The summons of death on the medieval and Renaissance English stage

Abstract

It has become a literary commonplace to speak of the late medieval obsession with death, but this "obsession" is not unique to the middle ages. All great art is concerned with endings--the deaths of heroes, the discarding of illusions, even the resolutions of love-triangles--and, as Samuel Johnson has pointed out, in every ending we see and grapple with our own end. Although the drama of the Renaissance seldom featured Death in its cast of characters, as did its medieval predecessors, death walked the stage in a number of disguises, a series of changing symbols reflecting the changing religious, social, and artistic views of the times. This study traces the universal theme, the summons of death, through its changing dramatic patterns in England, from the Mystery plays of the fourteenth century to the closing of the theaters in 1642. The first two chapters block in a survey of nondramatic representation of death, with particular attention to allegorical and symbolic iconography and theological treatises on the art of dying. Chapter Three surveys the coming of death in Mystery and early Morality plays, with a detailed view, in Chapter four, of the greatest death-play of them all, Everyman. Chapter Five, a summary of the shift from allegory to symbol in the sixteenth century, analyzes the relationship of the new symbols to new religious views on justification, repentence, and salvation, as well as to the new humanism of the Renaissance, both orthodox and heterodox. The next four chapters deal in detail with representative plays of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries: Tamburlaine, Doctor Faustus, Measure for Measure, and The Duchess of Malfi, all of which, no matter how heterodox they appear, are dependent on medieval Catholic tradition filtered through Protestant apologetics. In Chapter Ten, the traditional memento mori is followed in its decline from a religious exercise to a set piece of sensationalism as the medieval influence becomes more remote; and the final chapter describes the closing of the circle: the seventeenth-century inversion of the summons, in which the human creature summons Death.