A failed early modern memory theatre

I had reason to look at the various early editions of Florio’s translation of Montaigne. I had never seen this ‘comely frontispiece’ before, and thought I’d do a brief post on it. It appeared in the 1632 edition.

It comes with a variant on those ‘the mind of the frontispiece’ sets of verses that you sometimes get in early printed books.* These are graceful and well turned, and they adroitly turn the failure of an over-ambitious plan to advantage, for they explain how the picture doesn't convey the sense of the work.

As you will see if you read my transcript of the verses below, the scheme had been to do a woodcut of a many-roomed palace to symbolise the ‘Essays’ as a totality. The decoration of the many rooms would have been a memory theatre of the notable things in Montaigne; it would have displayed a cabinet of his wonders and rarities.

That was the plan, anyway. But the verses gracefully excuse its failure: Montaigne overwhelmed the capacity of visual art to represent his variety of subjects. So, the palace was dropped for a gateway (opened to all English readers by Florio’s translation) which invites the readers to pass through to see the riches beyond.

Who was working on this? Martin Droeshout, no less, did the engraving (and, I suppose, had struggled briefly with the scheme to depict a palace stuffed with visual allusions to Montaigne’s many subjects). My guess at the poet is Francis Quarles, as he has a rather similar conception in his Argalus and Parthenia frontispiece, also in 1632, but from a different publisher (John Marriott, and the engraving by Thomas Cecill: in Quarles’s vapid poem, the engraving is of a curtained ‘argument’ with supporting figures, to get you reading on).

Mary Edmonds has a brief ODNB life of Droeshout, and her publications may include some more informed comment on this elegant failure.

To the Beholder of this Title

When first this portlike Frontispiece was wrought,

To raise a Pile compleat, it was out thought,

Whose Roomes and Galleries should have been trim’d

With Emblemes, and with Pictures, fairly lim’d,

And drawne from those neat Peeces, which do lurke

Within the Closets of this Authors worke:

So placing them, and them contriving so,

That ev’ry Reader (passing to and fro)

By casting thereupon a glauncing eye,

Might in that Model or Epitomie

(Ev’n at the first aspect) inform’d have beene,

Of ev’ry Raritie contain’d within.

But walking through that Palace of Invention,

(The better to accomplish our Intention)

Wee found unlookt for, scattred here and there,

Such Profits, and such pleasures, ev’ry where,

In such Variety, that, but to name,

Each one, would make a Volume of the same.

For, in those Angles, and among those Leaves

Whereon the rash Beholders eye perceives

No shewes or promises, of such choice things

A diligent unfolder of them brings

Concealed Fruits to light: Ev’n thus did we

In such abundance, that they prove to bee

Beyond a brief expression, and have stop’t

Our purpose in presenting what wee hop’d.

In stead of Emblemes therefore, to explaine

The scope of this great Volume, we are faine

To fixe the Authors Title, on the Gate,

Annexed to his Name, presuming that

Will give this following Treatise much more praise

Then all the Trophies which our skill can raise.

For, he that hath not heard of Mountaine yet,

Is but a novice in the schools of wit.

You that so please may enter: For, behold

The Gate stands open, and the doores unfold

Their leaves to entertaine you. That French ward

Which lately kept you forth, is now unbard,

And you may passe at pleasure ev’ry way

If you are furnish’d with an English-key.

That, wee suppose you want not: If you do,

Wee are not they, whom this was meant unto:

Pray passe along, and stare no more on that

Which is the picture of you know not what,

Yet, if it please you, Spell it, And if than

You understand not, Give them roome that can.

* Edward Sherburne’s translation of Manilius has a fine Wencelaus Hollar, with explanatory verses giving explicitly the ‘mind of the frontispiece’. Funds for The London Bully (1683) either ran short or the picture of the prodigal was saucy enough to be swiped. I feel that I will want to post soon on the illustration to the work by Cave Beck, M.A.

An early modern fart-lighting contest, and other sonic delights.

I cannot remember what I was looking for when I strayed that way, but I found myself reading through Catch that catch can, or, A choice collection of catches, rounds & canons for 3 or 4 voyces collected & published by John Hilton (1652).

These are jolly songs for drunken amateur performers – male performers, that is to say. Among my ancient vinyl, I do not have any catches from this collection performed, but have posted here

http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhle/001/sincetimesokind.mp3

members of the Hilliard Ensemble doing very nicely a similar naughty song, Purcell’s catch, ‘Since time so kind to us does prove’, with Paul Hillier as the baritone, Leigh Nixon, tenor, and David James singing counter-tenor (and having great fun as the girl). All over in a minute and a half, so no wonder the lady is less enraptured than the gentleman. This was released on ‘The Merry Companions’ back in 1981.

But my life is the poorer for not having heard this splendidly bawdy catch performed, ideally at the Wigmore Hall:

“My Lady and her Mayd upon a merry pin, they made a match at farting, who should the wager win. Jone lights three Candles then and sets them bolt upright, with the first fart she blew them out, with the next she gave them light. In comes my Lady then with all her might and maine, and blew them out, and in, and out, and in, and out againe. My Lady, &c.”

I suppose that Dame Emma Kirkby is too grand these days to enact such fooleries.

Here’s another naughty one, about lovers on May Day, and it exploits the way a word can be syllabically divided in a musical setting to produce its bawdy:

“See how in gathering of their May, each Lad and Lass do kiss and play, do kiss love’s hole, & play with love’s hole, do kiss and play, do kiss and play, each thing doth smile as it would say, this is love’s hole, love’s Holiday, love’s hole doe kiss, and play with love’s hole, love’s hole, love’s Holyday, & while love’s kindly fires doe sting, hark Philomel doth sweetly sing, sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet, doth sweetly sing. See, &c.” William Lawes, no less, is responsible.

This one by ‘Mr. Cranford’ uses a low pun for the same joke:

“Here dwells a pretty Mayd, whose name is Sis, you may come in and kisse: Her hole, her hole, her hole, her whole estate is seventeen pence a yeare, yet you may kisse, you may kisse, you may kisse, you may kisse her, if you come but neare. Here, &c.”

But to come to a serious point, I have heard many, many versions of Shakespeare songs using the limited surviving early settings, but I have never heard anyone picking up on Hilton’s own setting of the catch in As You Like It:

“What shall he have that kill’d the Deere, his leather skin and horns to wear, take you no scorn to wear a horn, it was a crest e’re thou was born, thy father’s father bore it, and thy father wore it, the horn, the horn, the lusty horn is not a thing to laugh to scorn. What shall he, &c.”

In the Shakespearean text, Act IV scene 2, the words with a minor variation, and indication that the original setting was a solo voice and then a chorus:

Forester
What shall he have that kill'd the deer?
His leather skin and horns to wear.
Then sing him home;
(The rest shall bear this burden)
Take thou no scorn to wear the horn;
It was a crest ere thou wast born:
Thy father's father wore it,
And thy father bore it:
The horn, the horn, the lusty horn
Is not a thing to laugh to scorn.

This is jolly too: I can imagine finding these words funny after a glass or two
“Let Simon’s beard alone, alone, let Simon’s beard alone, 'tis no disgrace to Simon’s face, for he had never one: then mock not, nor scoff not, nor jeer not, nor fleer not, but rather him bemoan. Let, &c.”

I do not think that I have sung songs in a pub since I was an undergraduate, and it seems so long ago it might as well have been the Carmina Burana.

