Part 42

[1023] Chappell gives the song in _Popular Music of the Olden Time_, p. 216. _Three Merry Men_ is quoted in _Westward Hoe_, and in Barry's _Ram Alley_ (sung by Smallshanks: see note, Hazlitt-Dodsley, X. 298), as well as in _Twelfth Night_; and it is parodied by the musical cook in _The Bloody Brother_. Chappell is somewhat daring when he takes these words from the _Old Wives' Tale_ as the original; lines 3 and 4 look like a parody.

[1024] Dy. points out the pun in 'wooden' (= mad).

[1025] Long wide breeches or trousers; Dy. See _Looking-Glass for London and England_, near end: "This right slop is my pantry, behold a manchet [_Draws it out_]" ...

[1026] A bit of nonsense like the talk of Macbeth's porter. The speech is a sort of parody on the appeal of wandering knights or travellers in romances, and Clunch, with his 'territories,' may take the place of enchanter, giant, or the like.

[1027] This use of the third person is common in dramas of the time. See Ward, _Old English Drama, Select Plays_, etc., Introd., p. xi., notes. So in Greene: "Which Brandamart (_i.e._ I)" ...; "For Sacripant must have Angelica." It served to identify the actor.

[1028] They are now supposed to be at the cottage.

[1029] For fear of ...

[1030] A crab-apple. The pulp was mixed with ale, 'lamb's wool.'

[1031] Collier gave Dyce the following quotation from _Martin's Month's Minde_: "leaving the ancient game of England (_Trumpe_), where every coate and sute are sorted in their degree, are running to _Ruffe_, where the greatest sorte of the sute carrieth away the game."

[1032] The familiar _motif_ of the contented peasant as entertainer of royalty or what not.

[1033] According to the _Jests_ (Bullen, II. 314), George Peele had no skill in music, and must have been a conspicuous exception; witness the well-known statement of Chappell, _Popular Music_, p. 98. The barber kept "lute or cittern" in his shop for the amusement of waiting customers; and England had been a land of song from Cædmon's time down. The "man in the street" was expected to know how to join in a part song. The rural song, such as they sing here, was a great favorite with the dramatists.

[1034] Chopcherry: "a game in which one tries to catch a suspended cherry with the teeth; bob-cherry." ... New Engl. Dict.

[1035] A version of _Childe Rowland?_

[1036] Peele was probably of a Devonshire family.

[1037] A Dogberrian touch, evidently beloved by the pit, and a fine makeweight to those pompous experiments with word and phrase which delighted the serious playgoer.

[1038] Below 'extempore,' Sig. B.

[1039] See _Critical Essay_ for the folk-tales in question.

[1040] handsome.

[1041] 'he' keeps (frequents, lives), _i.e._ the young man. Omission of subject is common in the ballads.

[1042] The conjurer.

[1043] See the _Critical Essay_ for this "play within the play."

[1044] The princes, of course, talk in metre when the "high style" is needed, but in familiar prose with Erestus (= "Senex"). The repetitions in this blank-verse are characteristic.

[1045] B. omits. Dy. proposes to omit 'faire.' Neither omission is necessary.

[1046] Reminds one of nursery tales with bits of rhyme,--the _cante-fable_ of folk-lore.

[1047] So Milton's famous "grey hooded Even, Like a sad votarist in palmer's weed" ...

[1048] Below 'gold,' Sig. B ii.

[1049] Dy. assumes that "something ... has dropt out"; but this is not necessary. Erestus, who says below that he 'speaks in riddles,' knows the errand of the brothers, and asks the question abruptly. He plays the part of Merlin in _Childe Rowland_.

[1050] The spell is important, solemn, and is therefore repeated. No particular tale of The White Bear of England's Wood is known, but similar cases of transformation are plentiful.

[1051] Dy. prints ''chanting'; needlessly.

[1052] Below 'mend,' Sig. B iii.

[1053] B. notes that "St. Luke's Day (18th October) was the day of Horn Fair; and St. Luke was jocularly regarded as the patron saint of cuckolds. St. Andrew was supposed to bring good luck to lovers." ...

