History of English Humour Volume I Part 13

Peele was one of the gay play-writers to whom Greene addressed his warning. They seem at this time to have united the professions of dramatist and actor, and to have been infected with that dissipation which has since been attributed with more or less justice to the stage.

Peele is as fond as Greene of surprises and miraculous interventions. In the "Arraignment of Paris" a golden tree grows up, and in the "Old Wives Tale," the most humorous of his works, the head of Huanebango rises from a well. He is fond of dealing in phonetic words Latinisms and barbarisms; in one place he makes Corebus say:

"O _falsum Latinum_ The fair maid is _minum_ _c.u.m apurtinantibus gibletis_ and all."

Peele was very popular in his day, and was often called upon to write pieces for the Lord Mayor and for royal receptions. He sometimes used Hexameter lines such as:

"Dub, dub-a-dub bounce, quoth the guns with a sulphurous huff shuff."

Gabriel Harvey first introduced this metre into English, and he tried to induce Spenser to adopt it. Nash calls it "that drunken staggering kind of verse which is all vp hill and downe hill, like the way betwixt Stamford and Beechfeild, and goes like a horse plunging through the mire in the deep of winter, now soust vp to the saddle and straight aloft on his tip-toes."

CHAPTER V.

Donne--Hall--Fuller.

Already we have seen that some of our earliest humorists were ecclesiastics, and it would be unfitting that we should here overlook three eminent men, Donne, Hall, and Fuller. Pleasantry was with them little more than a vehicle of instruction; the object was not to entertain, but to enforce and ill.u.s.trate their moral sentiments. Hence their sober quaintness never raises a laugh, much less does it border upon the profane or indelicate.

Donne was born in 1573, in London, and was educated, as was not then uncommon, first at Oxford, and then at Cambridge. His ability in church controversy attracted the attention of James, and he was made chaplain to the King. He became preacher at Lincoln's Inn, and afterwards was made Dean of St. Paul's. He lived to be fifty-eight.

His sermons are full of ant.i.theses and epigrammatic diction. There is an airy lightness in his letters and poems, but he scarcely ever actually reaches humour. The following poem, an epistle to Sir Edmund Herbert at Juliers, will give an idea of his style.

"Man is a lump, where all beasts kneaded be, Wisdom makes him an ark where all agree; The fool in whom these beasts do live at jar, Is sport to others, and a theatre.

Nor scapes he so, but is himself their prey, All which was man in him is eat away, And now his beasts on one another feed, Yet couple in anger, and new monsters breed.

How happy's he, which hath due place a.s.signed To his beasts, and disaforested his mind!

Empaled himself to keep them out, not in, Can sow, and dares trust corn where they've been; Can use his horse, goat, wolf, and every beast, And is not a.s.s himself to all the rest."

Bishop Hall was born in 1574, and commenced his extensive literary labours by writing when twenty-three years of age, at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, three books of satires called Virgidemiae. These books he calls "_Toothless_ Satyres, _poetical_, _academical_, _and moral_," and he attacks bad writers, astrologers, drunkards, gallants, and others.

Alluding to the superabundance of indifferent poetry in his days, he says:--

"Let them, that mean by bookish business To earn their bread, or holpen to profess Their hard-got skill, let them alone for me Busy their brains with deeper bookery.

Great gains shall bide you sure, when ye have spent A thousand lamps, and thousand reams have rent Of needless papers; and a thousand nights Have burned out with costly candle-lights."

In the following year, he produced three books of "Byting Satyres." In these he laughs at the effeminacy of the times--the strange dresses and high heels.

"When comely striplings wish it were their chance For Caenis' distaff to exchange their lance, And wear curled periwigs, and chalk their face And still are poring on their pocket-gla.s.s; Tired with pinned ruffs and fans and partlet strips And busks and verdingales about their hips; And tread on corked stilts, a prisoner's pace, And make their napkin for a spitting place, And gripe their waist within a narrow span, Fond Caenis that wouldst wish to be a man!"

The most severe is against the Pope:--

"To see an old shorn lozel perched high Crossing beneath a golden canopy; The whiles a thousand hairless crowns crouch low To kiss the precious case of his proud toe; And for the lordly fasces borne of old To see two quiet crossed keys of gold; But that he most would gaze and wonder at To the horned mitre and the b.l.o.o.d.y hat, The crooked staff, the cowl's strange form and store Save that he saw the same in h.e.l.l before; To see the broken nuns, with new shorn heads In a blind cloister toss their idle heads."

Although Bishop Hall wrote learnedly and voluminously on theological subjects, this light medley is now more esteemed than his graver works.

He claimed upon the strength of it to be the earliest English satirist, and perhaps none of our writings of this kind had as yet been of equal importance. The work was one of those condemned to the flames by Whitgift and Bancroft.

Fuller was born in Northamptonshire, in 1608. He became a distinguished man at Cambridge, where he obtained a fellowship at Sidney Suss.e.x College. He was also an eminent preacher in London, and a prebendary of Salisbury. In the Civil War, being a stanch Royalist, he was driven from place to place, and held at one time the interesting post of "Infant Lady's Chaplain" to the Princess Henrietta. In his "Worthies of England," Fuller not only enumerates the eminent men for which each country is distinguished, but gives an account of its products and proverbs. "A Proverb is much matter decocted into few words. Six essentials are wanting to it--that it be short, plain, common, figurative, ancient, true." The most ordinary subject is enlivened by his learned and humorous mind. Thus, in Bedfordshire, under the head of "Larks," he tells us, "The most and best of these are caught and well-dressed about Dunstable in this shire. A harmless bird while living, not trespa.s.sing on grain, and wholesome when dead, then filling the stomach with meat, as formerly the ear with music. In winter they fly in flocks, probably the reason why _Alauda_ signifieth in Latin both a lark and a legion of soldiers; except any will say a legion is so called because helmeted on their heads and crested like a lark, therefore also called in Latin _Galerita_. If men would imitate the early rising of this bird, it would conduce much unto their healthfulness."

