FOUR FOUR“Nay, ’tis no play neither, but a show.”
Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and Testament is worth dwelling on both for what it is and what it is not. “ ’Tis no play neither, but a show,” says the prologue. Written two or three years before A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it presents a variety of roles, gestures, and ways of talking which were current in pageantry and game, precisely the traditional materials which Shakespeare used in developing festive comedy. Nashe’s piece, because it is a pageant, is not completely detachable from the occasion of its production. Read for a play, it often seems jerky and sprawling, without a controlling movement. It lacks the control provided by plot, by events inside the fiction, because the event it was designed to express was the occasion of its performance. The looseness, to be sure, is partly Nashe’s slapdash workmanship; his hasty genius is responsive rather than masterful. But he often shows imaginative power of a very high order indeed. I have let myself quote more extensively than is strictly necessary to establish points about the festive tradition, because his piece is often such good fun, or again, such good poetry, and it is so little read. The high quality of moments in the pageant is, indeed, a persuasive kind of evidence as to the vitality of holiday. Nashe works catch-as-catch-can, and his production shows how much there was to catch that would fit into festive comedy.
As a pageant, produced in 1592 or 1593 for Archbishop Whit-gift’s household, it expressed for the group the ending of summer at Croydon. An epidemic of plague in London was keeping the Archbishop and his retinue at his country place into the fall.1 The mocking Induction summarizes the plan of the piece in relation to these circumstances:
What can be made of Summer’s last will and testament? . . . Forsooth, because the plague reigns in most places in this later end of summer, Summer must come in sick; he must call his officers to account, yield his throne to Autumn, make Winter his executor, with tittle tattle Tom boy.
(77–85)
The tone implies that the scheme is familiar. Although the piece is not, like Dymoke’s, an integral part of a running local fiction, and although it is not so limited as Dymoke’s to traditional materials, Nashe builds his pageantry on the basic game of a festive lord and revellers who are his officers and retinue. The satiric device of making a will, which gives the piece its name, amounts only to one speech at the close. The main business is the calling of his officers to account. By this fiction, Nashe brings on stage successively the holiday groups and pageant figures who in the typical progress entertainment for Elizabeth would appear piecemeal, some coming under her majesty’s window, others encountering her in the garden, others emerging from the woods. Summer’s officers fall roughly into two groups. The most vital are spokesmen for everybody’s pastimes: Ver, Harvest, Bacchus. These are accompanied by large trains of followers who dance and sing in the traditional ways. The leaders, acting as apologists for festivity, speak a prose at once fanciful and colloquial, and often behave like the broad comedy figures of the early popular theater. The other group is conceived in the manner of more literary pageantry: Vertumnus, a hermit with a device of hour-glasses expressing moderation; Sol, who is accused of causing a recent drouth by his heat: “Is it pride that is shadowed under this two-legg’d Sun . . .?” (619); “Orion like a hunter, with a horn about his neck, all his men after the same sort, hallowing and blowing their horns” (634). These speak verse, often with a high-riding abusive recklessness. Towards the close of the pageant, by way of variation, the holiday spirit is expressed indirectly, in the comic churlishness of two kill-joy figures, one, “Backwinter,” a type of envy, the other a miserly Christmas too stingy to keep the Twelve Days. The rightness of holiday is confirmed in rebuking Christmas:
I tell thee plain, thou art a snudge, . . .
It is the honor of nobility
To keep high days, and solemn festivals.
(1722–26)
As Summer brings each gay officer to an accounting, seconded by his heirs, Autumn and Winter, the limitations of festive pleasures are brought out by asking the hard question with which Summer’s part opens:
What pleasure always lasts? No joy endures:
Summer I was, I am not as I was;
Harvest and age have whitened my green head . . .
(123–125)
The holiday heroes are floutingly unrepentant. All except Harvest are found wanting and condemned to suffer pains appropriate to their particular kind of excess. The pageant is thus made up of a series of trials of pleasures, reminiscent of mediaeval débats and of the encounters between gay vices and sober virtues in the morality plays, but here primarily shaped by a holiday-everyday opposition. It is a kind of serio-comic Everyman. Just as Everyman begins with the summons from God, so Nashe’s pageant begins with a song announcing Summer’s approaching death, sung by wood-nymphs and satyrs as Summer enters leaning on Autumn and Winter:
Fair Summer droops, droop men and beasts therefore;
So fair a summer look for never more.
All good things vanish, less than in a day,
Peace, plenty, pleasure, suddenly decay.
Go not yet away, bright soul of the sad year;
The earth is hell when thou leav’st to appear.
(105–110)
Although most of the pageant is spent in exhibiting pleasures and wittily apologizing for them, we are brought back again and again to the serious view so beautifully and forthrightly stated here. Ubi Sunt pathos goes with the late moment in the year at which the pageant was presented, and reflects the darkening prospect of plague and winter towards which the year was turning. One cannot settle whether the piece is “serious” or “comic,” because as a pageant, it expresses both aspects of the year’s turning as an event happening to its audience. This poised two-sidedness is apparent even in the complaints about perishing: for a small example, Summer’s line, “Harvest and age have whitened my green head,” links age’s sad white hair with the paling out of grain as it ripens, so that death is connected to the consummation of harvest. The playfulness of the wit with which grain is made hair implicitly recognizes that men are more durable than one season’s wheaten crown—though they have their season, too. In this two-sidedness Nashe’s piece anticipates Shakespeare’s way of simultaneously exhibiting revel and framing it with other sorts of experience. But in Nashe merriment is not enfranchised as fully as it is in Shakespeare’s gay comedies; Nashe keeps turning on mirth with a jarring abruptness, and his laments for mirth’s passing are more convincing than any of his fun. He has far less faith in nature than the young Shakespeare of the festive comedies, even though in this pageant he undertook to celebrate nature’s wantonness.