The piety of early modern shorthand

I have been looking again recently at the religious poems of Donne and Herbert: in regard to the latter, I read for the first time The Arminian nunnery or, a briefe description and relation of the late erected monasticall place, called the Arminian nunnery at Little Gidding in Huntington-shire. Humbly recommended to the wise consideration of this present Parliament. The foundation is by a company of farrars at Gidding (1641), where a puritan reports on his snooping around at Little Gidding, and his disapproval of the practices (to his mind, ‘papist’) which he saw there.

Thinking about the spectacular piety of Herbert, and the 24 hour worshippers at Little Gidding, led me to early modern shorthand, and to Rich redivivus or Mr Jeremiah Richs short-hand improved in a more breife & easy method then hath been set forth by any heretofore. Now made publique for generall advantage by Nathaniell Stringer a quondam scholar to the said Mr Rich. [1675?].

You might loosely think that shorthand would be a secular accomplishment, useful for taking transcripts of business meetings or other important group deliberations. The book put out by Rich and his pupil Stringer brings you up short. As one of the commendatory verses says:

… Quicke as an Angell darting through the Air

When he conveys to Heaven a good man prayer

With equall pace Can this rare Art Expresse

Each quaint Oration in its native Dresse

The fluent sermons word for word wee Reach

Though utter’d faster then shee Quakers preach…

This was a system of shorthand aimed at taking exact notes in church. To the title page illustration (which shows the Lord’s Prayer and the Ten Commandments in the shorthand), I have added a composite image from the later, intricate images. It shows that, once you had absorbed the basic rules (and the promoters reckon that you would spend one hour memorizing a rule, and then another hour on the next day on the next precept, and so on), this shorthand system had a range of ‘simbolicall characters’ designed to help the user take down sermons verbatim. There are signs for each book of the Bible, for names in the Bible, and for the common phrases of pulpit oratory. Obviously, a name like 'Melchizedeck' needs a lot of writing: but how often did you hear it?!

I suppose that this was in the days when hearing a famous preacher was like going to a concert given by a major star, though to take along your recording device was allowed. Once you’d scratched away through the hour, back home to make your transcript.

Amazing, really.

How true that is!

'He that sitteth sleeping signifieth slothfulness amongst teachers, whose desire being satisfied, careth not for the charge: the children idleness, whose minds without a careful tutor, are bent to nothing but ease and vanities'

A splendid emblematic picture from:

A christall glasse of christian reformation wherein the godly maye beholde the coloured abuses vsed in this our present tyme. Collected by Stephen Bateman Minister (1569)

You make me feel like (not) dancing: early modern Salome

I was spending an idle but contented hour this last Sunday afternoon looking at YouTube clips of Rita Hayworth dancing, and singing (I mean, gosh, chaps), sometimes with Fred Astaire, sometimes solo. I do not think I have ever seen her as Salome in the 1953 film, and maybe this is one of those things that will always be better in one’s imagination, for all that inimitable Hollywood style surely turned cheesy when historical or biblical subjects were attempted.

But I was led back to the early modern versions: mainly, and predictably they disapprove mightily. Salome as a name doesn’t have its later resonance: she is generally referred to as either ‘Herodias’s daughter’, or simply as ‘Herodias’. She crops up with regularity in general dispraises of women, and stars in that most woman-hating of early modern plays, Elizabeth Cary’s Mariam. But for the early modern stage-hating Puritan (John Rainolds, and William Prynne, and to an extent in Thomas Beard) Salome is the great Bible instance of the wickedness of performance. Prynne is apoplectic (and silent about David dancing before the Lord):

“All these, with sundry others, unanimously condemne all mixt, effeminate, lascivious, amorous dancing, (the epidemicall pastime of our dancing, loytring age) as sinfull, hurtfull, unlawfull to all chaste, all sober Christians, as the reasons they alleage against it will more plainely evidence. For first, (say they) as there is no allowance, no approved example of any such dancing in the Scriptures, the Primitive Church, the Fathers, or in the lives and practice of the Saints of God in former ages, (who as appeares by the fore-quoted Councels and Fathers have alwayes censured and exploded Dancing:) (Prynne here supplies dozens of bible citations) doe either absolutely in expresse tearmes, or else by way of necessary consequence, condemne such dancing as Idolatrous, Heathenish, carnall, worldly, sensuall, and misbeseeming Christians.”

Prynne now moves on to the revelation, derived from various fathers of the church, that the girl who danced before the leering Herod was in fact the multi-talented Devil himself:

“Secondly, the very Devill himselfe (write they) who danced in the Daughter of Herodias Math. 14 6. 7. (as Chrysostome, Fulgentius, Theophylact. and others write) was the originall Author of this dancing, the onely instrument who excites men to it; the onely person that is present at it, that is honored, pleased, and delighted with it; (he being ever-more present and president where such dancing is) as Chrysostome, Basil, with the other Marginall Authors have plentifully recorded.”

I wonder in what church father or rabbinical tradition the death of Salome was first invented? Joseph Beaumont had something of a specialism in writing disapproving poems about the bible’s best dancing girl (so we can imagine he was particularly susceptible to these things). So his (for him) short poem about John the Baptist ends with a vehement account of her fate:

One Dance for Thee is still behind
By which Revenge thy Crime will find:
The Ice perfidious to Thee,
But unto Justice true shall be,
When it shall catch
Thy neck, & snatch
Its Head away,
Which there shall play
And dance a tragik Measure on
That fatall Pavement: then shall John
W^th greater glory view Thee from his Sphear,
Then Herod at his Feast beheld Thee heere.

Here we see that her command of a performance space leads to appropriate retribution: the thin moral ice on which she fandangoed was literalised into ice which broke beneath her, and as she went through, visited on her the decollation she’d inveigled out of Herod. All positions having changed, the Baptist is now the gloating spectator. Henry Vaughan has a similar poem, which also alludes to this, and here it is with his marginal note:

‘The Daughter of Herodias’

Vain, sinful Art! who first did fit
Thy lewd loath'd Motions unto sounds,
And made grave Musique like wilde wit
Erre in loose airs beyond her bounds?

What fires hath he heap'd on his head?
Since to his sins (as needs it must,)
His Art adds still (though he be dead,)
New fresh accounts of blood and lust.

Leave then yong Sorceress; the Ice*
Will those coy spirits cast asleep,
Which teach thee now to please his eyes
Who doth thy lothsome mother keep.

But thou hast pleas'd so well, he swears,
And gratifies thy sin with vows:
His shameless lust in publick wears,
And to thy soft arts strongly bows.

Skilful Inchantress and true bred!
Who out of evil can bring forth good?
Thy mothers nets in thee were spred,
She tempts to Incest, thou to blood.

*Her name was Salome; in passing over a frozen river, the ice broke under her, and chopt off her head.

My image is taken from the impressive collection assembled over in Bucharest by the owner of this weblog:

http://brechto.blogspot.com/2007/05/salome.html

It is by Guido Reni, and shows a fabulously demure Salome receiving the Baptist’s head. I chose this from Mihai’s scholarly collection of these things because I thought it was latently self-subverting. Surely, here, there is some kind of contamination from memories of David with the head of Goliath? The boy staggering under the weight of the Baptist’s severed bonce giganticises the prophet: Salome is so modest, that she becomes saintly, a Judith.

But, of course, appearances are deceptive, and I must remember that Mr Prynne has let me know that she is really the devil. All change places now.

