Alexander Dyce, A General Glossary to Shakespeare's Works

fool — “Merely, thou art death's,” MEASURE FOR MEASURE, iii. 1. 11. The allusion in this passage is to a struggle between Death and the Fool; and would certainly seem to have no connection with the allusion in the passage of Pericles, — “To please the fool and death.” “Bishop Warburton and Mr. Malone have referred to old Moralities, in which the fool escaping from the pursuit of Death is introduced. Ritson has denied the existence of any such farces, and he is perhaps right with respect to printed ones; but vestiges of such a drama were observed several years ago at the fair of Bristol by the present writer [See what follows]” (DOUCE) . “Mr. Douce, to whom our readers are indebted for several happy illustrations of Shakespeare, assures me that some years ago, at a fair in a large market-town, he observed a solitary figure sitting in a booth, and apparently exhausted with fatigue. This person was habited in a close black vest painted over with bones in imitation of a skeleton. But my informant being then very young, and wholly uninitiated in theatrical antiquities, made no inquiry concerning so whimsical a phenomenon. [Douce observes that the following additional circumstances communicated by him to Steevens had probably escaped his recollection, —“that his informant concerning the skeleton character at the fair remembered also to have seen another personage in the habit of a fool; and that arriving when the performances at the booth were finished for the evening, he could not succeed in procuring a repetition of the piece, losing thereby the means of all further information on the subject.”] Indeed, but for what follows, I might have been induced to suppose that the object he saw was nothing more or less than the hero of a well-known pantomime, entitled Harlequin Skeleton. This circumstance, however, having accidentally reached the ears of a venerable clergyman who is now more than eighty years of age, he told me that he very well remembered to have met with such another figure, above fifty years ago, at Salisbury. Being there during the time of some public meeting, he happened to call on a surgeon at the very instant when the representative of Death was brought in to be let blood on account of a tumble he had had on the stage, while in pursuit of his antagonist, a Merry Andrew, who very anxiously attended him (dressed also in character) to the phlebotomist's house. The same gentleman's curiosity, a few days afterwards, prevailed on him to be spectator of the dance in which our emblem of mortality was a performer. This dance, he says, entirely consisted of Death's contrivances to surprise the Merry Andrew, and of the Merry Andrew's efforts to elude the stratagems of Death, by whom at last he was overpowered; his finale being attended with such circumstances as mark the exit of the Dragon of Wantley. . . . It should seem that the general idea of this serio-comic pas-de-deux had been borrowed from the ancient Dance of Machabre, commonly called The Dance of Death, a grotesque ornament of cloisters, both here and in foreign parts. The aforesaid combination of figures, though erroneously ascribed to Hans Holbein, was certainly of an origin more remote than the times in which that eminent painter is known to have flourished” (STEEVENS) . “The letter [representing a struggle between Death and the Fool] that occurs in Stowe's Survey of London, edit. 1618, 4to, is only an enlarged but imperfect copy from another belonging to a regular Dance of Death used as initials by some of the Basil printers in the sixteenth century, and which, from the extraordinary skill that accompanies their execution, will ever rank amongst the finest efforts in the art of engraving on blocks of wood or metal. Most of the subjects in this Dance of Death have undoubtedly been supplied by that curious pageant of mortality which, during the middle ages, was so great a favourite as to be perpetually exhibited to the people either in the sculpture and painting of ecclesiastical buildings, or in the books adapted to the service of the church: yet some of them but ill accord with those serious ideas which the nature of the subject is calculated to inspire. In these the artist has indulged a vein of broad and satirical humour which was not wholly reserved for the caricatures of modern times; and in one or two instances he has even overleaped the bounds of decency. The letter in Stowe's Survey is the only one that appears to have been imitated from the above alphabet. . . . It is to be remembered that in most of the old dances of death the subject of the fool is introduced; and it is, on the whole, extremely probable that some such representation might have suggested the image before us [in the letter copied from Stowe's Survey]” (DOUCE) .