Winwife. I did indeed.
Littlewit. He would have thought himself a stark reprobate if it had.”
All this would be caviare to the Cavalier, and it is doubtful whether he did not enjoy it more than his grandparents, who could but laugh at it as a hit religious, rather than political. The allusion to witnesses reminds us of Corporal Oath, who in “The Puritan,” published in 1607 (Act ii. sc. 3), rails at the zealots for the mild character of their ejaculations. The expression “Oh!” was the most terrible expletive they permitted themselves to indulge in, and some even shook their heads at a brother who had thus far committed himself:
“Why! has the devil possessed you, that you swear no better,
You half-christened c——s, you un-godmothered varlets?”
The terms godfather and godmother were rejected by the disaffected clergy, and they would have the answer made in the name of the sponsors, not the child. Hence they styled them witnesses.
In “Women Pleased,” a tragi-comedy, written, as is generally concluded, by Fletcher alone about the year 1616, we find the customary foe of maypoles addressing the hobby:
“I renounce it,
And put the beast off thus, the beast polluted.
And now no more shall Hope-on-high Bomby
Follow the painted pipes of worldly pleasures,
And with the wicked dance the Devil’s measures:
Away, thou pampered jade of vanity!”
Here, again, is no exaggeration of name, for we have Help-on-high Foxe to face Hope-on-high Bomby. The Rector of Lydney would be about twenty-five when this play was written, and may have suggested himself the sobriquet. The names are all but identical.
From “Women Pleased” and Fletcher to “Cutter of Coleman Street” and Cowley is a wide jump, but we must make it to complete our quotations from the playwrights. Although brought out after the Restoration, the fun about names was not yet played out. The scene is laid in London in 1658. This comedy was sorely resented by the zealots, and led the author to defend himself in his preface. He says that he has been accused of “prophaneness:”
“There is some imitation of Scripture phrases: God forbid! There is no representation of the true face of Scripture, but only of that vizard which these hypocrites draw upon it.”