationers in 1631. This warned a range of social types to consider their mortality in the usual way but was particularly notable for its skilfully assembled composite ‘dance of death’ image, created by bringing three separate woodcuts together.

And in 1632, Walter Colman’s La dance machabre or Death’s duell managed to extend the dance of death to a remarkable 262 verses. Four words, found on the first page, conveyed the central message more precisely: ‘We must all die’.

Christopher Marsh

References

Douglas Gray, ‘Lydgate, John (c. 1370-1449/50?), poet and prior of Hatfield Regis’ (2004), Oxford dictionary of national biography.

John Lydgate, ‘The daunce of Machabree’ (c. 1426), included at the end of Giovanni Boccaccio, A treatise excellent and compendious, shewing and declaring, in maner of tragedy, the falles of sondry most notable princes and princesses... translated into our English and vulgare tong, by Dan John Lidgate monke of Bury (1554), fos. 220-224.

John Lydgate, ‘Dance of death’, ed. Megan L. Cooks and Elizaveta Strakhov, University of Rochester, Middle English texts series: https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/publication/cook-and-strakhov-dance-of-death