[1054] The reference is to the tale preserved in several versions, and known as "The Three Heads of the Well," Jacobs, _English Fairy Tales_, p. 222. "The Well of the World's End," p. 215, however, has the incident of filling a sieve.

[1055] So "God ye good night, and twenty, sir!" In Middleton's _Trick to Catch the Old One_--"A thousand farewells." Compare the well-known forms of greeting, as "Grüss' mir mein Liebchen zehntausend mal!" or the elaborate message at the opening of the ballad _Childe Maurice_.

[1056] See Appendix _B_ on this Song.

[1057] See Appendix _A_.

[1058] The 'Booby' is later called 'Corebus' or 'Chorebus.' See Harvey, _The Trimming of Thomas Nashe_, Grosart, III. 29: "Thou mayest be cald the very Chorœbus of our time, of whom the proverbe was sayde, more foole than Chorœbus: who was a seely ideot, but yet had the name of a wise man." ...

[1059] Mr. Fleay thinks this is a pun upon that eternal theme of satire for Harvey's enemies, the rope-maker's trade of his father. "The name," Mr. Fleay says, "for the stock of Huanebango are adapted from Plautus, Polymachæroplacidus (from _Pseudulus_), Pyrgopolinices (from _Miles Gloriosus_), in shapes which inevitably suggest English puns indicating Harvey's rope-making extraction, Polly-make-a-rope-lass, and Perg-up-a-line-O...." Mr. Fleay is bold.

[1060] A difficult passage. Dy. thinks the stock is a sword,--Corebus "has run away from the Parish, and become a sort of knight-errant." Dr. Nicholson: "He has started and they may catch" (if they can) and as a vagabond put him in the stocks. B. makes the clown plume himself on his finery. He points with pride to his feather; and he is equally proud of his fashionable "long stock" (_i.e._ the stocking fastened high above the knee). This gives better sense than the second explanation; Corebus asserts a sort of equality with Huanebango.

[1061] The successful guessing of riddles wins a bride, fortune, liberty, what not, in many a folk-tale.

[1062] Below 'the,' Sig. C.

[1063] Enter _Erestus_.

[1064] care for.

[1065] plenty. Corebus quotes the stilted talk of Huanebango.

[1066] This gift of the cake reminds one of a similar _motif_ in the tale of _The Red Ettin_, Jacobs, p. 135.

[1067] though times are hard.

[1068] sings.

[1069] Below 'up,' Sig. C ii.

[1070] These tricks of magic are the staple of tales and chapbooks about conjurers, and make a braver showing in plays like _Doctor Faustus_ and _Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay._ See the latter play in this volume, and Mr. Ward's introduction to his edition of the two dramas.

[1071] Later editions omit. The formula is less uncanny than usual; but the two cocks have grim associations. The dark-red cock of Scandinavian myth belonged to the underworld. See _The Wife of Usher's Well_, and R. Köhler in the _Germania_, XI. 85 ff.

[1072] The local hits are to be noted: praise for roast beef of England, wine of France, and girding at Spain, at brewers,--one thinks of Falstaff's complaint about the lime in his sack,--friars, and usurers.

[1073] Below 'begon,' Sig. C iii.

[1074] B. prints: 'heaven [n]or hell shall rescue her from me.'

[1075] Did this Echo suggest the song in _Comus_?

[1076] The "Life-Index," so called, of popular tales, connected with the equally popular _motif_ of the "Thankful Dead."

[1077] Erestus.

[1078] Misprint for 'Corebus.'

[1079] Dogberry's distortion of words is about as old as English comedy.

[1080] Q. _assure_.

[1081] As above:--a gay, reckless fellow.

[1082] According to Sir Walter Scott "the very latest allusion to the institution of brotherhood in arms" is in the ballad of _Bewick and Grahame_, "sworn brethren" as they are, each "faith and troth" to the other.

[1083] That's settled once for all.--Bullen.

[1084] Recent editions make the Sexton's speech end here, and put the rest in the stage directions.

[1085] Below 'the,' Sig. D.

[1086] Open the argument from my side (with the aid of the pike-staff).--Bullen.

[1087] Recent eds. [_Gives money_].

[1088] on.

[1089] harvesters.

[1090] See Appendix _B_.

[1091] Below 'men,' Sig. D ii.

