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The Popular Culture of Shakespeare, Spenser and Jonson
By Mary Ellen Lamb
Routledge
£65
Dateline: 23rd August, 2006
In The Popular Culture of Shakespeare, Spenser and Jonson Mary
Ellen Lamb examines the ways in which fairy beliefs, old wives' tales
and the hobby-horse are used in the works of these three authors. She
contends that early modern writers were themselves the product of two
cultures: "low" or popular culture imbibed in early childhood
from female carers, and an elite culture dispensed by male teachers
from the age of seven onwards. Plays and poetry written by men with
a grammar school/university education bear traces of a struggle between
these two belief systems, an ambivalence that readers or playgoers could
either resolve in accordance with their own preferences or choose to
overlook.
Hamlet's famous words "For O, for O, the hobby-horse is forgot"
seem to imply that at least some elements of folk culture were on the
wane in Shakespeare's lifetime. The golden age of "Merrie England",
when aristocrats and artisans lived in harmony with nature and each
other, was already being viewed through rose-tinted spectacles. England's
increasing prominence on the world stage meant that "low"
culture had to be purged from the body politic just as the newly crowned
Henry V had to reject Falstaff, but a half-nostalgic, half-guilty pleasure
in the old customs and beliefs lingered long enough to influence some
of the greatest works in English literature. .
Shakespeare, it has to be said, must bear at least part of the blame
for transforming fairies into the terminally twee, pink-and-glittery
creatures of our own era. Yet, as Lamb points out, the ancient association
of fairies with forbidden sexual activity - especially between members
of the upper and lower classes - can still be discerned in both A
Midsummer Night's Dream and The Merry Wives of Windsor. "Fairy
gold" was a euphemism for money either stolen or found by a person
with no intention of returning it; the Old Shepherd in The Winter's
Tale, for example, knows perfectly well that baby Perdita is not
a changeling, but he tells his dim-witted son that the treasure he found
with her was a gift from the fairies. No wonder that the erudite Ben
Jonson, in his notes to the masque Oberon, the Fairy Prince,
made a rather desperate attempt to give his fairy characters a classical
gloss by suggesting that the word "fairies" was derived from
the Greek "pheras", meaning "satyrs".
"The wisest aunt telling the saddest tale" until she was
so rudely interrupted by Puck gives us a glimpse of the archetypal old
storyteller, and the atmospheric opening lines of Mrs Page's description
of Herne the Hunter almost fool us into thinking that she is about to
provide us with another. But to the middle-class Mrs Page such tales
are taken seriously only by "the superstitious idle-headed eld",
and the elaborate masque she devises with Mrs Ford is merely a trap
to humiliate Falstaff (who demeans himself still further by believing
in fairies).
Lamb's discussion of the hobby-horse and its variants is particularly
interesting. This popular participant in folk plays and processions
was originally a horse's skull on a pole, carried by a man draped in
a sheet. The more familiar tourney horse suspended by straps from the
wearer's shoulders was a later development, but both types were notorious
for their lewd behaviour with women in the audience (hence the use of
the term "hobby-horse" for prostitutes). The author finds
overtones of the hobby-horse in Bottom's partial transformation and
Falstaff's disguise as Herne the Hunter.
The Popular Culture of Shakespeare, Spenser and Jonson sheds
new light on some of the most curious aspects of early modern literature.
Folk customs are notoriously open to crackpot interpretations, but Lamb's
insights are firmly within the realm of common sense (although I would
question her reading of a woodcut depicting what she describes as a
maypole between a gallows and a seated judge. In my opinion this object,
a striped stick with cords hanging from the top, is more likely to be
a whip - the ribbons flowing from the tops of modern maypoles are, I
believe, a Victorian innovation). The book will fascinate anyone interested
in early modern literature and/or English folk culture.
J D Atkinson
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