Fuller abounds with figures and ill.u.s.trations in which learning and humour are excellently intermingled. "They that marry where they do not love, will love where they do not marry." "He knows little, who will tell his wife all he knows." Speaking of children, he says that a man complained that never father had so undutiful a child as he. "Yes," said the son, "my grandfather had." Alluding to servants, and saying that the Emperor Charles the Fifth being caught in a tempest had many horses thrown overboard to save the lives of the slaves--which were not of so great market-value--he asks, "Are there not many that in such a case had rather save Jack the horse than Jockey the keeper?" Of widows' evil speaking he observes, "Foolish is their project who, by raking up bad savours against their former husbands, think thereby to perfume their bed for a second marriage." Of celibacy he says, "If Christians be forced to run races for their lives, the unmarried have the advantage of being lighter by many ounces!"

Speaking of the "Controversial Divine," he says, "What? make the Muses, yea the Graces scolds? Such purulent spittle argues exulcerated lungs.

Why should there be so much railing about the body of Christ, when there was none about the body of Moses in the act kept betwixt the devil and Michael, the Archangel?" On schoolmasters he wrote, "That schoolmaster deserves to be beaten himself, who beats Nature in a boy for a fault.

And I question whether all the whipping in the world can make their parts, that are naturally sluggish, rise one minute before the hour Nature hath appointed."

The following are some good sayings that have been selected from his works by an eminent humorist:--

_Virtue in a short person._ "His soul had but a short diocese to visit, and therefore might the better attend the effectual informing thereof."

_Intellect in a very tall one._ "Oft times such, who are built four storeys high, are observed to have little in their c.o.c.k-loft."

_Mr. Perkins, the Divine._ "He would p.r.o.nounce the word d.a.m.n with such an emphasis, as left a doleful echo in his auditor's ears a good while after."

_Memory._ "Philosophers place it in the rear of the head; and it seems the mine of memory lies there, because men there naturally dig for it, scratching it when they are at a loss."

To this we may add something from his "Holy State,"--a pleasant and profitable work, in which Fuller is happy in making his humour subserve the best ends:--Of "The Good Wife," he says, "She never crosseth her husband in the spring-tide of his anger, but stays till it be ebbing-water. And then mildly she argues the matter, not so much to condemn him as to acquit herself. Surely men, contrary to iron, are worst to be wrought upon when they are hot, and are far more tractable in cold blood. It is an observation of seamen, 'That if a single meteor or fire-ball falls on their mast, it portends ill-luck; but if two come together (which they count Castor and Pollux) they presage good success.' But sure in a family it bodeth most bad when two fire b.a.l.l.s (husband's and wife's anger) both come together." In speaking of good parents, he says, "A father that whipt his son for swearing, and swore at him while he whipt him, did more harm by his example than good by his correction."

CHAPTER VI.

Shakespeare--Ben Jonson--Beaumont and Fletcher--The Wise Men of Gotham.

Greene, in his admonition to his brother sinners of the stage, tells them that "there is an vpstart crow beautified with our feathers an absolute Johannes factotum, in his own conceyt the onely Shake-scene in a countrey," and in truth these olden writers are princ.i.p.ally interesting as having laid the foundations upon which Shakespeare built some of his earliest plays. The genius of our great dramatist was essentially poetic, and some of his plays, which we now call comedies, were originally ent.i.tled "histories." How seldom do we hear any of his humorous pa.s.sages quoted, or find them reckoned among our household words! From some of his observations we might think he was altogether averse from jocosity. Henry V. says

"How ill gray hairs become a fool--a jester!"

In "Much ado about Nothing," Beatrice speaks as follows--

"Why, he is the Prince's jester; a very dull fool, only his gift is in devising unprofitable slanders; none but libertines delight in him, and the commendation is not in his wit, but in his villany, for he both pleases men and angers them, and then they laugh at him and beat him."

But notwithstanding all this condemnation Beatrice is herself the liveliest character in Shakespeare, and her lady's wit is some of the best he shows--

_Beatrice._ For hear me, Hero; wooing, wedding, and repenting is as a Scotch jig, a measure and a cinque-pace; the first suit is hot and hasty, like a Scotch jig, and full as fantastical; the wedding mannerly-modest, as a measure full of state and ancientry; and then comes repentance, and with his bad legs, falls into the cinque-pace faster and faster, till he sinks into his grave.

_Leonato._ Cousin, you apprehend shrewdly.

_Beat._ I have a good eye, uncle; I can see a church, by daylight.

In the "Merchant of Venice" Lorenzo thus answers Launcelot--

"How every fool can play upon the word. I think the best grace of wit will shortly turn into silence, and discourse grow commendable in none but parrots."

Again Lorenzo--

"Oh, dear discretion, how his words are suited, The fool hath planted in his memory An army of good words: And I do know A many fools that stand in better place Garnished like him, that for a tricksie word Defie the matter."