Although this poem does not contain the characteristic features of the danse macabre such as social satire and a dialogue between Death and the living, it is identified in its manuscript, British Library Additional MS 37049, as “The Dawnce of Makabre.” The poem, written in a Northern dialect, is one of a large number of death-related texts included in British Library MS Additional 37049, a Carthusian miscellany produced in Yorkshire during the second half of the fifteenth century. The allusion in this context shows that the danse macabre was recognized in monastic as well as lay contexts and circulated in England, well outside of London, where most of the surviving manuscripts of Lydgate’s poem were made.

It is representative of a popular genre of late medieval and early modern epitaphs in verse, although here (as in many other examples of the genre) the length of the poem calls into question whether or not this was ever actually inscribed on a tombstone or other monument. While in the Additional MS the poem is titled “The Dawnce of Makabre” and at line 63 enjoins its readers to “remembyr of the dawnce of makabre,” it does not contain the catalogue of figures or elements of estates satire found in Lydgate’s poem and characteristic of the Dance of Death tradition more broadly. It does, however, emphasize the inevitability and universality of death throughout, as well as the transitory nature of earthly life and achievements.

While, despite the title it is given in manuscript, the text is not closely aligned with the danse macabre tradition, it contains a number of other interesting literary features. The poem is framed as an epitaph, in which the memorial itself speaks to passersby. The second stanza is carefully structured to include each of the seven deadly sins, while the fourth and fifth stanzas feature an extended meditation on the great men of the past, an example of the ubi sunt trope borrowed from classical literature, which we also find in “Three Messengers of Death” (DIMEV 5387) included in this edition. The direct address to the reader, maintained throughout the poem, asks the reader to directly confront issues related to death, packing both vivid description and emotional intensity into the poem’s 83 rhyme royal lines. In the manuscript, a large, colored drawing of a skeleton wearing a crown, facing the reader and with one hand upraised, further heightens the sensation of direct address. This visual addition evokes the “image-text” quality of the larger danse macabre tradition, and resembles the visuals accompanying Lydgate’s “Death’s Warning to the World” (DIMEV 4905).

Manuscript:

• London, British Library Additional 37049 fols. 31v–32r

Editions:

• Brunner, Karl, ed. “Dance of Makabre.” In “Mittelenglische Todesgedichte.” Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 167 (1935), 27–28, 30.

• Doty, Brant Lee, ed. “Dawnce of Makabre.” In “An Edition of British Museum Manuscript Additional 37049: a Religious Miscellany.” Ph.D. Dissertation: Michigan State University, 1969. Pp. 206–11.

• Hogg, James, ed. “A Morbid Preoccupation with Mortality? The Carthusian London British Library MS. Add. 37049.” Zeit, Tod und Ewigkeit in der Renaissance Literatur 2 (1986): 52–54.