The fact that, as a pageant, Summer’s Last Will and Testament served to express the occasion of its performance accounts for the importance of the Presenter or Chorus. The role is fancifully assigned to the Ghost of Will Summers, Henry VIII’s famous fool, whose name was a by-word for jesters. There is nothing peculiar to Will Summers in the part; perhaps merely the handy pun suggested the name to Nashe—that is the way he worked. But the figure of the fool is wholly appropriate at once to abet and to qualify the mirth of a holiday show. Will Summers provides an “impromptu” introduction, abuses the author in reading his prologue, and remains “as a Chorus” to “flout the actors and him at the end of every scene” (91). The long and exacting part was played by a professional actor, apparently of some small reputation; his proper name, Toy, is alluded to several times.2 As a Master of Ceremonies who keeps addressing the audience directly, describing where they are and commenting on what they watch, he mediates between fact and fiction and relates one to the other. Thus, at his first entrance his role serves to express the show as a flurry of excitement in the housekeeping of the Archbishop’s official family; he talks about his costume just delivered from the laundry, pretends not to have seen “My Lord” (the Archbishop) on his first coming in, proposes borrowing the chain and fiddle of his “cousin Ned,” apparently an idiot or natural fool belonging to the establishment:
Enter Will Summer in his fool’s coat but half on, coming out.
Will Summer. Noctem peccatis, et fraudibus obi ice nubem. There is no such fine time to play the knave in as the night.3 I am a goose, or a ghost at least; for what with turmoil of getting my fool’s apparel, and care of being perfect, I am sure I have not yet supp’d tonight. Will Summers’ ghost I should be, come to present you with Summer’s last will and testament. Be it so, if my cousin Ned will lend me his chain and his fiddle. Other stately-packed Prologues use to attire themselves within; I, that have a toy in my head more than ordinary . . . will here dress me without. Dick Huntley cries, “Begin, begin!” and all the whole house, “For shame, come away!” when I had my things but now brought me out of the laundry. God forgive me, I did not see my Lord before. I’ll set a good face on it, as though what I had talked idly all this while were my part.
So it is, boni viri, that one fool presents another; and I, a fool by nature, and by art, do speak to you in the person of the idiot, our playmaker. He, like a fop and an ass, must be making himself a public laughing stock . . . I’ll show you what a scurvy prologue he hath made me, in an old vein of similitudes. . . .
(2–27)
In the running commentary which Will keeps up, he is sometimes carried away by the festivities presented, more often he is wryly ironical about them. For example, in watching Ver’s morris-dancers, he affects to be caught up like somebody following the dancers along the highwayside, then turns to rallying them:
Now for the credit of Worcestershire! The finest set of morris dancers that is between this and Stretham: marry, methinks there is one of them danseth like a clothier’s horse with a wool-pack on his back. You, friend with the Hobbyhorse, go not too fast, for fear of wearing out My Lord’s tilestones with your hobnails.
(201–206)
Nashe overdoes the precaution of forestalling jeering responses in the audience by having Will flout the pageant. But the fool’s commentary contributes to our awareness of what the pageant is expressing by describing, in a down-to-earth fashion, the way holiday pleasures can appear without the aura of wit and imagination with which they are invested on the pageant’s stage. He provides such perspective, for example, when Bacchus draws him into his drinking bout by compelling the fool to drink and be dubbed knight—to the tune of the Monsieur Mingo song from which Silence sings snatches in Henry IV:
Bacchus. This Pupillonian in the fool’s coat shall have a cast of martins and a whif. To the health of Captain Rinocerotry; look to it, let him have weight and measure.
Will Summer. What an ass is this! I cannot drink so much, though I should burst.
Bacchus. Fool, do not refuse your moist sustenance; come, come, dog’s head in the pot, do what you are borne to.
Will Summer. If you will needs make me a drunkard against my will, so it is; I’ll try what burden my belly is of.
Bacchus. Crouch, crouch on your knees, fool, when you pledge god Bacchus.
Here Will Summer drinks, and they sing about him. Bacchus begins.
All. Monsieur Mingo for quaffing did surpass,
In cup, in can, or glass.
Bacchus. Ho, well shot, a toucher, a toucher; for quaffing Toy doth pass, in cup, in can, or glass.
All. God Bacchus do him right,
And dub him Knight.
Here he dubs Will Summer with the black Jack.
Bacchus. Rise up, Sir Robert Tosspot.4
(1051–72)
After God Bacchus has been duly rebuked and sent packing by Summer, Will’s comment exclaims on the stupidity of tavern drinking bouts, then turns about once more to acknowledge that after all he himself is not above such folly, with a glancing suggestion that the good fellows of the audience are not above it either:
Will Summer. Of all gods, this Bacchus is the illfavoured’st mis-shapen god that ever I saw. A pox on him, he hath christened me with a new nickname of Sir Robert Tosspot, that will not part from me this twelve-month. Ned Fool’s clothes are so perfumed with the beer he poured on me, that there shall not be a Dutchman within 20 miles, but he’ll smell out and claim kindred of him. What a beastly thing is it, to bottle up ale in a man’s belly, when a man must set his guts on a gallon-pot last, only to purchase the alehouse title of a boon companion? “Carouse, pledge me and you dare!” “S’wounds, I’ll drink with thee for all that ever thou art worth.” It is even as two men should strive who should run furthest into the sea for a wager. . . . I am a sinner as others: I must not say much of this argument. . . . My masters, you that be good fellows, get you into corners and soup off your provender closely; report hath a blister on her tongue; open taverns are tell tales. Non peccat quicunq; potest peccasse negare.
(1116–41)
This sort of irony depends on being able to move easily from inside folly to a vantage outside it. Will Summer’s role in relation to the pageant proper is remarkably similar to Touchstone’s in relation to the Forest of Arden: Shakespeare’s jester also looks with a lackluster eye at festive enthusiasm—and yet dryly acknowledges his own share in folly. Although Touchstone’s range is far greater, and he is officially inside the fiction while Will Summer is officially outside it, Nashe’s use of the court fool for ironic mockery and burlesque is the most striking anticipation I have encountered of what Shakespeare did with the type.
A festive solidarity across class differences comes through strongly in the singing of the groups in Nashe’s pageant. The performers were probably local people, neighbors and tenants contributing in a customary way to the pastimes of the occasion.5 After the last song and dance group, “wood nymphs and satyrs,” have left the stage, Will Fool asks the “graver sort”: “do you think these youths worthy a plaudite for praying for the Queen, and singing of the litany? they are poor fellows I must needs say, and have bestowed much labour in sowing leaves, and grass, and straw, and moss upon cast [-off] suits. . . . send them to the tavern with merry hearts” (1886–94). The opening spring episode requires three such groups in succession, a rapid, crowded, gay exhibition. After the first group sing “Spring, the sweet spring, is the year’s pleasant king,” Will Fool places their song as the sort of thing a holiday troop might use: “this is a pretty thing, if it be but to go a-begging with” (175). The song seems likely to have been written by Nashe; it is a little too detached and descriptive to be an actual game song. But like so many of Shakespeare’s adaptations, it implies the dramatic situation of a group going on holiday. So, less richly, does “From the town to the grove,” sung a little later by “three clowns and three maids, . . . dancing” (211). The Hobbyhorse and Morris are pastimes brought bodily on stage. And when Harvest and his reapers come on singing of the work they have done, their song is traditional:
Merry, merry, merry, cherry, cherry, cherry,
Troll the black bowl to me;
Hey derry, derry, with a poupe and a lerry,
I’ll troll it again to thee.
