“How Scogin drew his sonne up and downe the court.
“After this Scogin went from the court, and put off his foole’s garments, and came to the court like an honest man, and brought his son to the court with him, and within the court he drew his sonne up and downe by the heeles. The boy cried out, and Scogin drew the boy in every corner. At last every body had pity on the boy, and said, Sir, what doe you meane, to draw the boy about the court? Masters, said Scogin, he is my sonne, and I doe it for this cause. Every man doth say, that man or child which is drawne up in the court shall be the better as long as hee lives; and therefore I will every day once draw him up and downe the court, after that hee may come to preferment in the end.”
The appreciation of a good joke cannot at this time have been very great or very general, for Scogin’s jests were wonderfully popular during at least a century, from the first half of the sixteenth century. They passed through many editions, and are frequently alluded to by the writers of the Elizabethan age. The next individual whose name appears at the head of a collection of his jests, was the well-known wit, Richard Tarlton, who may be fairly considered as court fool to Queen Elizabeth. His jests belong to the same class as those of Skelton and Scogin, and if possible, they present a still greater amount of dulness. Tarlton’s jests were soon followed by the “merrie conceited jests” of George Peele, the dramatist, who is described in the title as “gentleman, sometimes student in Oxford;” and it is added that in these jests “is shewed the course of his life, how he lived; a man very well knowne in the city of London and elsewhere.” In fact, Peele’s jests are chiefly curious for the striking picture they give us of the wilder shades of town life under the reigns of Elizabeth and James I.
During the period which witnessed the publication in England of these books, many other jest-books appeared, for they had already become an important class of English popular literature. Most of them were published anonymously, and indeed they are mere compilations from the older collections in Latin and French. All that was at all good, even in the jests of Skelton, Scogin, Tarlton, and Peele, had been repeated over and over again by the story-tellers and jesters of former ages. Two of the earlier English collections have gained a greater celebrity than the rest, chiefly through adventitious circumstances. One of these, entitled “A Hundred Merry Tales,” has gained distinction among Shakespearian critics as the one especially alluded to by the great poet in “Much Ado about Nothing,” (Act ii., Sc. 1), where Beatrice complains that somebody had said “that I had my good wit out of the Hundred Merry Tales.” The other collection alluded to was entitled “Mery Tales, Wittie Questions, and Quicke Answeres, very pleasant to be readde,” and was printed in 1567. Its modern fame appears to have arisen chiefly from the circumstance that, until the accidental discovery of the unique and imperfect copy of the “Hundred Merry Tales,” it was supposed to be the book alluded to by Shakespeare. Both these collections are mere compilations from the “Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles,” “Poggio,” “Straparola,” and other foreign works.[77] The words put into the mouth of Beatrice are correctly descriptive of the use made of these jest-books. It had become fashionable to learn out of them jests and stories, in order to introduce them into polite conversation, and especially at table; and this practice continued to prevail until a very recent period. The number of such jest-books published during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, was quite extraordinary. Many of these were given anonymously; but many also were put forth under names which possessed temporary celebrity, such as Hobson the carrier, Killigrew the jester, the friend of Charles II., Ben Jonson, Garrick, and a multitude of others. It is, perhaps, unnecessary to remind the reader that the great modern representative of this class of literature is the illustrious Joe Miller.
CHAPTER XV.
THE AGE OF THE REFORMATION.—THOMAS MURNER; HIS GENERAL SATIRES.—FRUITFULNESS OF FOLLY.—HANS SACHS.—THE TRAP FOR FOOLS.—ATTACKS ON LUTHER.—THE POPE AS ANTICHRIST.—THE POPE-ASS AND THE MONK-CALF.—OTHER CARICATURES AGAINST THE POPE.—THE GOOD AND BAD SHEPHERDS.
The reign of Folly did not pass away with the fifteenth century—on the whole the sixteenth century can hardly be said to have been more sane than its predecessor, but it was agitated by a long and fierce struggle to disengage European society from the trammels of the middle ages. We have entered upon what is technically termed the renaissance, and are approaching the great religious reformation. The period during which the art of printing began first to spread generally over Western Europe, was peculiarly favourable to the production of satirical books and pamphlets, and a considerable number of clever and spirited satirists and comic writers appeared towards the end of the fifteenth century, especially in Germany, where circumstances of a political character had at an early period given to the intellectual agitation a more permanent strength than it could easily or quickly gain in the great monarchies. Among the more remarkable of these satirists was Thomas Murner, who was born at Strasburg, in 1475. The circumstances even of his childhood are singular, for he was born a cripple, or became one in his earliest infancy, though he was subsequently healed, and it was so universally believed that this malady was the effect of witchcraft, that he himself wrote afterwards a treatise upon this subject under the title of “De Phitonico Contractu.” The school in which he was taught may at least have encouraged his satirical spirit, for his master was Jacob Locher, the same who translated into Latin verse the “Ship of Fools” of Sebastian Brandt. At the end of the century Murner had become a master of arts in the University of Paris, and had entered the Franciscan order. His reputation as a German popular poet was so great, that the emperor Maximilian[ ]I., who died in 1519, conferred upon him the crown of poetry, or, in other words, made him poet-laureat. He took the degree of doctor in theology in 1509. Still Murner was known best as the popular writer, and he published several satirical poems, which were remarkable for the bold woodcuts that illustrated them, for engraving on wood flourished at this period. He exposed the corruptions of all classes of society, and, before the Reformation broke out, he did not even spare the corruptions of the ecclesiastical state, but soon declared himself a fierce opponent of the Reformers. When the Lutheran revolt against the Papacy became strong, our king, Henry VIII., who took a decided part against Luther, invited Murner to England, and on his return to his own country, the satiric Franciscan became more bitter against the Reformation than ever. He advocated the cause of the English monarch in a pamphlet, now very rare, in which he discussed the question whether Henry VIII. or Luther was the liar—“Antwort dem Murner uff seine frag, ob der künig von Engllant ein Lügner sey oder Martinus Luther.” Murner appears to have divided the people of his age into rogues and fools, or perhaps he considered the two titles as identical. His “Narrenbeschwerung,” or Conspiracy of Fools, in which Brandt’s idea was followed up, is supposed to have been published as early as 1506, but the first printed edition with a date, appeared in 1512. It became so popular, that it went through several editions during subsequent years; and that which I have before me was printed at Strasburg in 1518. It is, like Brandt’s “Ship of Fools,” a general satire against society, in which the clergy are not spared, for the writer had not yet come in face of Luther’s Reformation. The cuts are superior to those of Brandt’s book, and some of them are remarkable for their design and execution. In one of the earliest of them, copied in the cut No. 139, Folly is introduced in the garb of a husbandman, scattering his feed over the earth, the result of which is a very quick and flourishing crop, the fool’s heads rising above ground, almost instantaneously, like so many turnips. In a subsequent engraving, represented in our cut No. 140, Folly holds out, as an object of emulation, the fool’s cap, and people of all classes, the pope himself, and the emperor, and all the great dignitaries of this world, press forward eagerly to seize upon it.
No. 139. Sowing a Fruitful Crop.