The Dance of Death and the Triumph of Death are themes that appeared across late medieval and Renaissance Europe in the visual arts, poetry and drama.¹ Death snatching people away became a favourite subject of didacticism. In Germany, France and Switzerland, particularly, the lasting impressions made by extant murals, verses and plays have continued into our time. Quantity of scholarship alone shows the growing interest in the subject. In modern drama, there are two distinct manifestations of the influence of the Dance of Death: first, the imitative Dance of Death plays, like Emil Wächter's, produced at the Berne Festival, 1962-64; and second, the more original adaptations of the theme such as Auden's The Dance of Death, Dürrenmatt's The Meteor and lonesco's Massacre Games.² Auden's familiarity with Germany perhaps included the Dances of Death on view before World War II. Dürrenmatt grew up near Berne and Basel, locations of Totentänze, and Ionesco learned his first lessons in staging death from puppet shows in the Luxembourg Gardens.

Historical evidence of dramatic performances of the Dance of Death goes back to 1393 in France. That dramatic presentations existed from the beginning—soon after the outbreak of the Black Death, 1347—is clear from the pictures, where conflict was suggested from the first. The Renaissance artists Niklaus Manuel Deutsch (c, 1484-1530), Bernese playwright and painter, and Hans Holbein the Younger (1497-1543), who spent some time in Basel, added realism and violence to their creations of the Dance. Holbein's Images of Death are complete scenes, crowded with characters, detailed scenery and intense dramatic conflict. Both Manuel and Holbein specialized in the grotesque comedy and social satire that replaced the dignified allegory and metaphysical meaning of the older Dances. Although drama gradually displaced the processional dance, the Renaissance artists retained the motif of music. Death as musician is prominent in the German tradition, whereas the French tradition generally prefers Death as gravedigger, carrying coffins or coffin lids, mattocks and shovels, though these objects may be combined with the pipe, and the dead figures—messenger of Death, or Death himself, depending on the text—are usually executing dance steps.

In the three plays under discussion, these aspects of the Dance of Death are present. Dance and music appear most prominently in Auden's play, with social satire as well. Dürrenmatt, imbued with the spirit of Manuel and Holbein, has transferred Renaissance realism to his play, together with a disconcerting touch of otherworldliness. His satire, too, prevails along with grotesque comedy. In Ionesco, we find the most stunning use of the medieval Dance of Death. In his play, the ominousness of Death, his dignity and irresistible power are vested in the allegorical Black Monk, who stalks his victims. Anonymous type characters come and go. Above all, the metaphysical aura, so strong in this author's later work, obtrudes in the midst of universal dying. Though devoid of theological meaning, this aura signifies man's helplessness before transcendence. Although the appearance of Death is sombre, Ionesco has injected the Grand Guignol farce in which he is now an expert, and in this context, it reflects the comic cavorting of the corpses in numerous Dances.³ Ionesco rejects realism categorically, of course, and by doing so he locates his work in fantasy. Rapid changes of scenes, simultaneous staging and use of lighting reinforce the vagueness of location. Common to Dürrenmatt and Ionesco is the medieval levelling of death, which carries off the rich and poor, the great and weak. The medieval hierarchy has its counterpart in a cross-section of modern society. Of the three playwrights, Auden alone parodies medieval didacticism in a half-serious exaltation of Marxism. Structurally, The Meteor and Massacre Games resemble the episodic scenes of Holbein, though Dürrenmatt's play is more tightly knit with a semblance of plot. Auden's play is in a single unit.