Hooky, hooky, we have shorn,
And we have bound,
And we have brought Harvest
Home to town.
(804–811)
A class difference is assumed between the merrymakers and Summer, Autumn, and Winter, who are like gentry being visited by simple folk in their “guising” (Harvest’s men, indeed, call for a largesse). But custom and a common dependence on the seasons, accepted by all without ignoring differences, bring all together. Autumn calls Harvest a “country button’d cap” and rebukes him with: “Thou, Coridon, why answer’st not direct?” (821). But Harvest has the self-respect of a merry bailiff, as well as the licence of “Hooky, hooky,” and takes his time before he will answer the gentry’s eager question about his crops. Summer acknowledges his right to such behavior: “Plough-swains are blunt, and will taunt bitterly” (919). Even in Will Fool’s deliberately flouting commentary on Harvest, there is a backhanded respect:
Well, go thy ways, thou bundle of straw; I’ll give thee this gift, thou shalt be a clown while thou livest. As lusty as they are, they run on the score with George’s wife for their posset, and God knows who shall pay goodman Yeomans for his wheat sheaf: they may sing well enough, “Troll the black bowl to me, Troll the black bowl to me”: for a hundred to one but they will be all drunk, e’er they go to bed: yet, of a slavering fool, that hath no conceit in anything but in carrying a wand in his hand with commendation when he runneth by the highway side, this stripling Harvest hath done reasonably well. O, that somebody had had the wit to set his thatched suit on fire, and so lighted him out. . . .
(941-952)
The joke on two senses of “a clown while thou livest” is the same which Shakespeare uses when Touchstone patronizingly summons Corin as a country fellow, calling arrogantly “Holla, you clown!” — and Rosalind rebukes him with “Peace, fool, he’s not thy kinsman” (A.Y.L. II.iv.66–67). Here too the jibe cuts both ways, for Will’s superior tone is undercut by the fool’s coat he is wearing. His mockery of the simple peasant who can express himself only by running with a wand conveys a superiority to the mere folk game, to Sly’s sort of inarticulate “gambold.” But such antics are in order in their way: “this stripling Harvest hath done reasonably well.”
To express in talk what the groups present in song and dance, Nashe writes out quite elaborate parts for their leaders. Each praises folly, his own special sort of folly, with the fustian eloquence and equivocation which was customary in maintaining misrule. Nashe is working the same vein as that from which Erasmus produced his Praise of Folly; indeed Nashe mentions Erasmus’ work, incidentally, in a mock-oration of his own, though there is no reason to regard Erasmus as a source, since the social tradition is common to both writers. It was a tradition with a large dramatic potential, because the statements made in praising folly pointed implicitly to an ironic change back from holiday to everyday. In other words, the praise of folly implied a sort of plot of the grasshopper-ant sort.
This dramatic potential appears clearly in Nashe’s handling of Ver, the leader of the spring revels: he is a Prodigal Son flouting his reverend, prudent father:
Summer. Presumptuous Ver, uncivil nurtured boy,
Think’st I will be derided thus of thee?
Is this th’account and reckoning that thou mak’st?
Ver. Troth, my Lord, to tell you plain, I can give you no other account: nam quae habui, perdidi; what I had, I have spent on good fellows. . . . This world is transitory; it was made of nothing, and it must to nothing: wherefore, if we will do the will of our high Creator (whose will it is, that it pass to nothing), we must help to consume it to nothing.
(222–227; 256–259)
In such exchanges, to paraphrase La Rochefoucauld, equivocation is the tribute that Vice pays to Virtue. Ver’s equivocating praise of prodigality, a “beggarly oration in the praise of beggary” (347) as Will calls it, is a formal exercise in turning the wrong side out, after the fashion of Cradock’s fustian sermon (Will, indeed, says “I thought I had been at a sermon”). Summer exclaims on “wit ill spent!” and sends Ver to meet the prodigal’s familiar fate: “lead him the next way to woe and want” (333). A little later Will asks (without avail) that Ver come back, describing him as he would appear at a later stage in the action of plays about a Prodigal Son:
Actors . . . let the prodigal child come out in his doublet and hose all greasy, his shirt hanging forth, and ne’er a penny in his purse, and talk what a fine thing it is to walk summerly, or sit whistling under a hedge and keep hogs.
(433–439)
This comment shows how conscious Nashe was of the relation between his pageant version of the Spring Lord and the prodigal plots of popular comedy.
Nashe’s handling of Bacchus illustrates the pervasive Elizabethan tendency to organize wit around a festival Lord, and so presents a striking prototype of Shakespeare’s Falstaff, whether or not there is any direct influence. The stuff of Bacchus’ part is the lingo of tavern companions who challenge each other by a chivalric cant:
What, give me the disgrace? Go to, I say, I am no Pope, to pardon any man. Ran, ran, tarra, cold beer makes good blood. St. George for England: somewhat is better than nothing. Let me see, hast thou done me justice? Why, so: thou art a king. . . .
(1042–46)
By re-christening the action of drinking in mock-heroic and mock-moral terms, Bacchus’ high words for low matter elude the implications of the downright names for drunkenness, endowing it with decorum; at the same time, serious decorum is mocked by alluding to it verbally even when flouting it in action.
Vinum quasi venenum, wine is poison to a sick body; a sick body is no sound body; Ergo, wine is a pure thing, and is poison to all corruption.
(1007–09)
Falstaff repeatedly plays the same game, of course with much more deftness. “I see a good amendment of life in thee—from praying to purse-taking.”—“Why, Hal, ’tis my vocation, Hal. ’Tis no sin for a man to labour in his vocation” (I H.IV I.ii.114). In one way he is covering up, by using the moral maxim; at the same time he is flouting morality. Earlier he goes out of his way to get Hal to pronounce another proverb which condemns him:
An old lord of the Council rated me the other day in the street about you, sir, but I mark’d him not; and yet he talk’d very wisely, but I regarded him not; and yet he talk’d wisely, and in the street too.
