The Dance of Death: The Virago

A skeletal Death seizes a shrieking, heavyset woman mid-brawl in a London street, her fist raised, her green skirts billowing — while shocked onlookers crowd a doorway and a lamplit group gapes from the left. The caption reads: *Her tongue & temper to subdue / Can only be perform'd by you.* Rowlandson's aquatint — acid-bitten line softened by watercolour wash — belongs to his 1816 *English Dance of Death* series, a comic reworking of the medieval *danse macabre* tradition. The 'virago' figure draws on stock class caricature: the loud, ungovernable lower-class woman as social menace. That misogynist type is inseparable from the joke. Rowlandson's fluid sequential storytelling across such series is a direct formal ancestor of the comic strip.