Auden's The Dance of Death (1933), performed by Rupert Doone in their Group Theatre, is only a lesser achievement in the Auden canon. More a cabaret act than a play, it presents Death the Dancer allegorically, first as Sun God, creator and destroyer, then as middle-class Fascism, trying to mislead the Chorus of confused Englishmen. Opposition comes from the working-class audience. The Dancer's tricks to deceive the Chorus are interpreted by an Announcer and consist of callisthenics, war, racism, organized pleasure and feats of daring. Death dances and makes the Chorus dance to mime these activities. The small jazz orchestra emphasizes the comic atmosphere that prevails through the light satiric tone of the lyrics and the low comedy of the cockney speeches. The play is a medley of commentary, song, dialogue, audience participation and other theatrical devices used in a Brechtian manner. Before his death, which signifies the end of the middle class, the Dancer bequeaths the sources of wealth to the audience, then the Chorus introduces the saviour figure by singing to Mendelssohn's Wedding March:

O Mr. Marx, you've gathered
All the material facts
You know the economic
Reasons for our acts.

(Enter Karl Marx with two young communists)
K.M. The instruments of production have been
too much for him. He is liquidated.⁴

Writing just prior to the mass dying inaugurated by Hitler, Auden did not treat his subject with the grimness and horror of later dramatists. His interest in the theme, however, is also evident in his serious war poem "Danse Macabre." The evocative power of his Dance of Death remains only guesswork until it is once again produced. Its significance for us is the combination of the dance motif with allegory in a modern cabaret act, thus bringing an ancient tradition to public awareness, as the medieval murals were intended to have popular appeal. This free use of the theme resembles the originality of Dürrenmatt and Ionesco.

In Dürrenmatt we find a playwright wholly obsessed with death. It is a peculiar aspect of his dramatic art that he places death in a grotesquely comic universe. Having had its première in 1966, The Meteor represents "grotesque theatre," a type of play based on the philosophical proposition that man's fate is grotesque but logical and therefore not absurd, when his careful planning is thwarted and reversed through chance, and he is thus reduced to the worst possible end. In The Meteor, Dürrenmatt has transposed the elements of the Dance of Death into an unexpected pattern: death prevails through the paradoxical and comic agency of Schwitter, the man who desperately desires death, dies several times, but keeps on resurrecting. He is the meteor that destroys the representatives of modern society. Extravagant comedy was captured in the Zürich première, when the renowned actor Leonard Stekel hurtled through the play, increasingly berserk and terrifying, tossing wet diapers and funeral wreaths in his frantic dance and then succumbing to comic despair.

Dürrenmatt has inherited the earthy humour and violence of Germanic artists and writers before him. He sees modern man as the victim not only of society, but even more of a demythologized transcendent force that reduces him to total frustration. This force is paradoxical chance. Dürrenmatt stands apart from Absurd Theatre on account of his view of existence and the moral purpose of his writing. He seeks to put a model of the real world on the stage to dramatize its grotesqueness. This formula works well for The Visit, where reality is parodied on various levels of unreality and where the moralist's accusing finger is pointed squarely into the auditorium. But when Dürrenmatt tackles theological mysteries such as life, death and immortality, as he does in The Meteor, the artistic purpose becomes confused. The blend of surface realism with myth and eschatology renders the play exceedingly difficult to stage. Schwitter, the Nobel Prize author who in revulsion against existence burns his manuscripts and millions and tries desperately to die strangely enough without thinking of suicide—is from the start a grotesque and improbable figure. Unwittingly he exerts a lethal influence on the clergyman, the artist, the contractor, the surgeon, his call-girl wife and finally, his mother-in-law, the toilet attendant. Here we have a burlesque of the Dance of Death procession of classes: instead of the pompous Pope of the Middle Ages, Dürrenmatt presents a timid and holy little minister; and instead of the peasant or cripple, the lowliest person is the toilet attendant, a semi-mythical figure who rises from her blue-tiled underworld, where she ekes out a living from the pennies dropped into her plate, and turns out to be a successful capitalist after all. In the meantime, Schwitter, the would-be corpse, makes love with the artist's wife in the same bed where he tries to die. Some of his victims are overwhelmed by his resurrections: the religious-minded die of joy, the agnostics of despair. Others are destroyed simply by chance for having strayed into the path of this meteor, which symbolizes the death force.