(I H.IV I.ii.93–98)
After being so elaborately cued, the prince obliges by recalling the Biblical phrases:
Thou didst well; for wisdom cries out in the streets, and no man regards it.
(I H.IV I.ii.99–100)
Hal displaces the emphasis so that a proverb describing the evil of disregarding wisdom can be taken as a direction to disregard wisdom. To enjoy disrespect for wisdom, it is essential that wisdom be present—in equivocating dialogue, “wisdom” is made present by alluding to the sort of statement to which misrule is a counterstatement. Falstaff gives a name to the process when he exclaims with mock-solemnity: “O, thou hast damnable iteration.”
Wit takes us along with it by preserving a factitious continuity to cover a displacement of the normal emphasis. Although this “wit mechanism,” as Freud called it, is most apparent in wordplay, continuities of gesture and manner can likewise serve as a surface to dazzle the critical faculty so that a saturnalian tendency can elude inhibition. To set up the dramatic fiction of a festival Lord, a figure of decorum who is patron of indecorum, makes it possible to act as well as talk wittily. As Freud points out, even an isolated verbal witticism of the tendentious sort involves, in the telling, a rudimentary dramatic situation: the teller inveigles his audience into an attitude of licence towards the moral world, which is put outside the circle where they set their heads together.6 With a Lord of Misrule, the expression of the Lord’s dignity and authority develops this situation. So with Bacchus’ learned manner in such praise of folly as the following:
Summer. What, Bacchus? still animus in patinis, no mind but on the pot?
Bacchus. Why, Summer, Summer, how wouldst do, but for rain? What is a fair house without water coming to it? Let me see how a smith can work, if he have not his trough standing by him. What sets an edge on a knife? the grindstone alone? no, the moist element poured upon it, which grinds out all gaps, sets a point upon it, and scours it as bright as the firmament. So, I tell thee, give a soldier wine before he goes to battle, it grinds out all gaps, it makes him forget all scars and wounds, and fight in the thickest of his enemies, as though he were but at foils amongst his fellows. Give a scholar wine, going to his book, or being about to invent, it sets a new point on his wit, it glazeth it, it scours it, it gives him acumen. . . . Aristotle saith, Nulla est magna scientia absque mixtura dementiae. There is no excellent knowledge without mixture of madness. And what makes a man more mad in the head than wine?
(976–995)
The wit depends in part on deft displacement of the tenor of the discourse behind an apparent, verbal continuity: for example, in Bacchus’ unacknowledged shift from liquor to “rain” as though the two were the same thing, “the moist element.” But the wit consists equally in the tone, the dramatic stance implicit in Bacchus’ confident, sweeping manner. He behaves like a triumphant doctor of what he calls “so worshipful an art.”
Falstaff, when he describes the twofold operation of a good sherris sack, says the same sort of thing as Bacchus about wine’s contribution to valour and wit, with the same sort of burlesque parade of logic and authority (2 H.IV IV.iii.92). Falstaff talks of “his first humane principle”; Bacchus quotes Aristotle. The conceits of both are elaborated with consciously specious plausibility, and with obvious mock-heroic touches at the climaxes: Nashe’s soldier fights “as though he were but at foils amongst his fellows” in the tavern; Falstaff’s microcosm is marshalled by a red nose, “which, as a beacon, gives warning to all the rest of this little kingdom, man, to arm.” The large suggestion of fertility in “How would’st do but for rain?” is paralleled by Falstaff’s remark about Hal’s use of “fertile sherris” to manure and husband “the cold blood he did naturally inherit of his father.” In response to Prince John’s rebuke, Falstaff talks scornfully of “these demure boys” that never “come to any proof; for thin drink doth so over-cool their blood, and making many fish meals, that they fall into a kind of male greensickness.” Bacchus makes similar points in answer to Summer’s final condemnation: “I beseech the gods of good fellowship, thou may’st fall into a consumption with drinking small beer. Every day may’st thou eat fish” (1094).
Part of Bacchus’ dignity on the stage clearly came from his girth. He is described as “god Bacchus, god fatback . . . god barrell-belly,” and dismounts from his ass with difficulty. When he asks rhetorically: “What is flesh and blood without his liquor?” even Autumn cannot resist a little good-humored raillery:
Thou want’st no liquor, nor no flesh and blood.
I pray thee may I ask without offence,
How many tuns of wine hast in thy paunch?
Methinks that [paunch], built like a round church,
Should yet have some of Julius Caesar’s wine.
(1028–32)
This is the same tone that smaller people adopt towards Falstaff, at once mocking and admiring. “There’s a whole merchant’s venture of Bordeaux stuff in him,” and he follows Pistol “like a church” (2 H.IV II.iv.68 and 249). The belly is a sort of insignia of office. Perhaps this emphasis owes something to the mummery figure of Shrove Tuesday. In a burlesque almanack of 1623, called Vox Graculi, or Jack Dawes Prognostication, the Shrove Tuesday holiday is introduced with a description that fits Bacchus and Falstaff remarkably:
. . . here must enter that wadling, stradling, burstengutted Carnifex of all Christendome, vulgarity enstiled Shrove-Tuesday, but more pertinently, sole Monarch of the Mouth, high Steward of the Stomach, chief Ganimede of the Guts, . . . Protector of the Pan-cakes . . .”7
Shakespeare may or may not have seen Nashe’s pageant. But it is clear from such a figure as Nashe’s Bacchus that in creating figures like Falstaff and Sir Toby, Shakespeare started with an established role and rhetoric. Nashe’s figures are types merely, for Nashe is using them to embody only one moment, one gesture of the spirit. This internal simplicity goes with pageantry as against drama. But Shakespeare, in creating characters whom we feel as individuals, does not drop the meaning of the type, or of the festive moment which shapes the type. On the contrary, a measure of his genius, and of the fortunate juncture when he wrote, is that his plot and his circumstantial detail do not obscure the generic moment or type but instead make it more meaningful by finding it a place in social life and subjecting it to the ironies of social and biological vicissitudes. Nashe’s Ver, all of a piece, sings a merry note without a groat; Falstaff is perplexed by “this consumption of the purse.” Bacchus never has a dead interval in which to exclaim, “Why, my skin hangs about me like an old lady’s loose gown. . . . Well, I’ll repent, and that suddenly, while I am in some liking” (i H.IV III.iii.3–6). It is as though Shakespeare asked himself: what would it feel like to be a man who played the role of festive celebrant his whole life long? How would the belly of Bacchus or Shrove Tuesday feel from the inside? He moves, so far, in a realistic direction. But the man he creates is not merely a man. He is an incarnation.
