“MERRIE” ENGLAND
The Athenians, I believe, used to round off their bouts of high tragedy with a farce of satyrs and clowns, and the practice has survived almost to our own day. When Charles Lamb and his sister went to Drury Lane, Pizzaro or Artaxerxes would be followed by Harlequin Dame Trot, or Harlequin Dick Whittington and his Cat. I am not scholar enough to say of the Elizabethans that they were in the same tradition; but if they were I can perceive some intention in Gammer Gurton’s Needle, which has been newly edited and printed for Mr. Basil Blackwell of Oxford. Otherwise I confess myself at a loss. It is an Elizabethan or, as I think, an even earlier knockabout, in which those only who saw fun in a harlequinade would find the kind of thing that they liked. That it should have been contrived for the amusement of the Master and Fellows of Christ’s College, Cambridge, is perhaps not so wonderful as it would have been if Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew’s Fair had not been revived the other day with some measure of success. And I suppose that the persons who were diverted by seeing Malvolio in the cage were very capable of being pleased with Gammer Gurion’s Needle. It is no worse than Shakespeare at his worst, and much better than Ben Jonson in that it is much shorter. Launcelot Gobbos, Speeds, Launces fill the stage. There are no Dogberrys, nor Dame Quickleys; no Master Shallow, no Bottom, and of course no Falstaff. But the difference is of degree, not of kind. Gammer Gurton is written de haut en bas, as Shakespeare also wrote of rural life and manners. Its author, “Mr. S., Mr. of Art,” whoever he was—and the editor thinks that he was William Stevenson, Fellow of Christ’s in the fifteen-fifties—as heartily scorned the peasantry as William Shakespeare ever did; and I think that he knew quite as much about them. In fact, I am led to believe that the thing is not far from being a faithful picture, as nearly so, indeed, as its comic intention will allow it to be. If that is so it deserves study. When we talk, as we are apt to do, of “Merrie England,” it is as well that we should know in what England’s merriment consisted.
Gammer Gurton is mending the breeches of her man Hodge when she sees the cat at the milk-bowl. Starting up to trounce the thief, she drops her needle, her “fayre long strayght neele that was her onely treasure.” That is serious. The house is turned inside out and upside down. Tib the maid has to sift the rubbish-heap; Cock the boy spends his day on all-fours and his nose to the ground. Enters here the villain of the piece, the village half-wit, Bedlam Dick, and says that Dame Chat has the “neele.” That prepares for the great scene of the play, a slanging match between the two old women, which ends in a tooth-and-nail affair. Gammer Gurton sends for the priest; Bedlam Dick primes Dame Chat. He tells her that Hodge is going to rob her hen-roost; and later, to the priest, he suggests a hiding-place whence he can spy on Dame Chat and the “neele” in felonious use. The priest edges in; Dame Chat thinks he is the chicken-thief, and cracks his skull for him. Mighty hullabaloo: the bailiff is called in to arbitrate. Bedlam Dick gives Hodge a smack on the buttocks, and drives the needle home. That is the plot, expounded in plain words which, no doubt, were exceedingly close to the bone.
According to Christ’s College, Cambridge, the life of the English peasant in Reformation days was a purely animal process, punctuated only by foul language. Eating and drinking were the pleasures, working was the pain, contriving how to get liquor without working for it the only intellectual exercise. In Gammer Gurton’s Needle there was not even love to complicate existence. Ale was the Good, and the only good.
“I cannot eate but lytle meate,
my stomacke is not good;
But sure I thinke that I can drynke
with him that weares a hood.
Thoughe I go bare, take ye no care,
I am nothinge acolde:
“I stuffe my skyn so full within
of joly good Ale and olde.
Back and syde go bare, go bare,
both foote and hand go colde:
But, belly, God send thee good ale inoughe
whether it be new or olde”:—
and so on for four clinking verses. The thing is a triumph; it sings itself. Out of its rollicking rhythm a kind of haze of romance has piled up, which select spirits like Mr. Belloc and Mr. Chesterton still see as a rosy cloud. I suppose it is all right.
But the language of those “merrie” people! There was only one injurious thing for woman to call woman: it was reflected in man’s accusation of man. If you named a woman the thing—and you always did—you named a man the thing’s son. The impact varied according to the temper of the accuser. It pricked you to madness if anger lay behind it; often it was a term of affection. Gammer Gurton so called Tib her maid, Dame Chat her girl Doll; but that was to coax them. When the beldams belaboured each other with the imputation they made the fur to fly. Exactly that impotence of expression, even in moods of malice, is observable to-day—but in towns, not in the country. I have lived twenty years in a village and never heard the taunt so much as whispered by one to another. But then nobody gets drunk out here now. Is there a holding link between ale and sterility of language? I suppose there must be.
Religion provides the only other expletives there are in Gammer Gurton, and that makes the date of it an interesting matter. No earlier edition appears to be known than that of 1575; but a play called Dyccon of Bedlam was licensed to be printed in 1562, and one by the presumed author of Gammer Gurton was acted at Christ’s College in 1553-4. However all that may fit in, there are internal evidences very much to the point. In the fifth act the bailiff is charged by the priest with Dick of Bedlam’s arrest. “In the King’s name, Master Bayly, I charge you set him fast,” he says. That might be Edward VI if the Prologue had not an allusion directly in conflict with it:
“Dame Chat her deare gossyp this needle had found;
Yet knew shee no more of this matter (alas)
Than knoeth Tom our Clarke what the Priest saith at masse.”
Is that reminiscence of old practice? Hardly that, for if the mass was then being said in English it would be quite pointless. Beyond that, the play is crammed with Catholic catchwords, all of them oaths. “Gog’s bread,” “Gog’s sydes,” “Gog’s malte”; numberless Our Ladys; “by gys” (by Jesus); finally this:
“There I will have you sweare by our dere Lady of Bullaine,
S. Dunstone, and S. Donnyke, with the three Kings of Kullaine,
That ye shall keepe it secret....”
These things point to a familiarity with Catholic usage, whichever way you take them, exceedingly interesting. The chief thing which they point out to me is that there was no religious sense in the peasantry at all. The names and symbols of worship were augmentives of conversation, but no more. They meant nothing, and implied nothing but use and wont. Catholicism expired and Calvinism did not thrive, for the same reason. Neither of them touched the heart of the peasantry, which remained what it had been throughout, innately pagan, follower (as I put it) of Saint Use, but of no other divinity. That is as far as one has been able to go. Certainly Gammer Gurton will take us no further.
Dullness, bestiality, grossness: these stare you in the face. Between the lines of them you may discern the squalor and the penury of village life in Merrie England. Take this:
Gammer: “Come hether, Cocke; what, Cocke I say.
Cocke: Howe, Gammer?
Gammer: Goe hy thee soone, and grope behind the old brasse pan,
Ther shalt thou fynd an old shooe, wherin if thou looke well
Thou shalt fynd lyeng an inche of whyte tallow candell,
Lyght it, and brynge it tite awaye.”
If that does not bring them home to us nothing will do it—except perhaps this:
“And home she went as brag, as it had ben a bodelouce.”