In an interview, Dürrenmatt indicated that Schwitter is a symbolic figure. He represents the self-destructive side of man, desiring his own death to excuse his brutal and nihilistic egoism.⁵ As the most grotesque character, he receives—paradoxically—the grace of a miracle. But he rejects it. That is the dialectic of the play.⁶ It is Schwitter who gives the play its metaphysical turn. He declares: "Death rushes toward one like a locomotive. Eternity is whistling about your ears, new creations roar into being, crash apart—the whole thing a gigantic accident."⁷

The human problem posed in the play is the agony of man as unwilling instrument of the death force. Here the medieval agent of Death has been re-created in a startling fashion and made to serve another metaphysical problem, the mystery of the afterlife. Dürrenmatt uses inversion much as Manuel does, for Schwitter, the death-figure, leaps and cavorts with more energy than the living. The violence of The Meteor is reminiscent of the shock effects in Manuel and Holbein.

As a Lazarus-figure Schwitter is an innovation in modern drama.⁸ From death he brings back an uncontrollable rage, an uncomprehending frustration and a growing horror of his predicament. One wonders from which existence he has rescued his abiding sense of irony. But it pervades the play, which consists of a series of comic reversals juxtaposing the glory of this world (success and money) with Schwitter's loathing of it. Renaissance wealth is parodied in the character of the tycoon contractor, modelled on the moneylender in Basel and the rich man in Holbein, but Diirrenmatt's original contribution is the toilet attendant and wealthy madam. Mixing his Swiss scatology with social satire, Dürrenmatt makes the Nobel Prize winner acknowledge the superiority of this woman's achievement. Compared to it literature and art are nothing, he says, addressing the already dead woman. "Death alone is the only reality," he adds, "the only imperishable thing."⁹ This is the final stage in the demythologizing of death begun in the sixteenth-century German Dances. Death no longer symbolizes transition into eternity—it represents only the end of man's mortal life and the scattering of his goods. This horrible joke is evident in Holbein's picture of the rich man: Death is scooping up his pile of gold while he leaps up in horror. Hence I interpret The Meteor as a twentieth-century version of the secular spirit of the Renaissance combined with a burlesque of the social types and of the corpse dancing vigorously out of the charnel-house.

That the end finds Schwitter more alive than ever remains Diirrenmatt's joke on the audience, who may indeed reject it as happened in Zürich. To Schwitter's final cry, "When will I finally croak?," a spectator shouted, "Soon, I hope!" In the secularized scheme of things it is of course no joke, since the death force will swallow up life. Dürrenmatt also parodies the medieval preacher and theme of redemption by introducing the Salvation Army, who sing in jubilation over Schwitter's "miraculous" resurrection. But their faith and joy are wasted on the man who has consistently rejected any suggestion of divine intervention. Although hampered by surface realism and the confusion of paradox, Dürrenmatt tries to convey the theological statement of real resurrection. Traces of the Dance of Death are also evident in The Visit, part of which Peter Brook choreographed (1958), and in Portrait of a Planet (1970), which the author linked expressly with the Dance of Death.

While Dürrenmatt shows the influence of the Swiss Dances, Ionesco's Massacre Games reveals an affinity with the French tradition of the danse macabré (accented until the seventeenth century) as exemplified in the pictures of Guyot Marchant (1485) that are copies of the Paris Dance and show Death as gravedigger. For its graphic details the play is based on Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year (1722). The Dance element was emphasized in the Paris production (1970) when the market scene was choreographed. Allegory is prominent in the figure of the Black Monk. The dramatic quality inheres in the separate scenes.

Ionesco believes that one must laugh at death. In 1969 he asserted that a dead person is derisible because he is no longer master of himself.¹⁰ Death is the deliberate joke in Massacre Games. The title alone stresses the play element in Ionesco's approach. A jeu de massacre is the game "Aunt Sally," played at fairs, in which the players throw sticks at the pipe in the mouth of a wooden woman's head. In this play, Death plays his grisly game with human beings. The basic irony in this game resembles that of the merry dance to which Death invites his reluctant guests. Ionesco also makes death itself ridiculous by dehumanizing all the characters, creating the effect of a gigantic puppet show. The surrealism of the Black Monk is emphasized by the marionette-like appearance and movements of the other characters, and the possible use of actual puppets and dummies on stage. In the Paris production, Death himself collapsed at the end like a giant puppet.