I have been pointing out that Nashe’s mode of expression consists in going to extremes, and that each extreme, whether festive licence or churlish avarice, implies its opposite. When the discourse is argumentative and cast in general terms, the result of this method is lame: the author seems merely to be scurrying from pillar to post and back again. For the opposites of this discourse are polarities, not alternatives: holiday-everyday, summer-winter. We cannot really take one and leave the other, and whenever Nashe proposes doing so, his writing becomes hollow. Consider, for example, Summer’s indignant moral condemnation of Ver’s equivocation:
O vanity itself! O wit ill spent!
So study thousands not to mend their lives,
But to maintain the sin they most affect,
To be hell’s advocates ’gainst their own souls.
(322–325)
These high-sounding moral terms are a sort of Sunday-best suit which Nashe wears perforce, here as in his prose “satires,” because the moralistic cast of the culture made it the expected thing. He could not speak with the easy, enfranchised voice of the honnête homme, so he had no point of rest from which to write a judicious satire. Instead, he combines tiresome moral bombast with delightful praise of folly and festive abuse.
The finest poetry in Summer’s Last Will and Testament, aside from the songs, is in a triumphantly slanderous diatribe against poets and scholars. It is delivered by Winter in contesting Autumn’s right to inherit Summer’s treasure. Although the subject of learned humbug is brought into the action on the thinnest of pretexts, and then is treated in a set speech of some two hundred lines, the speech is poetry of a high order, and dramatic poetry—dramatic, not because it advances an exciting story, but because it must be read as a gesture of the spirit springing from a particular attitude and implying conflict with opposite attitudes. Winter, setting out from the proposition that Autumn is the scholar’s favorite season, undertakes to demonstrate, by unmasking scholars, that Autumn is an unworthy heir. He begins with a history of writing, telling how Hermes,
Weary with graving in blind characters,
And figures of familiar beasts and plants,
Invented letters to write lies withall. . . .
After each nation got these toys in use
There grew up certain drunken parasites,
Termed poets, which, for a meal’s meat or two,
Would promise monarchs immortality.
Next them, a company of ragged knaves,
Sun-bathing beggars, lazy hedge-creepers,
Sleeping face-upwards in the fields all night,
Dream’d strange devices of the sun and moon;
And they, like Gypsies, wandering up and down
Told fortunes, juggled, nicknam’d all the stars,
And were of idiots termed philosophers.
Such was Pythagoras the silencer,
Prometheus, Thales Milesius,
Who would all things of water should be made;
Anaximander, Anaximenes,
That positively said the air was God. . . .
The poorer sort of them, that could get nought,
Profess’d, like beggarly Franciscan Friars,
And the strict order of the Capuchins,
A voluntary wretched poverty,
Contempt of gold, thin fare and lying hard.
Yet he that was most vehement in these,
Diogenes, the cynic and the dog,
Was taken coigning money in his cell.
(1262–65, 1267–70, 1285–96, 1300–08)
A long quotation is necessary because Nashe builds his verse in long breath units which carry across the end-stopped lines—it is poetry written to be spoken, and in a sweeping style. Nashe does not greatly trouble to have every line packed: “wit hath his dregs as well as wine,” says his Epilogue, “words their waste, ink his blots, every speech his parenthesis” (1913). He accumulates at leisure as he builds towards a rhetorical rather than a grammatical period; when he is at his best he contrives a single concentrated line for the détente: “Invented letters to write lies withal” or “Would promise monarchs immortality.” His characteristic fault is to put in too much elaboration, not all of it effective, as he moves through each large unit. But his command of elaborate rhythmical gestures is often very firm. When in quoting I drop out uninspired subordinate or parallel units, I am usually conscious of doing violence to the long speech rhythm.
Nashe is at no pains to make his mockery of learning just; on the contrary, the point is to bring off a triumphant slander. Once letters are invented, the men of art can abandon the involuntary honesty of ignorance, limited to familiar beasts and plants; the sky’s the limit now for lying. They undertake to change the world by words: they promise immortality and nickname the stars; Anaxi-this and Anaxi-that say positively, now this, now that (but water is water still, and air is air). The transforming power of mind is a sham: no wonder its products come cheap—“a meal’s meat or two.”
The Archbishop’s household was of course a very learned group: “gods of art and guides unto heaven” (1934) the Epilogue calls them. Such people are precisely the ones to enjoy this sort of slander on learning, just as the gentlemen of Gray’s Inn enjoyed farcical writs and trials during the burlesque ceremonies of their Christmas Lord. Nashe draws on the De Incertitudine et Vanitate Scientiarum of Cornelius Agrippa for ammunition in working up the proposition that there is no vice which “learning and vile knowledge brought not in,” or “in whose praise some learned have not wrote.”
The art of murder Machiavel hath penned:
Whoredom hath Ovid to uphold her throne; . . .
That pleasant work de arte bibendi,
A drunken Dutchman spewed out few years since:
Nor wanteth sloth (although sloth’s plague be want)
His paper pillars for to lean upon: . . .
Folly Erasmus sets a flourish on.
For baldness, a bald ass I have forgot
Patched up a pamphletary periwig.
(1395–98, 1406–14)
The wit here moves delightfully through sensuous connections: sloth, too lazy to stand, contrives paper pillars (which will inevitably collapse); the flourish which Erasmus sets on folly (as if topping it with a stroke of the pen could change it!) leads on to the pamphletary periwig set on baldness. A satirist at least pretends to an objective view; he implies that it is his subjects that are distorted, not his mood; however much he may in fact load his language, his attitude is that he is normal, ingenuous, an honnête homme. This assumption of a norm goes with speaking for one social group against others, or for “society” against the anti-social. But Nashe’s railing or “flyting” sweeps triumphantly to a close with blatant overstatement:
In brief, all books, divinity except,
Are naught but tales of the devil’s laws, . . .
Then censure (good my Lord) what bookmen are, . . .
Blest is the commonwealth where no art thrives, . . .
Young men, young boys, beware of schoolmasters,
They will infect you, mar you, blear your eyes: . . .
(1417–18, 1421, 1425, 1450–51)
Will Fool’s chorus makes the distortion manifest by chiming in with enthusiastic corroboration:
Out upon it, who would be a scholar? not I, I promise you: my mind always gave me this learning was such a filthy thing, . . . when I should have been at school . . . I was close under a hedge, or under a barn wall, playing at span-counter, or Jack in a box. My master beat me, my father beat me, my mother gave me bread and butter, yet all this would not make me a squitterbook.