The devil puts in an appearance: 1655 and 1663

Two supernatural ballads to the same (incongruous) tune: the full synoptic titles give the narratives. I will simply offer a rational reading of each, to show how easily we can make the devil disappear (or conversely, how easily they could write him in).

1.

The devils conquest, or, a Wish obtained: Shewing how one lately of Barnsby-Street, in Leg-Ally, in St Olaves Parish, Southwark, one that Carded Wooll for Stockings, carried home some work to her Mistris, living on Horsly-Down, who asked her how much shee owed her for; the Maid answered eight pounds; her Mistris said 'twas but six whereupon the Maid began to Swear and Curse, and wisht the Devil fetch her, if there was not eight pounds owing for; the Mistris loving quietness, paid her for eight pound: the Maid, with two of her Companions, walking over Horsly-Down, she having a Childe in her arms, one came and throwed her down, and presently took her up again, which caused her to say, Thou Rogue, dost thou fling me down and take me up again, and suddenly he vanished away, neither she, nor the two women with her, could discern which way he went, which caused them to say, it was the Devil, which for all this, nothing terrified the Maid, who went boldly home, and to bed, and the two women with her; at midnight she heard a voice, which called her by her name very often; she answered, I come, I come; but the voice still continuing, she swore she would come, and being got out of the bed, fell down upon her face, and was taken speechless, yet her body moving in most terrible manner, manifesting her inward pangs; her Mistris was sent for, who freely forgave her, and wisht God might forgive her too, and then shee departed, and her body was found as black as pitch all over; and all this was for no more than the value of eleven pence, which was done on the 6^th of this instant May, 1665. and was written for a warning to all, to avoid the like course. The tune is, Summer Time.

2.

Strange news from Westmoreland. Being a true relation of one Gabriel Harding, who coming home drunk, struck his wife a blow on the breast and killed her out right; then did he forswear the evil deed which he knew himself guilty of. Likewise how a stranger did come to the house cloathed in green, the people that were eye witnesse said it was an angel. Likewise how the stranger or angel did give sentence upon the man for killing of his wife. Also how Satan did break the mans neck that did forswear himself; and the stranger or angel did command Satan to hurt none else, and to vanish: which being done, there was a pleasant harmony of musick heard to sound: then did the stranger cloathed in green, take his leave of the people; whereof the chiefest in the parish desired it might be put in print, and have hereunto set their hands. To the tune of, In summer time.

The story about Margery Perry (in The Devil’s Conquest) gives a glimpse of the lives of a group of low income single women in a poor parish of 17^th century London. With her companions, Perry carded wool:

http://www.joyofhandspinning.com/hand-carding.shtml

The three women lodge and sleep together. The notion of ‘joy’ in their place on the bottom rung of the stocking-making process would have seemed far away. One day, Perry makes her false claim to her ‘Work Mistress’ to have carded eight pounds weight of wool, having only done six:

She wisht the Devil fetch her straight
If that she had not done eight pounds,
Ah woman! Caught with such a bait,
That came not to half a crown.

Perry was not made penitent by the warning attack on the way home, so she then succumbed to the devil at the proper hour of midnight. I suppose that Perry had a heart condition: the quarrel with her forewoman brought on her first attack as she walked home agitated, but in triumph; the AMI from which she didn’t recover came later. Yet in her extremity, she had the additional misery of believing that this was the devil come for her soul, and seems, as far as her condition allowed, to have acted as if she were complying with a supernatural summons.

Gabriel Harding was a wealthy alcoholic from Tredenton in Westmorland (the ballad says his rents came to £500 a year). The ballad tells how, in a drunken rage, he struck his wife, who died on the spot. Their children rushed into the street, and their cries alerted the neighbours. Harding was detained in his own house by his neighbours, but he denied the killing. They decided to summon the coroner. But instead, a knocking at the door heralds the arrival of a splendid angel:

His eyes like to the Stars did shine,
He was cloathed in a bright Grass green;
His cheeks was of a Crimson red
Of such a man was seldom seen…

He tells them that they should not send for the coroner, but to bring him ‘the man that did the deed / And boldly hath deny’d the same’.

The angel then gives Harding a brisk lecture. It contains a lot of local knowledge (or local ill feeling):

Thy full delight was drunkenness,
And always griping on the Poor:
Beside thou hast murdered thy Wif[e]
Alack what salve will cure thy sore.

Thy family within the house
Food thou wouldst grudge continually
O wicked man, thy self prepare!
A fearful death thou’rt sure to die…

The angel tells the neighbours not to be frightened about what will happen next: and the devil duly appears, first like ‘a brave Gentleman’, and then dancing round the hall in an ‘ugly shape’ after being given the charge to ‘Do no more then thou hast command’:

The Devil then he straight laid hold
On him that had murdered his Wife,
His neck in sunder then he brake,
And thus did end his wretched life.

The Devil then he vanished
Quite from the people in the Hall…

Yes, I am sure that is precisely what happened: a group of morally-revolted neighbours had after all been trying to deal with a drunken, angry and frightened man, aiming to keep him restrained in the hall of his own house. In the melee, they broke his neck. Afterwards they might have felt exactly as the ballad accidentally puts it – the devil had for that moment got into them. But, well, Harding was a drunk, a miser, they all hated him, and he had just killed his own wife. They just needed a story about why they hadn’t called the coroner: an angel told them not to, and that angel summoned up a devil to do his dirty work, before disappearing to a pleasant melody.

To authenticate itself, the ballad ends with a list of “the Names of some of the chiefest men that live in the Parish. Christopher Rawly, Esquire, James Fish, Gent. William Lisle, Gent. Simon Pierce, Ambrose Whir, Oliver Craft, Robert Ford, Thomas Clifford, Yeomen. George Crawly, Peter Vaux, Pilip Cook, Francis Martin, George Horton, Abraham Miles, Husbandmen.”

I surmise that among them were the men who accidentally killed the murderer Harding, and also those who concocted this spectacularly moral cover story, and maybe passed on the details to some passing Autolycus.

(I like the way that this ballad was reprinted as almost 30 years later, around 1690, but still as ‘News from Westmorland’.)

The images of the priapic devil decorate both ballads. It seems to be the same design. The later ballad probably uses the older block. For the 1663 ballad, it looks as though the old design had been stamped onto a new block, and been used as the basis of a re-cutting, so producing the crisper reversed print (devil on the left in my composite image).

I couldn’t exactly locate Margery Perry’s address on it, but I did find the promising new online Map of Early Modern London that is in development:

http://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/index_site.php

I might have to volunteer myself to help fill up their information boxes.

A talk with Mr Mazda

Off to another 'Rock, Gem and Mineral Fair', and here's my prime acquisition, from my favourite dealer, Mr R D Mazda.

These are little turrets of pale green chalcedony, mingled with pale pink quartz and a single bright green chrystal of apophyllite. The source (Mr Mazda is punctiliously correct about provenance) is a place called Jalgaon, which is in Mahavashtva state, a day's drive north east of Bombay.

My photograph has lost much of the beauty of the piece: the chalcedony is in the subtlest of grey-greens. It reminded me of the 'Rain Flower Pebbles' and other landscape stones the Chinese avidly collected (and I am sorry that so aesthetically and intellectually enriching a blog as 'misteraitch' has run is now brought to an end):
http://www.spamula.net/blog/2007/04/hard_stones_and_rain_flower_pe.html

I bought other smaller things, including a dangerous lump of native cinnabar - sealed in a plastic box. I acquired this late acquisitiveness around 2002. As these objects pile up in the house, I tell myself that having an enjoyment of ownership is one thing that distinguishes us from animals...