Briefly, the play consists of seventeen disconnected scenes showing the ravages of the plague in an unidentified town. Each scene presents another segment of society: shoppers at market, the rich man in his mansion, prisoners in jail, young people making love, a traveler at an inn, the city father giving a speech. The last scene shows the cessation of the plague and the beginning of the great fire. The resemblance of the play to the Dance of Death is in the use of allegory, social types and the theme of mass dying. The choice of the plague as the means of death is an even more significant resemblance. Hellmut Rosenfeld states that "all medieval pictures of the Dance of Death were painted or renovated immediately before or after catastrophes of plague."¹¹ Originally intended as spiritual warnings, they eventually were invested with a magical power to avert epidemics or cure victims of the disease.

Since the writings of Artaud and Camus, the plague has taken on new symbolic meaning for the modern mind. The universal dying witnessed in our century also invites artistic parody and requires the distancing of comedy to check emotion and control the gruesomeness of the subject. In its effects, it is a control different from yet similar to that of the medieval paintings with their austere detachment. It is different from the comedy of the Renaissance artists and of Rowlandson, who direct their attention to the social evils of their day and lure the viewer to immerse himself in the spectacle. Although Ionesco's career started in the Theatre of the Absurd, I do not think he writes exclusively in this vein any more. He has moved on to a theatre of myth, archetype and dream, shot through with a mystical vision and perception of the transcendental that take him back to medieval forms and symbols.

Ionesco found a vivid account of the 1665 London plague in Defoe's story. It is a description of shocking events cushioned by pious moral reflections arising from the pragmatism of a business man, Defoe's narrator, H. F. The Journal contains many dramatic scenes. Over half of Ionesco's scenes are borrowed directly from or based partly on the Journal. Even dialogue and some props are transferred from the source, the most outstanding being the wonderful profusion of stolen hats. When we come to this scene we realize why Ionesco chose 1880-1900 for the setting. What other reason but the comic exploitation of that heyday of millinery art? H. F.'s solemn interruption of the looting in the hat shop is transformed into Ionesco's riot of screeching women who "dress up with absurd ostentation, feathers flying to the four corners of the stage. They fight over the things. They have hats of all colours, the stage is covered with an improbable number of gaudy clothes."¹² Another farcical scene based directly on Defoe is the fumigating scene in the rich man's house. Defoe also tells of watchmen posted to shut up and guard houses of stricken families. Essentially they are decent fellows doing an impossible job. But Ionesco changes them into armed policemen who aid the plague in decimating the population. Uniformed in black, they appear to be Death's own henchmen. Another detail is the cruelty of the nurses. H. F. narrates these tales and piously questions their authenticity; but Ionesco rejects the moralizing and dramatizes the situation starkly: the nurse murders her patient and takes her money. Persons committing suicide, running naked through the streets or throwing themselves out of windows in distraction, are found in both works. In every instance the sober realism of Defoe is transmuted by Ionesco into eerie fantasy or grotesque farce.

In adapting Defoe and the Dance of Death, Ionesco modifies his satire. The impersonal element derived from more primitive theatre neutralizes it. Both puppets and stilts, and the mechanical repetition of acts, the depersonalized mass dying and the brevity of scenes disallowing audience identification, render the play as uncommitted as possible. The satire itself is pushed to the limits of improbability. For example, in discussing the pollution problem, the Fifth Housewife says: "I remember we used to have to wash carrots, or else they gave you leprosy." Presently she comments: "O, eggplants are cancerplants." (p. 9) Political satire fares the same way. The revolutionary politician declares: "This dying is political! We're playing into the hands of our oppressors by dying." (p. 73) The moderate politician says: "Our leaders are obsessed with death, they are neurotic about it. They make up a morbid and decadent government." (p. 79)

