“Come, come, my lord, you’d spare your spoons.”
A story is related of Shakespeare promising spoons to one of Ben Jonson’s children, in a collection of anecdotes entitled “Merry Passages and Jests,” compiled by Sir Nicholas L’Estrange (MSS. Harl. 6395): “Shakespeare was godfather to one of Ben Jonson’s children, and after the christ’ning, being in a deepe study, Jonson came to cheere him up, and ask’t him why he was so melancholy. ‘No faith, Ben (sayes he), not I; but I have been considering a great while what should be the fittest gift for me to bestow upon my godchild, and I have resolv’d at last.’ ‘I pr’y thee, what?’ sayes he. ‘I’ faith, Ben, I’le e’en give him a douzen good Latin spoones, and thou shalt translate them.’” “Shakespeare,” says Mr. Thoms,[704] “willing to show his wit, if not his wealth, gave a dozen spoons, not of silver, but of latten, a name formerly used to signify a mixed metal resembling brass, as being the most appropriate gift to the child of a father so learned.” In Middleton’s “Chaste Maid of Cheapside,” 1620:
“2 Gossip. What has he given her? What is it, gossip?
3 Gossip. A fair, high-standing cup, and two great ’postle spoons, one of them gilt.”
And Beaumont and Fletcher, in the “Noble Gentleman” (v. 1):
“I’ll be a gossip, Beaufort,
I have an odd apostle spoon.”
The gossip’s feast, held in honor of those who were associated in the festivities of a christening, was a very ancient English custom, and is frequently mentioned by dramatists of the Elizabethan age. The term gossip or godsip, a Saxon word signifying cognata ex parte dei, or godmother, is well defined by Richard Verstegan, in his “Restitution of Decayed Intelligence.” He says: “Our Christian ancestors, understanding a spiritual affinity to grow between the parents and such as undertooke for the child at baptism, called each other by the name of godsib, which is as much as to say that they were sib together, that is, of kin together through God. And the childe, in like manner, called such his godfathers or godmothers.”
As might be expected, it is often alluded to by Shakespeare. Thus, in the “Comedy of Errors” (v. 1), we read:
“Abbess. Thirty-three years have I but gone in travail
Of you, my sons: and till this present hour
My heavy burthen ne’er delivered.
The duke, my husband, and my children both,
And you the calendars of their nativity,
Go to a gossip’s feast, and go with me;
After so long grief, such festivity!
Duke. With all my heart I’ll gossip at this feast.”