Holbein’s Imagines, Cologne, 1566.
To another of the devices of the Images of Death (Lyons, 1547), attributed to Holbein, we may also refer as the source of one of the Dramatist’s descriptions, in Douce’s Dance of Death, (London, 1833, and Bonn’s, 1858); the device in question is numbered XLIII. and bears the title of the Idiot Fool. Woltmann’s Holbein and his Time (Leipzig, 1868, vol. ii. p. 121), names the figure “Narr des Todes,”—Death’s Fool,—and thus discourses respecting it. “Among the supplemental Figures,”—that is to say, in the edition of 1545, supplemental to the forty-one Figures in the edition of 1538,—“is found that of the Fool, which formerly in the Spectacle-plays of the Dance of Death represented by living persons played an important part. Also as these were no longer wont to be exhibited, the Episode of the contest of Death with the Fool was kept separate, and for the diversion of the people became a pantomimic representation. From England expressly have we information that this usage maintained itself down to the former century. The Fool’s efforts and evasions in order to escape from Death, who in the end became his master, form the subject of the particular figures. On such representations Shakespeare thought in his verses in Measure for Measure” (act iii. sc. 1, lines 6–13, vol. i. p. 334). Though Woltmann gives only three lines, we add the whole passage better to bring out the sense,—
“Reason thus with life:
If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing
That none but fools would keep: a breath thou art,
Servile to all the skyey influences,
That dost this habitation, where thou keep’st,
Hourly afflict: merely, thou art death’s fool;
For him thou labour’st by thy flight to shun,
And yet runn’st toward him still.”