By his ingenious combination of history with surrealism and symbolism, Ionesco has created a unique Dance of Death play that reflects the allegorical quality of the medieval Dances. Of primary importance is the Black Monk mounted on stilts. The symbolic function of black is evident in the Würzburger Totentanz (c. 1360), where the Dead Man says he leads "the dance of black brothers" and is himself called the "black man."¹³ The frequent, silent appearances of the Monk create the uncanny feeling that the Dance of Death plays and Everyman must have raised in their original audiences.¹⁴ Like the medieval Dances, too, Ionesco's play evokes no pity, and so his omission of Defoe's pathetic and sentimental scenes is deliberate. All suggestions of charity and religious reverence for God's punishment, however, are suppressed or distorted. Ionesco also omits three scenes he could have exploited for comic effect: Defoe's tales of the living piper accidentally carried out in the dead cart, of the man stricken with plague who swam the Thames and thereby was cured, and of the reconciliation of the religious sects. It seems that these were passed over because they end happily. In Ionesco, too, government and authority are presented in a foolish or sinister light, whereas Defoe defends them. By these means Ionesco's Dance of Death has stripped away every trace of secular glory depicted in the Dances from the beginning. For the medieval and Renaissance mind this world was intensely attractive; for Ionesco it is so only in snatches and then for immaterial reasons.

Without a theological centre, Ionesco's mystical bent, discussed at length in his Conversations with Claude Bonnefoy and evident especially in The Killer, leads him to experience moments of brightness and euphoria followed by terrible obscurity and heaviness. Amid all the puppetry of this play, suddenly an old couple hobble onto the stage and begin to recount these contradictory experiences of life. To the Old Woman, "Everything is a miracle" (p. 88), the world is "sweet and mysterious" and everything makes her happy (p. 93). The Old Man, however, has never felt this. To him, "every instant is burden-some and empty" (p. 89), and "The universe is a great steel ball, impenetrable" (p. 93). Her sadness is in his resistance to her love; his sadness is in his failure to have challenged existence (p. 93). Then the plague strikes her down. That this scene is to be played straight, without farce or grotesqueness, indicates the artistic purpose: the old couple have an intense experience of existence; its incommunicability stresses the essentially private nature of mystical insight; it may come as ecstasy or as abandonment. This is a dramatization, not of the absurdity of life, but of an experience beyond the limits of reason that is substantiated in much mystical writing. This transcendence possesses something of the medieval otherworldly quality; we realize here the presence of the intangible, the visionary, the mysterious. The scene ends and we see the looting, the gravediggers, the dead cart and the final farce of the "man of middle age, middle height and . . . middle class" being crammed into a coffin while the audience starts applauding (p. 106). Why did Ionesco insert this surprising scene into his puppet show if not to offer a glimpse of the mystery of life and death? Beyond social satire, beyond grotesque comedy, mystery envelops humanity, but only a few perceive it. What Dürrenmatt fails to achieve because of his surface realism, Ionesco succeeds in through his peculiar concept and use of theatre: "I want only to render my own strange and improbable universe."¹⁵

