Studies in jocular literature

by William Carew Hazlitt

So far, so good. But we are instinctively led hence to the consideration of a different, yet allied, question—as to the frequent habit, on the part of narrators, from one cause or another, of positively tampering with the text of a saying, and falsifying the sense.

For it is by no means with non-essentials only that your special artist deals, or even with minor accessories alone. He holds his licence to extend to the finding you a new hero—one, possibly, who could never, in his most prophetic mood, have ventured to imagine himself in such a situation or in such company.

Sometimes it happens that in a comparatively late chap-book we detect a rifaccimento of an ancient legend.

At Glasgow appeared a small roughly printed tract in 1700, with the title of The New Wife of Beath, in which we are desired to believe that the text is “Much better Reformed, Enlarged, and Corrected, than it was formerly in the old uncorrect Copy”; and we are farther told that there is “the Addition of many other Things.” The preface adds that the “Papal or Heretical” matter in the former copy has been omitted in this second edition, leaving nothing to offend the wise and judicious, “not being taken up into a literal Sense, but be way of Allegory and Mystical, which thus may edifie.”

We have here, in point of fact, the story and adventures of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath subsequently to her dissolution; and we learn how, after a strange series of vicissitudes, including a visit to his majesty the Devil, who declines to take her in, our heroine finally propitiates Christ by a profession of faith, and is placed among the elect. It is a grotesque tissue of piety and blasphemy, presumably adapted to the Protestant ritual and taste by an anonymous son of the Kirk.

What the reformer suppressed we can only conjecture, since the anterior impression, with the Popish leaven in it, has not fallen under our eyes. In lieu of the Saviour, the Virgin was, perhaps, made the central figure, with the general costume of the piece to correspond. What he added it is easier to judge; for, looking at the archaic narrative of “the Countryman who got into heaven by his pleading,” we perceive that The New Wife of Bath is an amplification of the idea and scheme; and where the original middle-age story-teller was content with the ordeal of the Apostles and the First Person of the Trinity, his presbyterian follower thought it necessary to make the lady run the gauntlet of all the patriarchs and prophets, and even of our first parents, all of whom she triumphantly vanquishes, the concluding parley being with Christ Himself, who is made to come out on hearing the disturbance, and is overcome by her argumentative eloquence and confiding humility.

With the portentous absurdity of the whole notion, both in its succincter and more enlarged shape, we need not occupy ourselves. I merely adduced the circumstance as one of the numerous phases of my subject; for I presume that no one will seriously question its title to a place in the semi-jocular category.

Nothing is truer than the passage in Horace:—

“Multa renascentur, quæ jam cecidere ...”

In the mediæval story of the Man with Wooden Legs, who succeeds in persuading a stranger that his apparent loss was a positive advantage and blessing, there is a property of permanence; for, as recently as 1885, a boat was capsized, and the only one who escaped was buoyed up by his artificial limb. This was a recommendation overlooked by the early conteur, anxious as he was to exhibit the unsuspected superiority of a substructure not prone to casualties, and not only renewable at pleasure, but useful as fuel when discarded from active service.