[1092] B. points out that Corebus enters a moment later.

[1093] "The 'fee-fi-fo-fum' formula is common to all English stories of giants and ogres; it also occurs in Peele's play and in _King Lear_.... Messrs. Jones and Krorf have some remarks on it in their 'Magyar Tales,' pp. 340-341; so has Mr. Lang in his 'Perrault,' p. lxiii, where he traces it to the furies in Æschylus' _Eumenides_."--Jacobs, _Eng. Fairy Tales_, p. 243.

[1094] Recent eds.--_Enter_ Sacrapant _the Conjurer and_ Two Furies.

[1095] Recent eds.--Huanebango _is carried out by the_ Two Furies.

[1096] Recent eds.--_Strikes_ Corebus _blind_.

[1097] goad.

[1098] In this and like cases the editors restore a tolerable metre by different printing. Thus 'Here hard' may be taken as part of the preceding line.

[1099] Dr. Nicholson would read 'name' to no advantage. Sacrapant says she has forgotten her name, but has not forgotten as much as she ought to forget. The phrase is awkward, but is perhaps more "intelligible" than Mr. Bullen allows.

[1100] Below 'to,' Sig. D iii.

[1101] Dy. prints 'Well done!'

[1102] To the popular tale, here plainly drawn upon, Peele has added an amusing feature which seems to be his own invention. He provides the deaf Huanebango with a scolding wife, while the blind Corebus takes her ugly sister.

[1103] As much as "uncomely," "ugly," as shown by the countless passages in Elizabethan literature, and the connotation of the opposite, "fair." Dyce quotes the same phrase,--"though I am blacke, I am not the Divell ..." from Greene's, _Quip for an Upstart Courtier_.

[1104] _In The Three Heads of the Well_, "a golden head came up singing:--

"'Wash me and comb me, And lay me down softly. And lay me on a bank to dry, That I may look pretty When somebody passes by.'"

[1105] _Sc._ beard.

[1106] The upshot of much investigation seems to be that the phrase to have cockell-bread means to get a lover or a husband.

[1107] So in Hartmann's _Iwein_, a knight pours water from a certain well upon a stone near by; a terrible thunderstorm is the immediate result. A similar act may bring the milder rain for one's crops (Grimm, _Mythologie_, p. 494).

[1108] Harvey had an indifferent ear for verse, and here, perhaps,--since the hexameters follow so hard upon,--is a neat way of stating the fact.

[1109] Both Stanyhurst and Harvey were favorites for this sort of ridicule. The hexameters of the former are described admirably by Nash, and, of course, are parodied here. Huff, Ruff, and Snuff were characters in the play of _King Cambyses_. Cf. too Harvey in "Green's Memoriall or certain funerall sonnets" (Son. vi):--

"I wott not what these cutting Huffe-snuffes meane, Of alehouse daggers I have little skill...."

[1110] Dy. points out that this is an actual line in Harvey's _Encomium Lauri_.

[1111] Below 'rattle,' Sig. E.

[1112] Used by Chaucer to describe the "hunting of the letter," in his day still a normal rule of verse, particularly in the north of England (Prologue to the "Persone's Tale"):--

"But trusteth wel, I am a suthern man, I can not geste rum, ram, ruf, by letter...."

Professor Skeat (_Notes to C.T._, p. 446) thinks Peele has Chaucer in mind, and shows that the latter probably borrowed the words "from some French source."

[1113] 'Ka'=quoth he.--'Wilshaw'? [Qy.: Will ich ha(ve)? _Cf._ l. 648. _Gen. Ed._]

[1114] Lob's pound, is B. notes, was a phrase of the day for "the thraldom of the hen-pecked married man."

[1115] It is hardly necessary to correct this into 'thy.'

[1116] As a ghost, of course.

[1117] Below 'runne,' Sig. E ii.

[1118] The "foot-page" of the ballads.

[1119] These rhyming scraps remind one constantly of the _cante-fable_, of the formula-jingles in popular tales.

[1120] Probably a misprint for 'come.'

[1121] Below 'pursse,' Sig. E iii.

[1122] Celanto.

[1123] He is blind.

[1124] In the tale there are three heads.