But, speaking of enriching people, I had a long talk with Mr Mazda, who collects books by the poets of the 1890's. We talked about Swinburne, and Dowson, back to Tennyson, and on to Masefield. And he recited for me a poem by Masefield which I did not know, 'A Creed', and politely indicated that its forthright account of reincarnation was more or less what he himself believed. He also said that Masefield's first line was toned down, under pressure, to the faintly absurd 'I held that' (which would undermine the very title - if you have renounced the idea, it hardly qualifies as much of a creed, does it?). The version on LION does indeed have that diluted past tense. I read David Gervais's life of Masefield on ODNB, which has no indication about Masefield's leaning to Buddhism. Here, Masefield seems so happy with Samsara, that it comes across as a kind of Buddhist Browning, all heartiness and vigour. But here it is, as a thanks to my educator and purveyor of fine rocks:

'A creed'

I hold that when a person dies

His soul returns again to earth;

Arrayed in some new flesh-disguise

Another mother gives him birth.

With sturdier limbs and brighter brain

The old soul takes the road again.

Such is my own belief and trust;

This hand, this hand that holds the pen,

Has many a hundred times been dust

And turned, as dust, to dust again;

These eyes of mine have blinked and shown

In Thebes, in Troy, in Babylon.

All that I rightly think or do,

Or make, or spoil, or bless, or blast,

Is curse or blessing justly due

For sloth or effort in the past.

My life's a statement of the sum

Of vice indulged, or overcome.

I know that in my lives to be

My sorry heart will ache and burn,

And worship, unavailingly,

The woman whom I used to spurn,

And shake to see another have

The love I spurned, the love she gave.

And I shall know, in angry words,

In gibes, and mocks, and many a tear,

A carrion flock of homing-birds,

The gibes and scorns I uttered here.

The brave word that I failed to speak

Will brand me dastard on the cheek.

And as I wander on the roads

I shall be helped and healed and blessed;

Dear words shall cheer and be as goads

To urge to heights before unguessed.

My road shall be the road I made;

All that I gave shall be repaid.

So shall I fight, so shall I tread,

In this long war beneath the stars;

So shall a glory wreathe my head,

So shall I faint and show the scars,

Until this case, this clogging mould,

Be smithied all to kingly gold.

'The Steem of Mad Doggs': Renfrewshire, 1698.

I am working rather too hard for the extra investigations required by the tangential investigations of this blog. But my ‘Witchcraft and Drama’ course has come round again, spurring me to read some of those pamphlets I have previously missed. My latest has been that by Sir Francis Grant, Lord Cullen, about the Renfrewshire witch scare:

A true narrative of the sufferings and relief of a young girle; strangely molested, by evil spirits and their instruments, in the west collected from authentick testimonies there-anent. With a preface and post-script containing reflections on what is most material or curious; either in the history, or trial of the seven witches who were condemn'd to be execute in that countrey. This comes in as late as 1698, and its interest made me reflect that we tend to read earlier works, and so miss out on highly evolved demonological discourses from the very end of that lamentable tradition. It also prompts me to consider that, in scholarship about the witchcraft panic, the general focus is awry, and should always be on the accusers, not the accused.

Grant is fascinating. He was a very devout lawyer, an intelligent and informed man who will deploy the discoveries of the dawning Enlightenment to reinforce the assertions of Enlightenment’s very opposite:

“there needs not so much Metaphysicks to unriddle the Appearance of Witches as Beasts, and the like: Since their reall persons may be covered with a Vehicle; which by dispersal of the Rays coming therefrom, may fascinate the Eyes by the same Impressions that come from the true sight of such”.

Grant is not a man to give any ground at all – all demonology is true, with no concessions. Thus, though he admires “our Famous K. Ja. 6^th” (King James) as an unimpeachable author, it clearly bothered him that James had given some ground to scepticism in the Daemonologie. Addressing the transvection of witches, James had produced a canny limitation on this power: in his view, witches can fly, “but in this violent forme they cannot be carried, but a shorte boundes, agreeing with the space that they may reteine their breath: for if it were longer, their breath could not remaine unextinguished, their bodie being carried in such a violent & forcible maner”. King James backs this up with the amazing assertion that when people fall from very high places, they are asphyxiated before they hit the ground: “as is oft seen by experience”. Grant will have none of this: “As it’s easy for [the devil] to Condense a part of the Vechicle: which may protect the Breathing and yet cutt the Air, like the Fence of Dyvers, & beak of a Sloop”. Again, the quasi-scientific language, deployed to argue that the devil contrives face masks for his aerial passengers. So the King was right, but wrong, as satan had a way round the brathing problem. When arguing that Satan can also create a ‘Vehicle’ of condensed air behind which the real form of the witch is hidden, and a “dispersal of Rays” to deceive the eye, Grant was also silently correcting the King’s theories: James did not think that witches could take the form of smaller animals: it would be just too painful to be so compacted. Grant has a particular need to establish this point, for his eleven year old informant lets it be known at one point that “M.M. … had appeared to her, and pincht her leg in the likeness of a Bumbee”.

The afflicted child that Grant found so convincing that he was among those who had seven people hanged as a consequence of her accusations was Christian Shaw, of Bargarran House, a “smart lively Girl”, who snitched to her mother that the housemaid Catherine Campbell was illicitly drinking the household milk, and got the fiery response from ‘Katie’: “The Devil harle your soul thorow Hell”. Campbell was unlucky: I suppose that the kindest construction on what followed is that Christian Shaw then succumbed to a mild attack of tetanus -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetanus

(“her Body was often bent & rigid, as she stood like a Bow on her Feet and Neck at once” – just look at that 1809 painting of a sufferer). But Christian had an available range of metaphysical explanations for her distressing symptoms: she was, of course, bewitched. At some point, her subsiding symptoms would have been overtaken by the necessity to sustain the accusations she had made, and she became an adept and dangerously manipulative fraud (for the best possible motives, of course). In her later life, she would make a major advance in the spinning of fine linen yarn:

http://www.electricscotland.com/history/domestic/vol3ch4g.htm

This clever girl could therefore contrive such staggering proofs as her glove, dropped in public view as she attended Kirk, levitating back to her hand. I suspect a minor magic trick involving a very fine thread. Christian was embarked on a course she had to see through. Her piety sustained her, as she effectively set about purging the parish of everyone that she had heard spoken ill of by those adults she respected. The number of her persecutors increased alarmingly, as the intrepid Christian fingered anyone with a bad local reputation. Those who cursed were a particular target, she also named a local crippled man, and of course swept up anyone previously suspected of witchcraft. But she is a child, and can be alarmingly arbitrary: an “Old Highland fellow” unluckily arrived at the house, weary from journeying, and sought shelter. Christian took an instant dislike to him, and he joined her other victims.

With these young accusers, there is always the possibility that an adult was colluding with or directing the ‘demoniack’ or child witness, as happened with Anne Gunter, or Edmund Robinson. I don’t think this was the case here. ‘M.M.’, who wickedly took the shape of a bumble bee to sting Christian, was a local gentlewoman. My illustration is the final page of this pamphlet, where the author complains about ‘M.M.’ having used legal redress against his pamphlet, reducing her name to the initials. Galling for the lawyer author to have the law turned against him, and this avenue of escape was not available to the seven who were found guilty of the persecution of Christian Shaw, and hanged. But that anyone can use the law as a positive defence is a sign of better times to come – in cases like that of the Throckmorton children, those accused seem to have no notion of any legal assistance, of habeas corpus, nothing: they are helpless as doom engulfs them.