Initially an art form inspired by religious conviction and otherworldly orientation, the Dance of Death play has moved in our century in two opposite directions. First, there are those plays and musical compositions with dialogue that adhere closely to the originals and are best performed, like the modern Everyman in Salzburg, in or close to the church edifice. The other course, followed by such dramatists as Auden, Dürrenmatt and Ionesco, takes the basic Dance or drama of Death into wider and unexpected areas of adaptation best suited to the theatre with its technical equipment. For Dürrenmatt and Ionesco, at least, the theatre is still suitable for a projection of metaphysical realities such as the mysteriousness of life and the horror of death. Realism is inadequate to dramatize these experiences, whereas the styles of surrealism and symbolism can create the required distance. Strindberg's The Dance of Death stands behind Dürrenmatt, who wrote his own adaptation, turning it into a marital boxing match. The naturalism in this Strindberg work is a deceptive cloak disguising elements more commonly found in expressionistic and absurd drama. Jarry's King Ubu is the acknowledged forerunner of Ionesco's dramatic art, and much might be said of Father Ubu as a dancing figure of Death drawn from the puppet theatre. The grotesque comedy central to Jarry's work has remained the strongest theatrical means of defying death and distancing its horror. A comic intension, I believe, was operating under cover in the medieval Dances of Death alongside of the overt didactic purpose, for the irony of being invited to a merry dance against one's will is a comic predicament and the joke played on man in his unpreparedness. From their interviews and their entire dramatic work, we may conclude that Dürrenmatt and Ionesco write grotesque comedies about death in order to distance its horror from themselves.

¹ Hellmut Rosenfeld's Der mittelalterliche Totentanz (Köln, 1954, 1968) is a reliable history of the Dance of Death, with annotated bibliography. The identity and date of the oldest Dance of Death text, however, are disputed. Stephan Cosacchi, Makabertanz (Meisenheim, 1965), believes the Spanish Danza general de la Muerte, which he dates after 1350, to be the oldest. Rosenfeld refutes this hypothesis, claiming the honour for the Latin Dance of Death, which he ascribes to a German Dominican, c. 1350.

² Emil Wächter, Der Berner Totentanz nach Nikiaus Manuel, Musik von Heinrich Sutermeister (Bern, 1964). Hugo Distler, Dance of Death, ed. Malcolm Johns, trans. Brigitte Rauer, Opus 12, No. 2, Motet for All Saints' Sunday. Dialogue based on the Lübecker Totentanz by Johannes Klöcking (Marquette, 1970). Another interesting play with music is Hans Henny Jahn's Neuer Lübecker Totentanz, Musik, Yngve Jan Trede (Hamburg, 1954), wherein two figures of Death appear, a fat one and an emaciated one. Several minor German authors have written imitative Dance of Death plays. W. H. Auden, The Dance of Death (London, 1933); Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Der Meteor (Zürich, 1966); and Eugène Ionesco, Jeux de massacre (Paris, 1970).

³ Théâtre de Grand Guignol was a Parisian theatre of horrors that flourished from 1896 to the early 1960's. Farces alternated with plays of horror almost from the start.

⁴ Auden, The Dance of Death, p. 38.

⁵ "Lazarus, der Fürchterliche. Urs Jenny im Gespräch mit Friedrich Dürrenmatt," Theater heute, 7 (Feb. 1966), 12.

⁶ Violet Ketels, "Friedrich Dürrenmatt at Temple University," Journal of Modern Literature, 1 (1970), 100. [Interview].

⁷Der Meteor, p. 47. Trans. mine.

⁸ The case of Edgar in Strindberg's The Dance of Death is not entirely similar, for although he claims to have died and returned, the author's chief concern is not with the mystery of resurrection.

⁹Der Meteor, p. 68.

¹⁰ Nelly K. Murstein, "Une Entrevue avec Eugène Ionesco," The French Review, 45 (Feb. 1972), 618.

¹¹ Rosenfeld, "Der mittelalterliche Bilderbogen," Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum, 85 (1954), 75, and Der mittelalterliche Totentanz, pp. 59, 299.

¹²Jeux de massacre, p. 98. Trans. mine. Further references to this play are indicated in the text.

¹³ Quoted in Der mittelalterliche Totentanz, pp. 311, 317. Death clad in monkish garb occurs in late medieval art. Such a statue is in the Badisches Landesmuseum, Karlsruhe. Hans H. Hofstätter, Art of the Late Middle Ages (New York, 1968), p. 202, supposes it to have been part of a Dance of Death group.

¹⁴ In La Soif et la faim (1964), Ionesco presents sinister figures in monkish costume. Their silent Brother Superior also walks on stilts.

¹⁵Notes and Counter Notes (New York, 1964), p. 159.