[1125] Dyce's copy read 'tost.' Mr. P. A. Daniel: "Qy.: 'Toast'?"

[1126] Milton, _Comus_, 817: "backward mutters of dissevering power."

[1127] Mr. P. A. Daniel would read 'iced.'

[1128] Dy., 'Acts.'

[1129] Below 'maide,' Sig. F.

[1130] Dy. notes that this and the three following lines are taken almost verbatim from Greene's _Orlando Furioso_.

[1131] It is not necessary to adopt Mr. Daniel's emendation.

[1132] Below 'Venelia,' Sig. F ii.

[1133] Calypha.

[1134] That is, all the actors of the play within the play. Below '_Omnes_,' Sig. F iii.

[1135] Q., _shuts_.

[1136] Part.

APPENDIX

=A. Characters: their Sources.=--T. Warton, in 1785 (_Milton's Poems on Several Occasions_), pointed out that "the names of some of the characters as Sacrapant, Chorebus, and others, are taken from the _Orlando Furioso_." Peele quotes Ariosto freely near the end of _Edward I_. Storojenko (Grosart's _Greene_, I, 180) thinks the Sacrapant in Greene's _Orlando Furioso_ "a very transparent parody of _Tamburlaine_." Mr. Fleay, with some daring, asserts that Huanebango is travestied from Huon o'Bordeaux, and is "palpably Harvey." Erestus, says the same authority, is from Kyd's _Soliman and Perseda_; "the play is evidently full of personal allusions, which time only can elucidate." Mr. Ward remarks that Jack is "namesake and rival of the immortal giant-killer." The classics, of course, are represented. Warton remarked that the story of Meroe could be found in Adlington's translation of Apuleius, 1566; but it is hardly necessary to go to such a source for the "White Bear of England's Wood."

=B. The Song of the Harvesters=--When the harvest-men enter again, and sing the song "doubled,"--as here,--it is evidently the same thing, a companion piece, only with reaping in place of sowing, and words to match:--

"Lo, here we come a-reaping, a-reaping, To reap our harvest-fruit. And thus we pass the year so long, And never be we mute."

Is it too much, then, to assume that the present song is to be restored somewhat as follows?--

Lo here we come a-sowing, a-sowing, And sow sweet fruits of love. All that lovers be pray you for me,-- In your sweethearts well may it prove.

They would naturally enter with motions of sowing or of reaping, and the opening words would fit the action. Moreover, "In your sweethearts well may it prove" must refer to requital not for the act of sowing, but for the prayers invoked. These craft-songs were common enough. In _Summer's Last Will and Testament_ the harvest-men sing an old folk-song of this kind, if one may judge by the _Hooky, hooky_ of the refrain, said by one of the Dodsley editors (ed. 1825, IX, 41) to be heard still "in some parts of the kingdom." The curious in these matters may find valuable information about songs of labour in general, with imitative action and suitable refrains, in Bücher's _Arbeit und Rhythmus_, Abhandlungen d. phil.-hist. Classe d. königl. Sächsischen Gesell. d. Wissenschaften, Bd. XVII.

_Additional Note_--P. 368, l. 491, for 'church stile,' P. A. Daniel queries 'church ale'?--but see Overbury' _Characters_ (_Works_, p. 145), "A Sexton": 'for at every church stile commonly ther's an ale-house.'