Christian duly recovered after a satisfactory number of deaths, her case won by her fantastic ingenuity and persistence in her visitations, and her occasional spectaculars (she could move along without her feet seeming to touch the floor, I think especially when there was a stair hand rail to help things along). She was also backed up by three who had the wit and unscrupulousness to turn ‘confessing witch’, and escape the gallows by collaborating the child’s story against their fellow accused.

My post title comes from Grant’s heated argument that “The confederated Devil may, upon the Witches desire, infuse poisonous Humours, extracted from Herbs, of the same invisible Operation with the Steem of Madd dogs, or the Pestilence” to inflict such awful sufferings on his victims.

I will next read Grant’s Sadducimus debellatus: or, a true narrative of the sorceries and witchcrafts exercis'd by the devil and his instruments upon Mrs. Christian Shaw, daughter of Mr. John Shaw, of Bargarran in the County of Renfrew in the West of Scotland, from Aug. 1696 to Apr. 1697. I expect more of the same, meanwhile, the case has a book about it now:

http://thegrimsaypress.co.uk/biblio/1845300343.htm

The Kirk, Satan and Salem: A History of the Witches of Renfrewshire, by Hugh V. McLachlan, which I will have bought into my college library. But while the title, as I imply, may help the book find its audience, the real focus ought to be on the perpetrator, the self-fancied demoniack, young Christian Shaw.

Mooning the moon in early modern Brazil

Because I have a postgraduate student working in this area, I have been reading a racy piece of serio-comic writing, the undeniably learned wit of George Rogers’ The horn exalted or Roome for cuckolds. Being a treatise concerning the reason and original of the word cuckold, and why such are said to wear horns. Very proper for these times, when men are butting, and pushing, and goring, and horning one another. Also an appendix concerning women and jealousie, [1660].

George Rogers was a 17^th century medical man ambitious enough to have trained in Padua. He then went into practice in London, and eventually became the president of the College of Physicians. To celebrate the restoration of the monarchy (and in an act of remarkable prescience about what would notoriously prove to be one of the major preoccupations of that new anti-puritan era, he sent to the press this disquisition on a horny issue, seeing ‘the general verge of the people to merryment’, and expressing the hope that ‘this piece of drollery’ might therefore prove ‘acceptable’

The account of the mysterious origins of the ‘cuckold’ and of his imaginary horns is appropriately gamey: Rogers writes with an amused tolerance about erring wives, and urges any offended husbands to keep quiet - they should never blow their own horn and so draw attention to it. Rogers delivers a staggering range of arcane lore, much of it collected from (it seems) an array of Italian sources theorizing about cuckoldry and horns (‘these pleasant Seignieurs’, he calls them).

He outlines all the relevant cuckoo lore, and then gets onto the cuckold’s imputed horns, and their possible origins: Seignieur Trifone (apparently) alleged that it was because, of all male animals, only the billy-goat never shows signs of jealousy (an opinion conclusively refuted with a garish anecdote about a he-goat with a very particular reason for fatally attacking a man). Seignieur Cesario, Rogers tells us, derived Beccho from the horned Bacchus (and drunkards do get to be cuckolds), Seignieur Raineri argued the relevance of the horns of the moon, while Signieur Marmitta referred the fabulous horns of the cuckold to a story that, among Indian women, custom held that ‘when any lover presented their Mistress with an Elephant, she might permit him the joyes of her beauty’. There’s a pleasant side argument touched upon on whether an elephant has horns or just big teeth.

Other sources help Rogers range over the cornucopia, ‘the horn of plenty and abundance, which kind dames bring their husbands’, and an astronomical reason for the cuckold’s horns, obscurely based on which side of their wife a husband ought to lie when they are in bed together. The constellation of the Ram is on the right side of the sun, while women ‘would have their husbands still to lie on the left side, as being more dextrous for embraces’. So those that sullenly insist on lying on the right of their wives, making themselves less available for their marital embraces by doing so, ‘they call rams’.

All this is agreeably knock-about: Laurence Sterne would have loved it. Or rather, Laurence Sterne would have plundered it. To the latterday pedant, Rogers offers the stuff of a hundred footnotes. Here, in a single sentence, we get a possible light on the proper costuming of Edgar when he impersonates ‘Poor Tom’ in King Lear, and a splendid menstruation-ritual from Brazil which involved mooning the Moon:

“Lunacy for certain comes and goes with the Syzigy

[syzygy, that perfect word for the game of Scrabble, means coupling or conjunction]

of the star; from the Moon sure enough we become horn-mad, and hence our Tom-a-bedlams wear horns about them, perhaps by way of jeer and reproach to her, just as the women in Braseile at Monomatopa go up to the mountains at a new moon, and turn up their half-moons or backsides in defiance of her, because the causer of their monethly tribute.”

In this next extract, he skitters from consideration of the meaning present in the precise ordering of the Ten Commandments, into a consideration whether it ought to be the adulterer that gets the horns, and then leaps on to considering the devil’s horns:

“Adultery is both murder and theft, and therefore 'tis placed in the Ten Commandements twixt both: for as that steals the pleasures of another mans property, so (as Chaucer speaks) it Kerves in two and breaks asunder those that were one flesh. Well do then adulterers deserve horns: for since like pampered horses they run neighing after others wives and lye at rack and manger with them, 'tis fit they should have the bitter cup, and be drenched with the horn. The devil too is pictured with horns. He was the old serpent 'tis true, but whether Cerastes or the horn-snake, 'tis unknown. The Women they’l say he is horned, because he beats his dame when rain and sunshine meet together; so in revenge she turns succuba to others, just as he uses to lye with Witches and impure persons in dreams by creeping into their bodie.”

‘So foul and fair a day I have not seen’, is Macbeth’s enigmatic first line: I have now seen two 17^th century sources that indicate a belief existed that if the sun was shining while it rained, the devil and his dam were falling out. Diabolic marital disputes! Now, who has written on the weather in Shakespeare?

Set my fancy on a fire!

I always welcome (I suppose) all Hollywood revisits to the 16th century, in the faint hope that things Elizabethan might suddenly seem modish to my students. I am told by those same students that The Golden Age opens here today. So here is Cate Blanchett in a publicity still giving it her maximum Gloriana, while Clive Owen is her 'Sweet Sir Walter'. Ratings over on the IMDB are good:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0414055/
I suppose I am looking forward, with temperate expectation, to seeing it.

The same kind of conversation led me to mentioning a piece of Elizabethan Petrarchising to a student who knows the originals far, far better than I ever will, and who is (astonishing though it may seem that such people exist) a latterday member of the Petrarchisti, keen to keep Petrarch's wreath of laurel, bay and myrtle in a suitably flourishing state.

The poem I had in mind was a sonnet published in The Phoenix Nest, 1593. Here it is:

Those eyes which set my fancy on a fire,
Those crisped hairs which hold my heart in chains,
Those dainty hands which conquered my desire,
That wit which of my thoughts doth hold the reins!
Those eyes, for clearness do the stars surpass,
Those hairs obscure the brightness of the sun,
Those hands, more white than ever ivory was,
That wit, even to the skies hath glory won!
O eyes that pierce our hearts without remorse,
O hairs of right that wear a royal crown,
O hands that conquer more than Caesar's force,
O wit that turns huge kingdoms upside down!
Then Love be judge, what heart may thee withstand,
Such eyes, such hair, such wit, and such a hand.

