“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,