(1462–70)
The prose here carries Winter’s big talk to homely absurdity. Winter’s gesture is a festive repudiation of learned discipline like that which Berowne makes for the bookmates at the turning point in Love’s Labour’s Lost. Will Fool demonstrates the ironic consequences when such an attitude is maintained day in and day out.
The dramatic implications of Winter’s language are actually more precise and rich than the dramatic situation provided by the relations of persons in the plot of the pageant. Winter, in his railing speech, but not elsewhere, has a very definite implied character which is complementary to the character he imposes on the scholars. The opposition is another variation on the basic antithesis between control and liberty, decorous prudence and impudent recklessness. Thus at the outset he challenges Autumn’s worthiness to inherit by setting him up as a bankrupt:
A weather-beaten bankrout ass it is,
That scatters and consumeth all he hath:
Each one do pluck from him without control.
(1247–49)
As he says this, Winter is a careful purse-proud housekeeper: what one needs is control. He has a man of property’s scorn of masterless men, “lazy hedge-creepers” skulking to avoid statutes against beggars, creatures without a house over their heads who must sleep in the fields by night. Everybody, he knows, is really all out for money, whatever those who can’t get it profess about voluntary poverty: the case of Diogenes proves it—taken coining money in his cell. Winter sees through the “cunning-shrouded rogues”:
Vain boasters, liars, makeshifts they are all,
Men that, removed from their inkhorn terms,
Bring forth no action worthy of their bread.
(1376–78)
Which, then, are we for: the solid man or the coxcomb? Winter’s caricature does indeed express real defects of learning; but this awareness implies in turn the defects of his own niggardly attitude. And the learned rogues, even as presented from Winter’s standpoint, have at moments a powerful appeal. After all, they have freedom; they are Scholar Gypsies, and they enjoy the contemplative independence Arnold celebrated (along with beggarly humiliations which his proper Oxford muse did not envisage). They “plant a heaven on earth . . . called Contemplation.” Winter adds sarcastically: “As much to say as a most pleasant sloth.” But nevertheless, in “loitering contemplation,” in “walking summerly” like the prodigal, they have brave fantasies:
Sun-bathing beggars, lazy hedge-creepers,
Sleeping face-upwards in the fields all night
Dream’d strange devices of the sun and moon.
(1286–88)
Moon-madness, caught from sleeping face-upwards, leads to strange imaginations. There is a peculiar intensity, a tension between scorn, wonder and pathos, in such lines as these.8 The delights of cunning and imagination have an appeal which belies the official attitude of the speaker:
Sky-measuring mathematicians,
Gold-breathing alchemists also we have,
Both which are subtle-witted humorists
That get their meals by telling miracles
Which they have seen in travailing the skies.
(1371–75)
The alchemist here suggests Jonson’s comedy. Several passages in Nashe’s invective amount to descriptions of Jonson’s canting knaves—“cunning-shrouded rogues” is perfect for Subtle and Face. The swaggering soldier, brought in by way of comparison with learned cheaters, is presented in a very Jonsonian fashion:
For even as soldiers not employ’d in wars,
But living loosely in a quiet state,
Not having wherewithal to maintain pride,
Nay, scarce to find their bellies any food,
Nought but walk melancholy, and devise
How they may cozen merchants, fleece young heirs,
Creep into favor by betraying men,
Rob churches, beg waste toys, court city dames,
Who shall undo their husbands for their sakes;
The baser rabble how to cheat and steal,
And yet be free from penalty of death:
So those word-warriors, lazy star-gazers,
Used to no labour but to louse themselves,
Had their heads fill’d with cozening fantasies.
(1314–28)
It is not only Jonson’s subject matter that Nashe anticipates, but his special kind of double attitude mingling scorn and fascination: the beauty in “gold-breathing” undercut by the gold’s being merely breath; “meals” balanced against “miracles”: the Marlovian reach of “travailing the skies” qualified by the punning suggestion of working a racket. L. C. Knights has observed that the mingled zest and revulsion expressed in Jonson’s comic handling of glamorous luxury and cunning license is the response of an old-fashioned, traditionally disciplined sensibility to the new anarchic forces of money-power and irresponsible knowledge.9 Jonson’s poetry, at great moments like Epicure Mammon’s rhapsodic description of the delights of wealth, manages to face and express conflict by combining a purgative expression of anarchic appetite with an ironic judgment upon it. A similar reconciliation, momentary but magnificent while it lasts, happens in Nashe’s lines about the sun-bathing beggars and the sky-measuring mathematicians. The tension of antithetical attitudes towards liberty is discharged or fulfilled in wit and image and rhythm; conflict becomes a satisfying order of language. Nashe has no proper plot, and so no development of this tension such as we get in Jonson’s masterpieces, where it unfolds in the complications of the gulling of fools by knaves. But we can see the potentiality of such development, of such an extrapolation from real life’s minglings, in the festive cultivation of extremes of attitude.
The pervasive seasonal awareness in the pageant, present even in such a casual, proverbial expression as “walk summerly,” is treated with a remarkable variety of tones and attitudes. For a modern reader, the shifts are often abrupt, even disconcerting and trivializing; he feels the absence of a plot line to carry him from mood to mood. But the original audience could simply sit back in their seats to find “the place,” since in one way or another what was being expressed was always where they were. Once a modern reader has the original occasion firmly in mind, he can feel how part of the effectiveness of the most moving moments is that the literal facts are not left behind: “bright soul of the sad year,” for example, refers to the plain fact of declining sun and early dark, as well as to more complex, human relations.
Nashe spins out a good deal of argument about the merits and faults of one season as against another, of the sort traditional in debates of Winter and Summer, Owl and Cuckoo. Some of it is tedious; at Oxford in 1605, King James fell asleep watching a pageant called Vertumnus, sive Annus Recursus, or The Year About; no doubt he had drunk too much at dinner, but parts of Nashe’s turning about of the year make one sympathize with James. Yet the seasonal theme has potential meaning which sometimes, in the middle of forced conceits, suddenly comes through strongly. This happens, for example, when Winter is defending his right to inherit:
Youth ne’er aspires to virtue’s perfect growth,
Till his wild oats be sown: and so the earth,
Until his weeds be rotted with my frosts,
Is not for any seed or tillage fit.
