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Article Excerpt
The Three Living and the Three Dead, a mediaeval icon of the macabre, survives in English manuscripts in only five illuminations (two with English verses) and an alliterative poem. The motif works as multiple speculum, its six haunted figures engaged in a reciprocal specular encounter, while it beckons a reader to take his or her place in its temporal hall of mirrors.
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Without warning, three wayfarers meet three animated corpses, likenesses of themselves as they shall be, a Doppelganger of stark, macabre immediacy. Though primarily a visual icon, the mediaeval Three Living and Three Dead also survives in purely verbal renditions in French, Latin, Italian, and German, with at least one version having circulated in England in Anglo-Norman and French variants (Glixelli; Rotzler; Tristram 162-66; Binski 134-40). In searching through mediaeval English records, scholars usually cite only one verse occurrence, the densely alliterative The Three Dead Kings, also known by its Latin incipit De tribus regibus mortuis (Woolf 346; Tristram 165; Turville-Petre, Alliterative 149). Here a slim narrative fleshes out the memento mori sign: three crowned kings who have embarked upon a hunt meet the surreal dead, who grotesquely enact gestures and responses similar to their own but transmuted by death. In the English poem, the Dead explain to the Living that they are their own royal fathers, and, by this, a generational bridge spans the temporal divide. Glimmers of this folkloric motif can be detected in Chaucer's The Pardoner's Tale, but there it is dramatized obliquely and without the kinship tie, as three wastrels heedlessly dismiss three monitory mirror-like figures who speak for three ages in succession (Fein, "Other" 341-47). Shakespeare comes closer to imitating the classic spectral encounter when the ghost of Hamlet's father accosts his son and seeks "remembrance," a scene discussed recently by Stephen Greenblatt, who detects its purgatorial undertones but not its strong evocation of this primal motif.
The Three Dead Kings belongs to a small, interesting body of hybrid verse that combines the meter of alliterative unrhymed poetry (as in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Piers Plowman) with rhymed strophes, a mixed type that intrigues scholars (see, for example: Turville-Petre, "Summer"; Lawton 143 -72; Hanna 494-97; Fein, "Early"). Its place in the canon of Middle English has been largely metrical, but its narration of the spectral motif deserves sustained attention as well. The poem appears in the Audelay Manuscript, a book containing the works of a fifteenth-century chaplain named John Audelay, apparently compiled at Haughmond Abbey, Shropshire, about 1426 (Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Douce 302). The consensus is that Audelay did not compose the poem, and, to judge from its ornate style, it was likely created earlier, in the fourteenth century (Whiting xiv-xxviii, 217-23; Turville-Petre, Alliterative 148-57; Fein, "Thirteen-Line").
As the last overt expression of the Three Living and the Three Dead to appear in an English manuscript, The Three Dead Kings stands as the final member of a select lineage. Its anonymous poet comprehended well the raw power by which the visual icon coerces readers to experience their own temporal state. A close examination of the tradition as revealed in English mediaeval books affords us a glimpse into how mediaeval reading practices--honed for meditative and often devotional ends--expected an absorbed engagement quite unlike the more rapid, passive methods that we adopt today automatically. It is also evident that the The Three Dead Kings poet wanted to exploit such extra"-literate operations even though he used narrative rather than visual means to do so.
In mediaeval art, the spectral motif follows, especially in its earliest forms, a simple iconography of placement: Three Living on the left, Three Dead on the right, an open gulf between them. This flat pictorial design is essentially binary, with the space between the threesomes established as a mirror-point, the site of inversion between the realm of the Living and that of the Dead. The crossover point does not generally figure in modern analyses of the motif, but it ought to, because it matters greatly. In mediaeval Christian terms, it is the sacral divide between the here and the hereafter, between time and atemporality. The symmetry of the binary image sets this divide before the viewer, at the centre.
The spectral encounter that structures any story of ghostly visitation must operate from a point of spatio-temporal division, the line that marks the relation of living to dead as a dialectic across the realms of time, loss, and remembrance (see, for example, Schmitt 185, 213-17, and the mediaeval ghost stories he has gathered). In its emphasis on confrontation with a startlingly strange--in this instance, macabre--"other" who forces one to self-recognition and maturation, the motif of the Three Living and Three Dead is a close cousin to the "specular encounter" that Donald Maddox identifies as a trait of mediaeval narrative. The encounter can occur in literary forms across the dimension of time, as when a character meets a long-lost father and has knowledge revealed about his inherited past that will condition his future: "The absent father or exemplary ancestor is unveiled [...] to point the way toward unique future achievements," or, stated in more subjective terms, "preception of self hood in the mirror of the past offers a means of conceptualizing an ideal futurity" (191, emph. mine). Maddox stresses the essential reflexivity of this narrative component, that is, how the two major functions of revelation (on the part of informant) and recognition (on the part of addressee) are fully interrelated.
In the domain of visual image rather than verbal narrative, the motif of the Three Living and the Three Dead enacts a reflexive dialogue that moves past the encounter depicted on the page to involve the viewer directly. Hans Belting has described how religious images evolved gradually over many centuries from public, static icons made for church display to private, dialogic forms created for lay patrons. Artists of late mediaeval devotional images depicted holy figures who through gesture invited private, individual participation in their privileged proximity to God (Belting 410-18). Image becomes, then, a form of specular encounter. The Three Living and the Three Dead belongs with this late mediaeval aesthetic with its participatory aspect slanted more toward meditative self-assessment than faithful devotion. Yet, "for all its gross physicality," as Eamon Duffy observes, "its function was spiritual, to bring home to the spectator the reality of his own mortality" (307).
The impact depends on specular action and emotional response. Paul Binski describes how the macabre image challenges a human onlooker, leading the viewer to his or her own uneasy recognition of the repulsive spectacle/speculum: "The corpse, as image, stands for the absence that is death, returning to rebuke both the imaged living, and also ourselves as onlookers. The macabre implicates us in a mise-en-abyme, a hall of mirrors. And by means of its defamiliarization, it offers the capacity for self-examination. The organization of the macabre image is thus not binary (playing on antitheses), but ternary (implicating the third-party viewer)" (138). "hall of mirrors" effect comes about, in part, because the motif exploits symmetry. Typically according equal space and/or text to each half, Living and Dead, it...
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