CHAPTER XV.
Facetious Biographies.
LEAVING behind us these two admirable productions, we encounter an interesting group of compilations, which differ essentially from them in structure and treatment. They constitute a sort of family of books, and are of a biographical cast, with an imperfect attempt at chronological sequence. I shall enumerate some of them:—
The Jests of the Widow Edith.
The Merry Tales of Skelton.
The Jests of Scogin.
Tarlton’s Jests.
The Merry Conceited Jests of George Peele.
The Pleasant Conceits of Old Hobson.
Dobson’s Dry Bobs.
The original motive for associating a particular individual with a publication was obviously the stimulus which his reputation was expected to lend to the sale. The real tie between a facetious miscellany and its god-parent was, in nine cases out of ten, absolutely nominal. In the reputed adventures and pranks of the Widow Edith, Skelton and Scogin, there is the largest share of verisimilitude; but the printed accounts, especially in the case of Scogin, are so long posterior to the epoch at which the heroes flourished, that there was infinite opportunity for laying to their credit any current jokes or tricks of a suitable complexion.
Of the three, the tracts dealing with the poet and the widow leave the impression, on perusal, of being narratives of authentic incidents in a far greater degree than the Scoginiana; and some of the anecdotes of Skelton are superlatively funny,—for instance, that which narrates “how the cobbler told Master Skelton it is good sleeping in a whole skin.” But it is unfortunately too lengthy for transcription. There is not only a stronger air of probability about the anecdotes which we here find of the parson of Diss than in those which occur of Scogin, but an agreeable exemption from grossness, although it has been surmised that both came from the same pen—that of Dr. Andrew Borde, of Pevensey.
Shakespearian readers are familiar with the passage in Henry IV., Part I., Act ii., where Falstaff is discovered asleep behind the arras, and his pockets are turned out, disclosing a tavern account, in which the charge for sack is the principal item, and for bread only a halfpenny is set down; whereupon Prince Hal exclaims to Poins, “O monstrous! but one halfpennyworth of bread to this intolerable deal of sack!” The germ of this passage seems to be in the story relating “how the Welshman did desire Skelton to aid him in his suit to the king for a patent to sell drink”; and another point is that the song “Back and side go bare, go bare,” etc., introduced into Gammer Gurton’s Needle, embodies the same idea.
Chaucer makes his Sumner describe himself as “a man of little sustenance,” but does not let us hear whether his predilections were for liquids or solids.
Apart from their dubious personality, the jests of Scogin have their clear utility and worth as a picture of archaic social life; they furnish glimpses of obsolete manners and notions with merciless candour, and eclipse almost the entire body of Ana in unrestrained licence of expression. But, as I have hinted, Scogin is more or less of a lay-figure, and some of the achievements for which he enjoys the credit are of foreign origin. At least two of them meet the eye in the “Book which the Knight of the Tower made for the Use of His Daughters,” printed by Caxton, and not unknown to Dr. Borde; and this, while it may detract from their originality, is a plea on their behalf, as some of the borrowed matter, which was thought fit reading for young ladies by a noble French author and their parent, is certainly among the less decent portions of a not very decent volume.
The good knight himself, however, was part of a world less verbally or outwardly prudish than ours. He had only to dip into the written literature of his time to find plenty of such anecdotes as he introduced into his book, and as have become familiar to us through the collections of fabliaux, where numerous examples offer themselves to our view of the identical conditions of ancient domestic life. I shall not attempt to decide whether the moral atmosphere of France in the thirteenth century was better or worse than that which we breathe; but the knight and his family were surrounded by it, and knew no other.
Of the other jest-books falling within the biographical category, the Jests of George Peele and the Conceits of Hobson are palpable réchauffés—warmed-up dishes of stale viands. The same is to be predicated of Dobson’s Dry Bobs, which claims on the title-page to be a kind of sequel to Scogin.
Tarlton’s Jests present the aspect of a tolerably contemporary, if not homogeneous and individual, assortment of witticisms and exploits. They are chiefly redolent of the court and the theatre, the two scenes of his activity and triumphs; and if all the things which they make him say or do were not said or done by him, it is not easy to point out the sources to which the editor of the original book went. Tarlton was undoubtedly a man of rare powers, and his celebrity must have long outlived him. He died in the plague-year 1588, before Shakespear came to settle in London, yet not before the great dramatist might have seen him and spoken to him; and for some time I have entertained a suspicion that he may be the Yorick of Hamlet.
The Jest of the Widow Edith, the lying Widow which still liveth, is an early Tudor book (1525), which, though not dissimilar in its nature from Skelton and Scogin and the German Eulenspiegel, varies distinctly from them all in being a history in doggerel rhyme, composed by one of the dupes of a licentious and unprincipled adventuress, named Edith, whose stratagems and impostures are rehearsed in this quaint metrical record with graphic minuteness. The date of the tract—the first quarter of the sixteenth century—its popular tenor, and its uniqueness of type, may together do something to disarm our anger at its literary poverty and its occasional latitude,—although, were not a lady in the question, it is not so offensive as the low buffoonery of Scogin, or as some of the items which found their way into the Tarlton volume.
The relations of Skelton with his parishioners in Norfolk form a curious chapter in the ecclesiastical annals of the reign of Henry VIII. His eminence as a writer and celebrity as a humourist have doubtless contributed to preserve for our edification a tolerable salvage of his sayings and doings while he held preferment in the Church; but it is the circumstance that he was something more than a loose parson which has given such prominence to his irregularities, just as there were, in the time of Shakespear, deer-poachers whose names we have not been enabled to recollect.
The so-called Merry Tales of Skelton amount, in reality, to a slight biographical sketch strung together in sectional form. There even appears a sort of attempt at chronological propriety, as they begin prior to his instalment at Diss and close at a point in his life when he was under the displeasure of Wolsey—not for his profligacy of behaviour, but for his vituperative writings against that powerful minister.
As a picture of the manners of the time, without a study and knowledge of which it is obviously futile to try or presume to judge Skelton or anybody else belonging to it, the narrative of the mistress whom the poet kept at his living, his reprehension by the bishop, and the scene in Diss church when (according to the jest-book) he rated his congregation for complaining of him and openly exhibited the child, baffles competition, when one takes into account the relations of the pastor to his flock, the severity of ecclesiastical discipline, and the rebuke which Skelton had suffered immediately before at the hands of his spiritual chief. It is when we contemplate such social phenomena that we become more and more forcibly convinced that the Reformation was not a crusade against immorality, but a political fight between the Church and State. In the case of Skelton himself, his licentiousness would probably have never involved him in serious trouble had he not chosen to attack Wolsey.
But the entire texture of this small miscellany of humour, scandal and libertinism is cross-woven; and its serious value is, to my apprehension, greater than its comic. For it not only sheds light on certain points in the career of the singular man with whose name the tales are directly associated, but on the whole surrounding atmosphere.