_Robert Greene_

HIS PLACE IN COMEDY

_A Monograph by G. E. Woodberry, Professor in Columbia University, New York._

GREENE'S PLACE IN COMEDY

OF the group of gifted college-bred men who had some part in the fashioning of Shakespearian drama and drew into their mortal lungs a breath of the element whose "air was fame," Greene has long been marked with unenviable distinction. He had the misfortune to try to darken with an early and single shaft the rising sun of Shakespeare; and he has stood out like a shadow against that dawning genius ever since. The mean circumstances of his Bohemian career, and the terribly brutal, Zolaesque scene of his death-chamber--the most repulsively gruesome in English literary annals--have sustained with a lurid light the unfavourable impression; and, were this really all, no one would have grudged oblivion the man's memory. The edition of his collected works, however, which Grosart gave to scholars, has enlarged general knowledge of Greene, and has permitted the formation of a more various image of his personality, a juster estimate of his literary temperament, and a clearer judgment concerning his position in the Elizabethan movement of dramatic imagination; and some few, even before this, had lifted up protestation against that ready damnation which seemed provided for him by his irreverence toward the undiscovered god of our idolatry who, then fleeting his golden days, seemed to this jaundiced eye "an upstart crow beautified with our feathers, ... the only Shake-scene in a country." Never were more unfortunate words for the "blind mouth" that uttered them. But there is more to know of Greene than this one speech; and though the occasion is not apt here for so complete a valuation of his character and temperament, his deeds and works, as is to be desired for truth's sake, yet it is needful to take some notice of his total personality as evinced in his novels, plays, poems, and pamphlets, in order to determine his relative station in the somewhat limited sphere of English comedy.

Marlowe is commonly regarded as the forerunner of the heroic strain in Shakespeare, with moulding influence on the imaginative habit of his younger fellow-workman in respect to that phase of his art; and Greene, who though he will never shine as a "morning-star" of the drama was at least a twin luminary with Marlowe, has been credited with occupying a similar position as the forerunner of Shakespeare with respect to the portrayal of vulgar life. It is hardly to be expected that an antithesis so convenient for the critics should be really matter-of-fact. The narrower distinct claim that the Clown in his successive reincarnations passed through the world of Greene's stage on his way from his old fleshly prison in the Vice of the primitive English play may require less argument; and in several other particulars it may appear that fore-gleams of the Shakespearian drama are discernible in Greene's works without drawing the consequence that Shakespeare was necessarily a pupil in every school that was open to him. Not to treat the matter too precisely, where precision is apt to be illusory even if attainable in appearance, was there not a plain growth of Greene as a man of letters closely attached to his time which will illustrate the general development of the age and its art, and naturally bring out those analogies between his work and Shakespeare's that have been thought of as formative elements in him by which his successor on the stage profited? The line of descent does not matter, on the personal side, if the general direction of progress be made out.

Greene was distinctively a man of letters. He was born with the native gift, and he put it to use in many ways. He tried all kinds of writing, from prose to verse, from song to sermon, and apparently with equal interest. He was college-bred and must have been of a scholarly and receptive temperament; he was variously read in different languages and subjects; and he began by being what he charged Shakespeare with being,--an adapter. His tales, like others of the time, must be regarded as in large measure appropriations from the fields of foreign fiction. Even as he went on and gained a freer hand for expression, he remained imitative of others, with occasional flashes of his own talent; and, dying young, he cannot be thought to have given his genius its real trial of thorough originality. In the main his work is derivative and secondary and represents or reflects literary tradition and example; he was still in the process of disencumbering himself of this external reliance when he was exhausted, and perished; and it is in those later parts of his work which show originality that he is attached to the Shakespearian drama. Slight examination will justify this general statement in detail. It is agreed that he drew his earlier novels from the stock-fiction, with its peculiar type of woman and its moral lesson; and he shows in these sensibility of imagination and grace of style. He was, more than has been thought, a stylist, a born writer; and this of itself would interest him in the euphuistic fashion, then coming to its height in Lyly; and besides he always kept his finger on the pulse of the time and was ambitious to succeed by pleasing the popular taste: he adopted euphuism temporarily, employing it in his own way. In the drama his play, _Orlando Furioso_, harks back to Ariosto, and it was when the stage rang with _Tamburlaine_ that he brought out _Alphonsus, King of Aragon_, and when _Doctor Faustus_ was on the boards that he followed with _Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay_; on Sidney's _Arcadia_ succeeded his own _Menaphon_; and if _James IV._ with its Oberon preceded _A Midsummer Night's Dream_--which is undetermined--it was a unique inversion of the order which made Greene always the second and not the first. In view of this literary chronology it seems clear that in the start and well on into his career Greene was the sensitive and ambitious writer following where Italian tradition, contemporary genius, and popular acclaim blazed the way; and in so doing his individual excellence lay not in originality on the great scale, but in treatment, in his modification of the _genre_, in his individual style and manner and purport--in the virtues, that is to say, of an able, clever, variously equipped man of letters whose talent had not yet discovered the core of genius in itself.