#john lydgate

The stress on her footyng, on the passage or trace, ties her posture to the choreographed and, tellingly, architectural discipline of Death’s plans for her body; the last lines show her steeling herself to relinquish her beauty and her flesh. Here, the word rimpled means wrinkled, folded, or corrugated, like the flesh of Alice’s cadaver figure; the Harley manuscript [of Lydgate's Danse Macabre] witnesses an alternative line: ‘Our Reueled age saith farwell adiev’. This might make more sense, in that she is saying that her age of revels—her youth—is leaving her; but the base text Bergen uses is, at the expense of grammatical sense, perhaps more strenuous (even her wrinkled age is leaving her). What is true of all the victims of the poem is true of the Great Lady: that Death is really her body, though it seems to have a body of its own that is quite separate. If Death has a skeleton, it is the Princess’s skeleton. Here, as so often in personification, a sort of autoimmune condition develops, as something that belongs to one entity is alienated and experienced as quite other than it, perhaps even as attacking it out of nowhere. Death requires the Princess to lose control of her own ‘straungenesse’, that disdainful and compelling quality of romance ladies who play hard to get, and to submit instead to its quite foreign, exterior, superior, and ultimately strange power. Death forces her to follow a passageway or path that leads her away from herself. In the poem, the otherness is always the same: death is the same thing to all of us. In biological fact, our skeletons are no more alike than our faces or social positions, if less legible, but in the dance those bones are unified into a single image that repeats mercilessly across the poem. The terrifying repetition of sameness is designed to shock us again and again as we see the shock every character experiences, each unlikelier than the last, but all inevitable. Reading the poem, we are drawn through postures of disgust and pity, disgust and pity—a repetition at the frequency interval of two stanzas. It is a dance for the reader, designed to draw us in and out of other persons as a way of accepting the simultaneously comic and penitential work of relinquishing ourselves to dissolution.

Elizabeth Fowler, "The Duchess and the Cadaver: Doubling and Microarchitecture in Late Medieval Art (with Alice Chaucer and John Lydgate)", Personification: Embodying Meaning and Emotion (Brill 2016)

13th Century illustration of Saint Michael the Archangel defeating Satan as a dragon (x)

O Myghell! by grace of Cryst Iesu Callid among angelis þe hevenly champioun, Be a prerogatyf synguler of vertu, Held a batayll, venquysshed the dragoun, Be thow our sheld and our proteccyoun, In euery myschef of daungeris infernall, Dyffende our party, presente our orisoun, Vp to the Lord that gouerneth all.

John Lydgate, Minor Poems. Modernization below.

The Daunce of Machabree

Wherein is Lively Expressed and Shewed the State of Manne, and how He is Called at Uncertayne Tymes by Death, and when He Thinketh Least Thereon

John Lydgate (1371-1449), The Temple of Glas (c. 1430)

Lydgate’s Temple of Glas is a poetic dream-vision that recounts a secret negotiation between an unknown “queen” and “man”. The queen beseeches the goddess Venus to free her from her “double bind” — suggesting that she may be trapped in a loveless marriage, betrothed against her will, or prevented from marrying at all. What is clear is that she desires a man she cannot possess. In reply, Venus promises the queen that she will one day have what she desires, though she must wait patiently, and that the man will love her devotedly.

Lydgate’s poem is unique in that it confers agency onto the lady, rather than the man, granting her the full capacity of suffering the agonies of the courtly lover. Moreover, the stealth and scandal of the affair suggests that it represents an extramarital affair or clandestine marriage. These have led critics to speculate that Lydgate had in mind the clandestine marriage of Catherine de Valois and Owen Tudor. Queen Catherine was personally acquainted with Lydgate, commissioning at least one short poem from him, That now is hay some-tyme was grase: a short lament on the passing of youthful beauty, reflecting Catherine’s anguish as a young widow. Like the “queen” in Temple of Glas, Catherine was forbidden from remarrying by her young son’s council. Her second marriage to Owen Tudor in the late 1420’s was likely an open secret in court circles, and Lydgate was close enough principal actors to have observed events and form his own opinions. The Temple of Glas may therefore have been an attempt from Lydgate to subtly lend his poetical craft to Catherine’s cause.

MUSIC ART WORDS: 1426

Guillaume DuFay, Missa Sancti Jacobi: II. Kyrie (1426)

John Lydgate, The Dance of Death (1426)