The thing that has always struck me about this sonnet is way we react as we read through it. The octave grinds through the conventional rota of compliments in a way that triggers instant impatience. ('Oh, good grief, not another one.') And, as we drag our weary eyes down into the sestet, we stir back awake, even though that tiresome correlative structure is still unfolding. It is addressed to someone that wears a royal crown by right, whose wit 'turns huge kingdoms upside down'. There's only one person fits the bill, and there's Cate Blanchett above impersonating her.

Agnes Latham, editing Ralegh, saw this as a Ralegh-circle poem. He might have had it ghosted, for it is more mechanical than Ralegh's usual wavering line. But more likely, he wrote it himself. Emrys Jones doesn't discount the possibility in his brief note on the poem in his Oxford Book of Sixteenth Century Verse.

Suddenly the cardboard petrarchisms shift aside, and we half glimpse no less a man than Ralegh addressing Elizabeth I. The conventional lover's deference in the poem is the court favourite to the woman whose favour lifted him from being an obscure gentleman-swordsman, hardened in vicious campaigning in Ireland, to what he became ('the best-hated man in England', and other attendant benefits).

So the amusement of it all is, can we possibly imagine a more fantastically boring poem being transacted between two more fantastically interesting people?

Plague prediction from the behaviour of children, and coffee as a remedy, 1665

In sprucing up a lecture I came across the little pamphlet The prophecie of one of His Maiesties chaplains, concerning the plague and black-patches with Mr. Gadburies happy and joyful predictions, for the decrease of the plague both in the city and suburbs; the time when; the manner how; by God's permission, and according to natural causes; the effects and motion of the planets, and what every week may produce for the thrice-happy and welcome abatement of this sad and dismal pestilence; and the city of London to be wholly acquit thereof about (or before) Christmas (1665).

This ill-founded announcement of hopeful news ( the pamphlet gives both the astrological reasons for the outbreak, and repeats the hopes Gadbury had raised for an amelioration in August when ‘the fortunate Planet Venus … may so happily contemper the fury of it’ by entering into ‘a Trine of the Sun’ – no such luck, of course) brings together several oddities. Taking me back to some of my earliest postings on the fashion for black face patches, the pamphlet mentions a royal chaplain denouncing them as connected to, and in some sense responsible for, outbreaks of plague:

“And 'tis worthy of serious consideration, that about 20 years ago, one of the Chaplains of his late Majesty King Charles the First of ever blessed memory, did preach at Bristol upon this Text out of Gen 4.15 (‘And the LORD said unto him, Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the LORD set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him’) And in his Sermon did speak often against black patches and beauty-spots; and, among other things, said they were Fore runners of other Spots, and Marks of the Plague; and presently, within a very little while after, the Plague broke out among them, and all those persons that did wear them, fled the Town.”

If fashion can be connected to the plague, so can all kinds of behaviours. Arguing rather unconvincingly that God in His infinite mercy (!) sends warning signs (but the plague nevertheless tends to arrive ‘unawares’), the author runs through a few of the bad signs to look out for:

“Though the Plague cometh unawares, and seizeth upon a man on a suddain, yet such is the infinite mercy of God, and the providence of Nature, that it giveth always warning enough to any one that will diligently observe it …

… First the Reader may be pleased to observe, the Signs immanent and approaching of great Mortality; Mr Kelway in the third Chapter of his Treatise of the Plague printed at London 1593 hath these words: When we see young Children flocke them selues together in companyes, and then will faine some one of their company to be dead amongst them and so will solemnize the buriall in a mournefull sorte, this is a token which hath bene well obserued in our age, to foreshew great mortallitie at hand.

The allusion is to Simon Kellwaye’s A defensatiue against the plague contayning two partes or treatises: the first, shewing the meanes how to preserue vs from the dangerous contagion thereof: the second, how to cure those that are infected therewith. I in fact had to fill out the faintly-inked quotation in the 1665 text from the 1593 source.

So, it’s a bad sign if you see the children out playing at funerals. I find this interesting, and, I must confess, to have a faint possibility of plausibility, like those stories of animals predicting disasters. William Lilly, in his manuscript ‘History of his Life and Times’ (I read the 1822 printing of this fascinating work) firmly believed in this indication of bad times ahead. (I concede that Lilly firmly believed in all kinds of indications of bad times ahead – that was his stock-in-trade.) But here he is on the 1625 outbreak (and, at first, on what has to be a smaller outbreak from his earlier London years, 1620 onwards):

“I will relate what I observed the spring before it broke forth. Against our house every night there would come down, about five or six of the Clock, some hundred or more boys, some playing, others as if in serious discourse, and just as it grew dark would all be gone home; many succeeding years there was no such, or any concourse, usually no more than four or five in a company. In the spring of 1625, the boys and youths of several parishes in like number appeared again, which I beheld, called Thomas Sanders, my landlord, and told him, that the youth and young boys of several parishes did in that nature assemble and play, in the beginning of the year 1625 ‘God bless us’, quoth I, ‘from a plague this year’.

Was there some unrecorded lore among 17^th century children, some observation they had made? Boys were perhaps close observers of the behaviour of rats, as a source of sport. Had they noticed (as used to be the case with local tribes when the plague was still confined to the steppes) that the population of rodents was diminishing? Before the plague got out of central Asia, the people there knew that if the marmots were sick, you stayed well away. I read somewhere that the Chagatai horde led by Timur-i-Leng (Tamburlaine) swept through, knowing nothing of this, and freed the bacillus into circulation across the hemisphere.

The 1665 pamphlet offers the usual desperate remedies – wood fires, dosing yourself with vinegar, and coffee. Yes, coffee.

“Kindle a wood-fire in the Chimney, to consume and destroy all the infectious vapours… Venice-Treacle, Vinegar is a most excellent Antidote against the Plague, and to drink 2 or 3 Spoonfuls in a Morning is very good … Coffee is commended against the Contagion.”

What a pitiable life they led!

Thomas Campion's Secret Love

I suppose I’ve always given Thomas Campion short shrift (mainly for not being John Dowland). But I’ve just been looking back at his words, and enjoying their directness when it comes to amatory subject matter. His Two bookes of ayres The first contayning diuine and morall songs: the second, light conceites of louers of 1613 clearly made Campion feel defensive at having put devout and undeniably naughty songs between the same book covers:

‘To the READER.’

That holy Hymns with Lovers’ cares are knit
Both in one Quire here, thou maist think’t unfit;
Why do’st not blame the Stationer as well,
Who in the same Shop sets all sorts to sell?
Divine with stiles profane, grave shelv’d with vain;
And some matcht worse, yet none of him complain.

The ‘light conceits of lovers’ show Campion writing out of classical models, particularly Catullus and Ovid. These were liberating influences: there’s a fine lyric requesting sex before marriage (‘Sweet, exclude me not…’), and asking (in same way that Ovid’s male lovers get absurdly aggrieved about things) why it was the doors were ever invented ‘in love’s despite’ (he’s asking his fiancée not to ‘bar not the door’, but she is doing so, and laughing at him). The lover who just daren’t speak is here, analyzing whether keeping painfully silent doesn’t in fact preserve the hope that will vanish if he speaks:

Fain would I my love disclose,
Ask what honour might deny;
But both love and her I lose,
From my motion if she fly.