He must be purged that hath surfeited:
The fields have surfeited with Summer fruits;
They must be purg’d, made poor, opprest with snow,
Ere they recover their decayed pride.
(1547–54)
A few lines after this suggestion of a sacrificial logic in seasonal change comes the famous song about the inevitability of death. It is characteristic that the two are not connected by the action, which is occupied with dispatching Vertumnus to fetch Winter’s sons; as action, the song seems to be rung in arbitrarily:
Summer. To weary out the time until they come,
Sing me some doleful ditty to the lute,
That may complain my near approaching death.
The Song.
Adieu, farewell earth’s bliss,
This world uncertain is,
Fond are life’s lustful joys,
Death proves them all but toys,
None from his darts can fly;
I am sick, I must die;
Lord, have mercy on us.
(1571–80)
But though there is no narrative consequence, there is thematic, imaginative coherence, beneath the casual surface, of the kind that matters most. When the song is read as part of the pageant, it is not incidental, but an imaginative projection of the pageant’s whole subject, still another expression of the audience’s situation at Croydon. Thus the second stanza mentions the plague which they feared; the refrain, “I am sick, I must die” is primarily the appropriate complaint of dying Summer, but has a poignant urgency because of the plague. The talk of strength stooping to the grave recalls the figures of pride the pageant has presented, Sol and Orion; “Wit in his wantonness” recalls Ver and Bacchus, to whose vain art of equivocation hell’s executioners now will not attend. The final stanza’s exhortation to “each degree” was addressed directly to the many social levels gathered in the great hall:
Rich men, trust not in wealth,
Gold cannot buy you health;
Physic himself must fade.
All things to end are made,
The plague full swift goes by;
I am sick, I must die;
Lord, have mercy on us.
Beauty is but a flower,
Which wrinkles will devour,
Brightness falls from the air,
Queens have died young and fair,
Dust hath clos’d Helen’s eye.
I am sick, I must die;
Lord, have mercy on us.
Strength stoops unto the grave,
Worms feed on Hector brave,
Swords may not fight with fate,
Earth still holds ope her gate.
Come, come, the bells do cry.
I am sick, I must die;
Lord, have mercy on us.
Wit with his wantonness
Tasteth death’s bitterness;
Hell’s executioner
Hath no ears for to hear
What vain art can reply.
I am sick, I must die;
Lord, have mercy on us.
Haste therefore each degree,
To welcome destiny:
Earth but a players’ stage,
Mount we unto the sky.
I am sick, I must die;
Lord, have mercy on us.
(1581–1615)
The charged line about brightness, which troubled the imagination of Yeats and of Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, is a particularly notable case where the song is resonant to its context. “Brightness falls from the air,” goes with “bright soul of the sad year” in the opening song and with lines like “Short days, sharp days, long nights come on apace” in the final song. The line can be referred to the sort of clear autumn evening when light flows down to the edge of the horizon as it drains out of the zenith. A suggestion of “hair” can be present, too, to go with Helen’s eye and cheek;10 other suggestions, beyond enumeration, are present also.
I have labored the thematic connections between the song and the pageant because they exemplify so clearly the sort of poetic resources available at the inception of the golden age of English literature—that brief moment when, as C. S. Lewis observes, the obvious was entirely satisfying. Nashe does not need to plan it all, indeed he plans too little. The whole complex of metaphors relating man’s life to the cycle of days and seasons came to him with his materials, metaphors already just there for everybody. This situation permits a remarkable sweetness and humility of tone even at moments of great imaginative intensity, for there is no emphasis on the act of finding or making the metaphors, such as often accompanies more self-conscious writing, no suggestion that the feeling is strong in proportion as the figures are original or fetched from afar.
Another consequence of Nashe’s matter-of-course relation to tradition is his freedom to turn and mock—a freedom he is apt to abuse. When the song in farewell to earth’s bliss is over, Summer exclaims with a shake of the head, “Beshrew me, but thy song hath moved me!” Will Fool at once chimes in with “Lord have mercy on us, how lamentable ’tis!” The mocking repetition, in a colloquial sense, of the song’s moving refrain does not invalidate it, just because the phrase “Lord, have mercy on us” is right out of the Prayer Book. When the forms for serious meaning are inevitable, received from accepted tradition, the comic reapplication of them need not be threatening. People so situated can afford to turn sanctities upside-down, since they will surely come back rightside-up. It is when traditions are in dispute, when individuals or groups are creating new forms and maintaining them against the world, that it becomes necessary for those who “build the lofty rhyme” to be on guard against the “low.”
A resource for expressing the situation of a group, similar to the creation of a Summer Lord and his retinue, was the convention of compliment to Elizabeth. We have seen how Elizabeth would be treated as a supreme Summer Lady, under whose influence “the crooked-winding kid trips o’er the lawns.” Often the queen, appropriately (and diplomatically) differs from Summer Lord or similar seasonal genius in that she is presented as transcending natural limitations. So at the outset of Nashe’s pageant, Summer explains his being still alive so late in the year with
And died I had indeed unto the earth
But that Eliza, England’s beauteous queen,
On whom all seasons prosperously attend,
Forbad the execution of my fate,
Until her joyful progress was expir’d.
(132–136)
Right after Summer has entered attended by his elaborate train, it is delightful and obvious in a golden-age sort of way to envisage Elizabeth’s progress as a pageant of pageants, where he and the other seasons are themselves attendants. When, at the close, he makes his will, Summer’s charge to Autumn and to Winter charmingly develops the idea of such “prosperous” attendance:
Autumn, I charge thee, when that I am dead,
Be pressed and serviceable at her beck,
Present her with thy goodliest ripened fruits,
Unclothe no arbors where she ever sat,
Touch not a tree thou think’st she may pass by.
And, Winter, with thy writhen frosty face,
Smooth up thy visage, when thou look’st on her;
Thou never look’st on such bright majesty.
A charmed circle draw about her court,
Wherein warm days may dance, and no cold come. . . .
(1845–54)
The lines suggest that Elizabeth was present; but there is good evidence that she cannot have been at Croydon in 1592 or 1593, and it does not seem to me likely that, as McKerrow suggested, there was a revival for which these exquisite lines were written in, because they are so much of a piece with the rest.11 Perhaps the solution to the puzzle about the lines is that Elizabeth’s presence was not necessary for Nashe to decide to use one of the stock features of pageantry. A compliment was bread on the waters of court favor. And a compliment was an important resource for Nashe’s artistic purpose: to envisage Elizabeth as magically exempt from the seasons’ change was an effective way of expressing the here and now of the pageant’s occasion. The seasonal change which she is to transcend is precisely the change which everyone else must accept—as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream it is precisely the thralldom to fancy’s images, to which everyone else is subject, that the imperial vot’ress escapes in her maiden meditation, fancy-free.
