The poem is found in British Library MS Additional 15225, a miscellany of mostly Catholic ballads compiled in the first quarter of the seventeenth century. Although the date of the manuscript is late, the language of many of the poems, including the one printed here, is earlier. (The contents of the entire manuscript are described in Rollins, Old English Ballads, p. xxvii–xxx). The poem draws on several familiar dimensions of the medieval danse macabre tradition, including its emphasis on Death’s leveling power across all levels of society (“Bringe away the beggar and the king, / And everie man in his degree,” lines 8–9). While Lydgate’s poem contains a more or less equal representation of clerical and secular occupations, most of the figures named here are laypeople and the more explicitly “Popish” figures found in Lydgate’s version, like the Pope and the Friar, are absent.

This version of the danse macabre engages with religion in other ways, however. The fourth stanza references the “solempe syses last” in Oxfordshire. This is an allusion to the socalled “Black Assize” of the summer of 1577. As many as 300 people died in an outbreak of “gaol fever” (typhus) that coincided with the trial of a recusant (Catholic) bookseller, Roland Jenkes (see ODNB, “Barham, Nicholas”). The dead included Sir Robert Bell, chief baron of the exchequer, and Nicholas Barham, a sergeant-at-law, as well as several members of the jury — Puritans who were perceived to be biased against Jenkes. The event is described by Holinshed in the expanded and revised 1587 version of his Chronicle (p. 1270) and, in addition to the English ballad here, was the source for a Welsh carol by the recusant priest and martyr Richard White (see English Martyrs, ed. Pollen, p. 99).

The references to the “solempe syses last” suggest this version of the poem was composed shortly after the events of 1577, although this stanza — the only one in the poem to contain topical references — may be an interpolation into an older text. The text was printed numerous times as a broadsheet ballad in the seventeenth century. Like other broadsides in the danse macabre tradition, these later printings often feature woodcuts of Death armed with a spear (also a feature of the fifteenth-century illustrations to Lydgate’s “Death’s Warning to the World” [DIMEV 4905]).

Manuscript:

• London, British Library Additional MS 15225, fols. 15r–16r

Early Print Editions:

• The dolefull dance and song of death; intituled, dance after my pipe. [London]: F. Coles, J. Wright, T. Vere, and W. Gilbertson, [1655–58]. (Wing H2013A)

• The dolefull dance and song of death; intituled; Dance after my pipe. London: F. Coles, T. Vere, and W. Gilbertson, [1658–64]. (Wing H2013B)

• The doleful Dance and Song of Death; Intituled, Dance after my Pipe. [London]: F. Coles, T. Vere, and J. Wright, [1663–74?]. (Rawl. 566)

• The doleful Dance, and Song of Death; Intituled, Dance after my pipe. [London]: T. Vere, I. Wright, J. Clarke, W. Thackeray, and T. Passenger, [1678–81]. (Pepys Ballads 2.62)

Editions:

• Chappell, W., ed. “The Dance and Song of Death.” In Roxburghe Ballads, vol. 3. Hertford: Stephen Austin & Sons, 1880; Rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1966, pp. 183–86.

• Gray, Douglas, ed. “A Dolfull Daunce & Song of Death Intituled: the Shakeing of the Sheetes.” In “Two Songs of Death.” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 64 (1963), 64–67.