Campion goes quite deep, psychologically: ‘Though your strangeness frets my heart’ is a lover’s complaint to a Lady who insists on such secrecy, and requires such arbitrary postponements of meetings that he just has to suspect her of being up to something (– it’s a good tune too).

But I’d forgotten about this set of verses for a very candid woman speaker/singer:

A secret love or two, I must confess,
I kindly welcome for change in close playing:
Yet my dear husband I love ne’ertheless,
His desires, whole or half, quickly allaying,
At all times ready to offer redress.
His own he never wants, but hath it duly,
Yet twits me, I keep not touch with him truly.

The more a spring is drawn, the more it flows;
No Lampe less light retains by lighting others:
Is he a loser his loss that ne’re knows?
Or is he wealthy that waste treasure smothers?
My churl vows no man shall scent his sweet Rose:
His own enough and more I give him duly,
Yet still he twits me, I keep not touch truly.

Wise Archers bear more then one shaft to field,
The Venturer loads not with one ware his shipping:
Should Warriors learn but one weapon to wield?
Or thrive faire plants ere the worse for the slipping?
One dish cloys, many fresh appetite yield:
Mine own I’le use, and his he shall have duly,
Judge then what debtor can keep touch more truly.

The wife loves her ‘dear husband’ well enough, but she also needs her ‘secret love or two’ (how many, though, really?) for variety’s sake. Her husband, who is given everything he wants sexually (it seems he could have plenty more if he could deal with it) is not in her view the loser by her extra-marital adventures. To justify her in all this there flows a stream of semi-proverbial instances and analogies. How unreasonable of him to want to keep all to himself all of something that he can’t in practice use all of!

Campion, writing such a splendidly uninhibited lyric voiced for a woman speaker, surely offered a very risqué piece for amateur and domestic performance. Could a man, his wife, and their friends, really ever have sat round a table singing their parts in this song-setting? Or would it always have been ‘performers’, distanced by profession from the unblushing sentiments they were voicing? She sounds, in her commonsense and socially aspirant euphemisms (‘close playing … scent his sweet rose’), a bit like one of the citizen’s wives in the comedies of Middleton, and in this way, the song is lightly ‘in character’. In my next post I will look at how one in particular of Campion’s songs was a great success with the broadside ballad audience. This poem is like one of the more outspoken state-of-a-marriage ballads.

The verb ‘twit’ is a characteristic Elizabethan usage: the OED, bless it, explains that it began with a long ‘i’ (‘twite’), and that was itself an aphetic form of ‘atwite’, which is the word in Beowulf for ‘reproach’ – if you in the later centuries were ‘twitting’ somebody, you were reproaching, as the OED sagely defines it, in a light or annoying manner. Perhaps it's still used only in English Departments? Even we no longer 'twit' one another 'in the teeth', as they did in the 16th century.

Joseph Swetnam, the Master of Defence

I have been reading, with interest and approval, Joseph Swetnam. There goes what professional reputation I have! But no, I do not mean the misogynist Swetnam, of The Arraigment of Lewd, Idle, Froward and Inconstant Women, but the same Swetnam as the author of The schoole of the noble and worthy science of defence. Being the first of any English-mans invention, which professed the sayd science; so plainly described, that any man may quickly come to the true knowledge of their weapons, with small paines and little practice (1617).

In this, his other work (which I suspect not many Renaissance specialists will have read, in comparison to those who have looked at The Arraignment), Swetnam is completely in the male world. Apart from this complete masculinism of subject, there is no sign here of Swetnam’s anti-feminism. He is calmly, and authoritatively amongst his own, and makes a very considerable instructor.

Swetnam’s anti-woman polemic caused, of course, a lasting stir. It has always seemed to me that he managed to provoke women so much (those who took up pen to answer his book) because of a very particular aspect of his style: Swetnam wrote with a flow of cliches, truisms, proverbs, and reach-me-down phrases. To a woman reading his diatribe, it would not have seemed like an individual was attacking her sex, but that here, horribly, were all the things a whole society seemed to say and hold against women: every old joke, jeer, and cynical adage, with Swetnam as merely the channel of a universal bile.

In this other book for men, Swetnam’s manner is just the same: but here, it renders him the good, untaxing companion, whose opinions make sense because they sound so universal – the ‘old saying going thus’ backing for what he says. Makes sense to me, it will make sense to you: that’s his pitch. Swetnam was clearly a tough cookie, a twenty minute hard-boiled egg. He says in passing that he has fought with rapier and dagger twenty times, and has never himself lost a drop of blood (these would not be duels, but prize fights and challenges between ‘masters of defence’ – but they would have been very hazardous, I am sure).

But Swetnam does not swagger: he addresses with understanding and latitude the kinds of hazards that early modern English men would undoubtedly have faced:

“if you meet with thine enemie in the night, and he charge upon thee, the best means for thy defence, is presently to chop up into this high guard, except thy staffe be of a sufficient length to keep him off, with charging the point upon him, or else the third means is to trust to thy heeles” (p. 139). Fight or flight: Swetnam sensibly admits either option: here’s the best guard if a man is coming at you with a big stick, he says, or run for it (“Run, and tell you old lady to run too”, as Richard Pryor might have added).

Swetnam had been Prince Henry’s “tutor in the skill of weapons”. With his patron, who had (he claims) asked him to put his instructions into print, dying so young, Swetnam dedicated his work to the less promisingly bellicose Prince Charles. He intended a second, expanded edition, with even more woodcuts showing the correct stances, and says he has that work in hand.

But ‘bellicose’ maligns the book: after he has discussed the best managing of all the hand weapons that are likely to be used if actual fighting has to be done, Swetnam produces one last weapon, one he guarantees will get you out of danger: it is “a fair tongue”. Talking your way out of trouble, avoiding the provocations of someone looking for a fight – Swetnam is absolutely sensible.

As for combat, Swetnam really does seem to know what he is talking about. If it comes to man against man combat, his instructions are completely cogent. Fight only in the morning when you are sober. If there is sunshine, maneuver round so it is your opponent’s eyes. If the ground slopes, you want to be on the lower side, for that is the more advantageous ground. If you let your rapier slip, take your dagger’s point in your hand, and shape up as though you are about to throw it: your opponent will hesitate, if you can, recover your rapier in the time you buy.

“Againe, and againe I say” (for that’s Swetnam’s tone), speed is the thing: you watch your opponent’s eyes, as the point of his rapier (if he is fighting correctly, with wrist movements only) will be moving to fast to follow if you try to do that intently. You do not try to use ‘strong blowes’: too much upper arm in it, and so it is too slow, you expose yourself to risk: “therefore strike an easie blow, and doe it quicke” (p.121).

The illustration shows the weapon Swetnam swears by: those are four foot rapiers, and two foot daggers; and you keep your twelve foot distance as an imperative. Swetnam speaks very ill of the modish ‘short sword’ – fight just as well with a tobacco pipe, he says, it's an “idle weapon”. In his measured account of the facts, ever inch counts: if your rapier has an inch on your opponent’s, that inch may be enough to save your life (and end his). Characteristically down to earth, he also notes that anyway a short sword (with its edge) will wear through your clothes three times faster than the rapier.

The choreographed Hollywood duel does not get any support: never give a weapon back, and if you are up against multiple opponents (and not in some narrow way), you are doomed, if your opponents are willing to kill you. (Swetnam is always realistic: men often don’t want to fight, and ofetn will not want to kill even when they can. But if two men really set out to kill one man, he is finished, as he just cannot be quick enough to guard against two purposeful assailants). Left-handers are always at an advantage: they get more practice fighting right-handed men than right-handed men get fighting the left-handed. It’s as simple as that.

