Studies in jocular literature

by William Carew Hazlitt

CHAPTER XIII.

The “Hundred Merry Tales”—The Authorship Discussed.

THERE is, however, a second hypothesis bearing on the parentage of the Tales. In the Interlude of the Four Elements, which came from the same press a few years before, there is the following passage:—

Sensual Appetite. Canst get my master a dish of quails,
Small birds, swallows, or wagtails?
They be light of digestion.
Taverner. Light of digestion? For what reason?
Sen. For physic putteth this reason thereto,
Because those birds fly to and fro,
And be continual moving.
Ta. Then know I a lighter meat than that.
Sen. I pray thee, tell me what?
Ta. If ye will needs know in short and brief,
It is even a woman’s tongue,
For that is ever stirring.

Now, the ninth story in the Jest-book, in the edition of 1526, is “Of him that said that a woman’s tongue was lightest of digestion”; and we have exactly the same notion reproduced. Conversely, the nineteenth story in the Tales treats “Of the four elements, where they should soon be found”; and here very curiously an analogous notion about the qualities of the female tongue discloses itself thus: “The wind said, ‘If ye list to speak with me, ye shall be sure to have me among aspen leaves or else in a woman’s tongue.’” Water and fire were to be found in a woman’s eye and in her heart; the earth alone was stationary and steadfast. And even in the moral we are told that “by this tale ye may learn as well the property of the four elements as the properties of a woman.”

These are rough indications, which must go for what they are worth. And in the same way, No. 3 of the Tales relates an adventure in connection with the performance of a stage-play in Suffolk, in which the devil was a person of the drama. Theatrical exhibitions in the provinces were not of very usual or frequent occurrence in those days. This particular one is alleged to have taken place in a certain market town; but, perhaps to prevent the possibility of giving offence, the name is withheld. But the narrative strikes me, from its minuteness of detail, as emanating from somebody who was on the spot, rather than from a secondary source, and from the pains and skill with which the plot is elaborated as the composition of a professional writer. And the question arises whether the reporter of the two jests was not also the author of the stage-play in Suffolk and of the Interlude of the Four Elements.

I submit this suggestively and experimentally, since it appears to me that, next to More, John Heywood is the most probable candidate for the honour of having furnished Rastell with the MS. of the Tales; and if he did so, we may have a sort of clue to the authorship of two dramatic productions not hitherto comprised in the list of his writings.

Nor does the connection of More himself with the Tales, even under such circumstances, absolutely fall to the ground, as Heywood and he saw a good deal of each other; and Gabriel Harvey, Spenser’s friend, and an affectionate student of the curious literature of the period, informs us that some of his (Heywood’s) epigrams were founded on conceits and devices of More.

There are, nevertheless, clear grounds for regarding this Century of good things as a gathering to which More and Heywood were contributors, rather than as the exclusive property of either of them, or of any one else. For we see, for instance, that in the fortieth story a man so celebrated and even notorious as Skelton, and at the time of the publication of the Tales still living, is described as “one Master Skelton, a poet laureate,” which seems to argue the presence behind the scenes of an editor not very conversant with contemporary literature or literary history; and this might be possibly true of Rastell the printer, but could not be so of More or of Heywood.

But then, only a little way farther—in the forty-eighth anecdote—we are confronted with the admirable apologue “Of the friar that told the three children’s fortunes,” where, after declaring to the horrified mother that of her family one should be a beggar, a second a thief, and the third an assassin, he consoles her by saying that she might make the one who was to be a beggar a friar, the one who was to be a thief a lawyer, and him who was destined to be a murderer a physician. Here we recognise the touch and individuality of no ordinary pen, and discover an additional explanation of the reluctance which the compiler or contributors felt to couple any names with the volume. Attacks on the Romish Church were treated in 1526 with a larger measure of toleration than heretofore; but in this jest three obnoxious callings, including that of More himself, are exposed to satire.

One drawback to the dramatic completeness of the anecdote is the aspersion which the Friar Mendicant is made to cast on his own cloth; and we at the same time cannot avoid discerning a trace of the root of the incident in some fabliau composed in far more primitive times than those of the appearance of the first English jest-book. For we are introduced to the wife of a very rich man, standing at the entrance of her husband’s dwelling, accompanied by her children, and subsequently with her own hands spreading the repast, of which the friar partakes. The intention was to create a laugh at the cost of the three vocations; but the rédacteur neglected to observe all the conditions necessary to render the hit perfectly true to art.