If the “brightness falls” stanza is the highest flight in the pageant, the generous, quiet lines about Elizabeth’s pleasures are perhaps the sweetest thing in it—especially the chiming monosyllabic retard of the line
Wherein warm days may dance, and no cold come.
The pageant’s final song has still another kind of perfection, perfect simplicity and directness. It is sung as Summer is carried out—Faustus-like but with a difference—by his Satyrs and Wood-nymphs (“Slow marching thus, descend I to the fiends”).
Autumn hath all the Summer’s fruitful treasure;
Gone is our sport, fled is poor Croyden’s pleasure;
Short days, sharp days, long nights come on a pace,
Ah, who shall hide us from the winter’s face?
Cold doth increase, the sickness will not cease,
And here we lie, God knows, with little ease;
From winter, plague, and pestilence, good Lord, deliver us.
London doth mourn, Lambeth is quite forlorn,
Trades cry, Woe worth that ever they were born;
The want of Term is town and city’s harm;
Close chambers we do want, to keep us warm,
Long banished must we live from our friends;
This low-built house will bring us to our ends.
From winter, plague, and pestilence, good Lord, deliver us.
(1872–85)
This brings the group back from the fiction of the Summer Lord game to the bare facts of their situation, to the sleeping on the rushes in the great hall—“Close chambers we do want, to keep us warm”—to the prospect of living on into the winter in a summer residence—“This low built house will bring us to our ends.” Such plain statements, by themselves, would be lamely literal. They are so effective because they come as a movement down to the literal after the projection of the same facts into the pageant’s fiction. The meaning is brought—quite literally—home. For its original audience, Summer’s Last Will and Testament not only represented the change of seasons which they were going through, but also helped to control or order the making of this change, in a fugitive but important way, by enabling them to accept it. When the pageant ends, they can say with the songs:
And here we lie, God knows, with little ease.
(1187)
And then they can go their several ways “with merry hearts.”
1. McKerrow, Nashe, IV, 416–418; and B. Nicholson’s discussion in Grosart’s Nashe, vi, xxviii–xxx. References by line numbers to Summer’s Last Will and Testament in the rest of this chapter refer to McKerrow’s edition.
2. See McKerrow’s note on line 1068 in his Nashe, IV, 435.
3. Providing English equivalents for Latin tags is a game Nashe plays in such a way as to amuse those who understood Latin, while providing a crutch for those who might not care to admit their ignorance. Here his equivalent for Horace’s “Cast night over your sins and a cloud over your deceits” is “There is no such fine time to play the knave in as the night.” Usually his renderings, though downright enough to be funny, are fairly close. Only rarely does he quote Latin without providing some equivalent—as he does at the conclusion of Will Summer’s speech on tavern tell-tales, quoted below, p. 72, where he adapts Ovid’s “She has not sinned who can deny she has sinned”: “Non pecasse quicunq; potest peccasse negare.”
4. For a comparable game in real life, see Chambers, Mediaeval Stage, I, 407. George Ferrers, as Edward VI’s Lord of Misrule, knighted the Lord Mayor’s Lord of Misrule in the course of a mock-royal procession in 1552.
5. B. Nicholson, in Grosart’s Nashe, VI, pp. xxx–xxxiii, argues that the performers were some children’s company. But the remarks he instances from the pageant, with the one exception of the epilogue, refer rather to youths than to boys whose voices have not changed. And McKerrow plausibly objects that, at a time when, as the pageant repeatedly tells us, the plague was raging, the Archbishop would not have risked entertaining a company of actors from London. McKerrow’s conclusion is that “Probably Toy himself was a professional, . . . but it seems to me possible that most of the others were servants of the household” (IV, 419). This does not answer the difficulty, raised by Nicholson, that servants of the household would not be going off to the tavern. But if we assume that the speaking parts were played by members of the household, while those who merely danced and sang were “simple neighbors,” this difficulty disappears. Being local people, of course they would go to the tavern, even if first to My Lord’s buttery. And local people would bring no London contagion. In commenting on the performance of the revellers, Will Fool repeatedly refers to them as though they were real country folk. The fact that the pageant is a gathering up of items traditional in housekeeping high days makes this hypothesis very natural. Another argument is that the number of supernumeraries required seems unreasonable if all had to travel to Croydon.
6. Sigmund Freud, Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious, trans. A. A. Brill (New York, 1916), Chap. V, “The Motives of Wit and Wit as a Social Process.”
7. p. 55. I have used a photostat of a British Museum copy, STC 6386. A quite similar description occurs in Jack-a-Lent, by Taylor the Water Poet, cited above pp. 41–42. The almanack passage is quoted in Brand’s Antiquities, ed. Ellis, I, 65. Shrovetide is called Bacchus’ feast in Barnabe Googe’s The Popish Kingdome, translated from the Latin of Thomas Naogeorgus, 1570 (printed with Stubbes’ Anatomie, ed. Furnivall, p. 329). “At Eton School it was the custom, on Shrove Monday, for the scholars to write verses either in praise or dispraise of Father Bacchus” (Brand’s Antiquities, I, 62).
8. I first encountered these lines in an essay by Mr. Howard Baker in which he quoted them for their similarity to Wallace Stevens’ humorous rhetorical effects, “Add This to Rhetoric,” in an issue of The Harvard Advocate devoted to Stevens (Vol. 127, No. 3, Dec. 1940). Subsequent conversations with Mr. Baker led me to Summer’s Last Will and Testament; part of the life the pageant has for me came from his comments on it, and from the light thrown on it by a pageant play which Mr. Baker wrote in a mode rather similar to Nashe’s but with modern materials and modern tensions between scorn, wonder, and pathos.
9. Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson (London, 1937), especially Chap. VII, “Jonson and the Anti-acquisitive Attitude.”
10. McKerrow commented “It is to be hoped that Nashe meant ‘ayre,’ but I cannot help strongly suspecting that the true reading is ‘hayre,’ which gives a more obvious, but far inferior, sense” (Nashe, IV, 440). But when the seasonal theme of the song and the pageant is remembered, it does not seem likely that “ayre” is an accident.
11. McKerrow, Nashe, IV, 418–419.