A SEVENTEENTH CENTURY DANCE OF DEATH

Turnbull Library Record, Volume I, Issue 3, 1 March 1968, Page 29

A SEVENTEENTH CENTURY DANCE OF DEATH

F. M. McKay

There is in the Turnbull Library a small octavo book La Dance Machabre or Death’s Duell of which only five other copies are known to survive. On B of the Turnbull copy is written the name of a previous owner ‘Frances Wolf-(?)eston her bouk’. No date is given on the title page and the author is merely styled W.C. A prose dedication to Queen Henrietta Maria, the Queen of Charles I, is signed Colman and a verse dedication W. Colman. The book itself offers no conclusive evidence that its author was the Franciscan friar Walter Colman. We know of Colman’s authorship from two Franciscan historians Angelus Mason and Luke Wadding. Mason wrote in his Certamen Seraphicum (1649): ‘Opus vtile, qui titulus Duellum Mortis metro Anglicano a se compositum, in lucem edidit, Sacraeque Majestati Angliae Regine(sic) dedicavit.’ and Wadding in Scriptores Ordinis Minorum (1650): ‘Christophorus Colmanus. . . edidit rhythmo Anglico Mortis duellum, Londini an 1628. ’* No edition of 1628 is known. The book was entered in the Stationers’ Register 13 June, 1631. Possibly some support for the existence of an earlier edition is Colman’s statement in his verse dedication to the Queen that his ‘rude composure’ was ‘. . . the first piece ventur’d on the Stage/ Since you were ours,/ To craue your Patronage.’ 2 Henrietta Maria, after the earlier ceremony in Notre Dame, married Charles at Canterbury in 1625.

The dedication to the Queen reminds us that with her accession there was some slackening of the rigid censorship which had previously severely restricted Catholic books. Caution was still necessary and the London publisher of Colman’s book suppressed any reference to his author’s religious status. It is interesting to note that under Henrietta Maria, between 1631 and 1636, there were six new editions of the work of the Jesuit martyr Robert Southwell who had been executed as a traitor in 1595.

Mason tells us of the genesis of La Dance Machabre. While a Franciscan novice Colman wrote a poetic meditation on death which at the command of the Master of Novices he burnt. After his profession he rewrote the poem in the form we now have it. Colman’s theme, which is that of the medieval Dance of Death, was enormously popular both in England and on the Continent. Besides numerous literary treatments of the theme examples of ‘Death leading off all estates’ existed in many English Churches and other buildings in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The most famous example was the one painted around the cloister of Saint Paul’s Cathedral, lamentably destroyed by the Duke of Somerset in 1549. As late as 1651 Wenceslaus Hollar, drawing master to the future Charles 11, produced his admirable imitations of Hans Holbein the Younger’s enormously popular His

Images of Death Les Simulachres et historiees faces de la mort (Lyons, 1538). The theme of the Dance of Death received popular literary currency in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries through broadside ballads. Colman’s poem is perhaps the last extended treatment of the subject in the seventeenth century. Like Robert Southwell before him Colman regarded his poetry as part of his apostolic work on the English mission. He said in his fulsome dedication to the Queen that he wrote: ‘. . . pour ayder aux hommes peruertis de cest side corrumpu, a retourner de l’insolence a la crainte du Ciel et de la debauche a la raison par le sentiment de ce quilz doiuent estre et par la pensee de ce quilz ne sont pas, la malice leur ayant ferme les yeux de fame pour ne veior et l’impiete bouche les oreilles pour n’entendre a bien faire, comme dit le Roy Prophete.’ 3 The reader is exhorted: ‘Read note (sic) if not to profit’, and the appropriate response is repentance:

‘Twixt life and death the fatall warre I sing: Which whil’st I but recite, me thinkes from all At euery accent should a salt teare fall.’ 4

By two engravings, one of which is the title-page, Colman evokes the traditional atmosphere of the Dance of Death. On the title page Death sits enthroned. Besides his dart Death holds by two cords eight panels containing groups representing his subjects: All ages, all conditions, all estates. In the second engraving death holds a spade and leans on a coffin upturned beside an open grave. The Latin tag ‘Sum quod eris Fui quod es’ points the moral. La Dance Machabre runs to some two hundred and sixty two verses nearly all of which are six line stanzas of lambic Pentameter rhymed ababcc. The poem is constructed of a series of loosely connected meditations on the traditional commonplaces on death found in devotional manuals. It is the horrific aspects and the terror of God’s judgement that fascinate Colman, a reflection of the medieval quality of his piety and the intense earnestness of the novice who first drafted the poem. Colman does not move easily in verse and is frequently awkward and flat. There is nothing in his poem to suggest vigour or distinction of mind. Occasionally the concluding couplet is well-turned and there are the lines which will perhaps appeal to those with a cyclic view of history: ‘So impudent our female sex’s are growne That by their garb they scarce from men are known.’

The liveliest section is the attack on those women who though well past the first flush of youth still search tirelessly for lovers:

‘But as in weaknesse, so in wickednesse, Doe your old doting women beare the bell Though nere so much appailed with age, expresse Their good will striuing euer to excell Your fondest Wanton, in whose mouthes still rise The Prouerbe for their warrantie. Lifes Life.

Dawbing their flaggie cheekes, anoint their nerues, Stand poring in a glasse, expose their dugges, Prouoke stale nature with restoritiues; Write loue letters, dance galliards, with their drugges, And tempting gold, insight some smooth-fac’st boy, In that which is loues remedie to ioy.’

Tell these of death, that one foots in the graue, Vnto the market (straight they will be bold To answere) comes (so many shifts they haue) The yong sheep-skin as soone as doth the old. Thus nuzeld in their sensualitie Towards death and hell they post on merrily. 6

Of special interest are the references to John Donne. There is the line: ‘Then thinke each bell that toles, toles out for thee,’ 7 and a whole poem of bitter complaint that Roger Muchill (Michell) had stolen his title ‘Death’s Duell’ and conferred it on a sermon of Donne. From Donne and the Metaphysicals, however, Walter Colman appears to have learnt little. He is a latter-day medievalist trying to evoke for the court of Charles I a honor of Death and its consequences by means of

images and ideas that had long since lost their vitality.

Victoria University of Wellington

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