What Swetnam lets us through to is the world of the early modern tough: the drinkers and fighters, those careless of their lives. He tells us what became of many of the best masters of defence he has known:

“Henry Adlington for killing his Maister Iohn Deevell, was hanged: Furlong he drank a pinte of Aqua vitae at one draught, and he fell downe and died presently: Westcoat, for some unkindnesse received of his owne daughter, he went into a wood neare Perine in Cornewall, and there hanged himselfe: Richard Caro, hee died most miserably of the French disease in an olde house neare Plimouth, although he had a new suite of clothes from toppe to toe, yet hee was so loathsome a creature, that no bodie would let him harbour in his house.” [Sig C4]

In instructing you to look after yourself, Swetnam will also expound, in the way that is so typical of his age, of how providence will doom those who murder. But, a man’s man if ever there was one, something in him still warms to these hacksters and bravos, with their flamboyant recklessness. “Rufus the Ruffian” (he recalls) was a sword and buckler man: he had “God pictured on the in side of his Target, and the divel on the out-side, with this poesie on the in-side, If thou wilt not have me, the other shall” (p.192).

So, alongside his book in contempt of women, he wrote a book which is (in a very odd way, considering the subject) full of compassion for men. Here’s their other anxiety (he knows) – the thought that some boozed-up thug carrying lethal weapons is going to pick a fight. He will tell you how to get safely home to that little woman… (And as for her…)

Not a happy early modern bunny?

My image here is a composite from part of the title page, the final page, and a portion of the recto of signature H2 (rotated) from the rapier and dagger manual, Vincentio Saviolo his practice, of 1594-5. I thought to look back at it, remembering its images of duellists, and thinking about my post about the challenge to a display of arms at the Red Bull theatre between Mr Gravener and Mr Blunne.

What caught my eye instead was the annotations made by the 17th century owner of the EEBO copy, one Henry Chaytor (possibly 'Chayton'). He puts his name into the book, 'Henry Chaytor his booke' on the title page. Inside the back cover, he writes a list of names: 'Thomas Thorpe, An Killinghall, Henry Chaytor, An Chaytor'. I don't know how Thomas Thorpe gets in, perhaps it's just a name that crops up in contexts of bibliographic enigma, but I surmise that 'Ann Killinghall' was in Henry's mind for alteration by marriage into 'Ann Chaytor'. Amid the usual pen-testings and doodles, he tries out the new name she will have, to see how it looks.

But in the middle of the book, running down the right hand margin, 'M An burke was wed the thirtieth day of april 1657' - the bad news that Mistress Ann Burke was wed the thirtieth day of April 1657. Now, if this were not an annotation in a rapier and dagger manual, I'd think this was a different Ann, but I suspect from the context that young Miss Killinghall opted to become Mistress Burke rather than Mistress Chaytor. And Henry is thinking of taking his honorable revenge on the over-felicitous Mr Burke...

Saviolo is still good reading if you can skip the technical details of imbroccatas, mandritas, stoccatas, punta reversas and stramazones. (I assume that the modern reader would take a merely scholarly interest, rather than be revising for tips on improving the lethality of your caricado.) He seems to know what he is talking about, and his advice can only be described as to the point. Keep striking at the face, is his basic line, as you have to intimidate your opponent, and if you can succeed in striking there, good, for 'every little blow in the face staieth the furie of a man more than anie other place of his body, for being through the bodie, it happeneth often times that the same man killeth his enemie notwithstanding in the furie of his resolution: but the blood that runneth about the face, dismaieth a man'. What do you do if the rapier twists or slips from the hand of your opponent? Kill him while you have the chance, whatever you do, don't give it back! Suppose you find yourself fighting an old friend after a quarrel, and you end up with him at your mercy, what should you do? Spare him for old time's sake? No, kill him while you can, for you never know what's in a man's mind, don't give him the opportunity to make you regret being merciful.

He has several interesting pages about giving the lie - it's like Touchstone, but deadly serious, and a marvellously addled assertion that if you are out to kill someone, you have to do this as the instrument of God's wrath, rather than for private reasons. Just take revenge in the right frame of mind, with suitable piety of purpose, and that's OK.

I doubt Mr Chaytor called out his man: he looks a bit of a dreamer to me, and the book he was swotting up on technique in is enough to unnerve anyone.

Flights of fancy

Whee!

I am in the current EMLS, writing at considerable length about transvection, the purported flight of witches, and how it got represented on the early modern stage:

http://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/13-1/13-1toc.htm

http://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/13-1/bootwitc.htm

A challenge at Long Picke and Half Picke

The Guardian ran a piece about the exhibition being put on by the Society of Antiquaries for the 330^th birthday of the institution. Here’s the link, and another link to the accompanying slide show of some of the treasures that will be on display.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/gallery/2007/sep/11/art?picture=330717412

http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/news/story/0,,2167486,00.html

This reminded me faintly of how printed materials owned by the Society crop up on EEBO, and here’s one of them, A Challenge, From Richard Grauener, Gentleman and Souldier, Scholler to Thomas Musgrove, & Seruant to Robert Battell, Prouis Masters of the Noble Sience of defence, against Thomas Blunne, Shoo-maker, and Scholler to Thomas Turpin, Master of the Noble Science of Defence this to be performed at the Red Bull in St. Iohns street, on Tuesday next, being the 20. of October, 1629. If God permit.

The black letter text says:

“Judicious Gentlemen and others, I being a Souldier, from me expect no complementall phrases, for in my opinion that more stuffes the eare, then please the eye; then to leave off this empty outside of verball threatenings, I in plaine termes challenge the said Thomas Blunne at these eight severall weapons hereunder named, wishing him to bring his best skill and resolution with him. This to be performed at the time and place above named, desiring from the spectators stage-room, and from him his uttermost of his malice, while then I rest.

The names of the Weapons.

Long Picke, Half Picke, Backe Sword, Sword and Buckler, Single Rapier, Rapier and Dagger, Sword and Dagger, Holberd.

And I the said Thomas Blunne will be ready at the time and place appointed, to answer this Challenge, If God permit. Vivat Rex.”

In this promotional handbill, we see the kind of thing that might have been distributed to advertise new plays by Shakespeare, and stuck up on posts in the city. A humble black letter sheet (it is about six inches high) - something very like this might have announced King Lear. Here, the amphitheatre (the Red Bull) will be showing a display of martial prowess rather than a play, with the bill assuring those who read it that both men are going to appear, and hack away at each other in some controlled and semi-safe manner through a full repertoire of weapons. I suppose that, with breaks for a breather and a small beer, it might have gone on for a couple of hours if all digits and eyes survived the early rounds. There would have been side-betting, I imagine. In Davenant's play, The Unfortunate Lovers, there's an allusion to the customary costumes worn when two men 'played a prize', which lets us see how Gravener and Blunne might wel have turned out:

"Why, dost thou thinke they goe to play a Prize?
Is't of necessity they must appeare
In scarlet Breeches, and cleane lac'd shirts?"

The two participants represent two different schools in the ‘Science of Defence’. Interesting that the gentleman and soldier Gravener will be fighting a shoemaker. Perhaps Blunne was doing the whole socially mobile ‘a shoemaker a gentleman’ thing by means of mastering methods of fighting. Maybe this is part of the commercial appeal of the bout – to get the journeyman shoemakers along to cheer on their man.

Ephemera at its most priceless.