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| It's that time, again!!! It's Tudor Trivia Tuesday!!! |
1) In Scotland and the far north of England the harvest was still being brought in as Halloween approached thus making it a harvest festival as well as a time devoted to spirits let loose on the earth.
2) In spite of Tudor witches being able to assume the form
of any animal at pleasure, the tail was always missing. For this reason, in
Macbeth (I.iii.), the first witch says:
And, like a rat without a tail,
I'll do, I'll do, and I'll do.
3) A Tudor / medieval Scottish poetry slam was called a
“flyting”.
4) Alexander Montgomery, in his Flyting against Patrick
Hume of Polwarth, written before it was referenced in a critical work published
in 1584, mentions the annual Halloween procession of spirits and fairies:
|
In the hinder end of harvest, on
All-hallow een, When our gude neighbours dois ride, if
I read right, Some buckled on a bunewand, and some
on a been, Aytrottand in troups from the
twilight; Some saidled a she-ape, all grathed
into green, Some hobland on a hemp stalk, hovard
to the hight, The king of Pharie and his court, with
the elf queen, With many elfish incubus was ridand
that night; |
In the hinder end of harvest, on
All-hallow een, When our good neighbours does ride, if
I read right, Some buckled on a bunewand[1], and some on a bean, Trotting in troupes from the twilight; Some saddled a she-ape, all accoutered
in green, Some rocking on a hemp stalk, hovered
to the height, The king of Fairie and his court, with
the elf queen, With many elfish incubus was riding
that night;" |
5) In Tudor /
medieval times, “urchin” was the name of a hedgehog. Because hedgehogs could be
mischievous, it has been suggested, they were sometimes considered to be a type
of goblin.
6) Mr. William John Thoms, in his Three Notelets on
Shakespeare (1865), adds “that near Inverness is a remarkable oblong mound,
the name of which illustrates the present subject. It is called Tom-na-Heurich,
or Hill of the Fairies…”. Heurich being similar to Urchin, we wonders whether
the word doesn’t have an origin deep within Celtic times.
7) In Thomas Ravenscroft’s Brief Discourses (1614),
we find fairies, elves, and urchins separately accommodated with dances for
their use. The following is the urchin's dance :
By the moone we sport and play,
With the night begins our day ;
As we frisk the dew doth fall,
Trip it, little urchins all,
Lightly as the little bee,
Two by two, and three by three,
And about goe wee, goe wee.
8) Of course, fairies and such were not only in evidence on Halloween, as Ben Jonson informs us in his “Mab the Mistress-Fairy”:
This is Mab the mistress-fairy
That doth nightly rob the dairy,
And can hurt or help the churning
As she please, without discerning:
She that pinches country wenches
If they rub not clean their benches,
And with sharper nails remembers
When they rake not up their embers;
But if so they chance to feast her,
In a shoe she drops a tester.[2]
This is she that empties cradles,
Takes out children, puts in ladles;
Trains forth midwives in their slumber
With a sieve the holes to number;
And then leads them from her burrows
Home through ponds and water-furrows.
She can start our franklin's daughters
In their sleep with shrieks and
laughters,
And on sweet Saint Anne's night
Feed them with a promised sight,
Some of husbands, some of lovers,
Which an empty dream discovers.
9) As usual, Robert Herrick is briefer with his description.
The Fairies
If ye will with Mab find grace,
Set each platter in its place;
Rake the fire up, and get
Water in, ere sun be set.
Wash your pails and cleanse your
dairies,
Sluts are loathsome to the fairies;
Sweep your house. Who doth not so
Mab will pinch her by the toe.
With him Mab would seem to be the fairy queen solely of good
housekeeping.
10) Shakespeare gives his own description of Mab in Romeo
and Juliet:
BENVOLIO
Queen Mab, what’s she?
MERCUTIO
She is the fairies' midwife, and she
comes
In shape no bigger than an agate stone
On the forefinger of an alderman,
Drawn with a team of little atomi
Over men’s noses as they lie asleep.
Her wagon spokes made of long spinners'
legs,
The cover of the wings of grasshoppers,
Her traces of the smallest spider’s
web,
Her collars of the moonshine’s watery
beams,
Her whip of cricket’s bone, the lash of
film,
Her wagoner a small gray-coated gnat,
Not half so big as a round little worm
Pricked from the lazy finger of a maid.
Her chariot is an empty hazelnut
Made by the joiner squirrel or old
grub,
Time out o' mind the fairies'
coachmakers.
And in this state she gallops night by
night
Through lovers' brains, and then they
dream of love;
On courtiers' knees, that dream on
curtsies straight;
O'er lawyers' fingers, who straight
dream on fees;
O'er ladies' lips, who straight on
kisses dream,
Which oft the angry Mab with blisters
plagues,
Because their breaths with sweetmeats
tainted are.
Sometime she gallops o'er a courtier’s
nose,
And then dreams he of smelling out a
suit.
And sometime comes she with a
tithe-pig’s tail
Tickling a parson’s nose as he lies
asleep,
Then he dreams of another benefice.
Sometime she driveth o'er a soldier’s
neck,
And then dreams he of cutting foreign
throats,
85Of breaches, ambuscadoes, Spanish
blades,
Of healths five fathom deep, and then
anon
Drums in his ear, at which he starts
and wakes,
And being thus frighted swears a prayer
or two
And sleeps again. This is that very Mab
That plaits the manes of horses in the
night
And bakes the elflocks in foul sluttish
hairs,
Which once untangled, much misfortune
bodes.
This is the hag, when maids lie on
their backs,
That presses them and learns them first
to bear,
Making them women of good carriage.
[1]
bunewand] parsnip
[2]
tester] a coin formally called a “Testoon” worth 2 ¼ pence.
Also at Virtual Grub Street:
- More on Thomas North as Shakespeare and author of Arden of Feversham. June 14, 2021. “This is also the reason why the title pages included the address of the shop that was selling the book.”
- A 1572 Oxford Letter and the Player’s Speech in Hamlet. August 11, 2020. “The player’s speech has been a source of consternation among Shakespeare scholars for above 200 years. Why was Aeneas’ tale chosen as the subject?”
- Gutenberg, proto-Hack Writers and Shakespeare. May 26, 2020. “A less well known effect of the Reformation was that many young Catholic men who had taken religious orders in order to receive an education began to lead lives at large from monastic discipline. Like Erasmus and Rabelais they took up the pen.”
- Shakespeare’s Funeral Meats. May 13, 2020. “Famous as this has been since its discovery, it has been willfully misread more often than not. No mainstream scholar had any use for a reference to Hamlet years before it was supposed to have been written.”
- Check out the English Renaissance Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.
- Check out the Letters Index: Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford for many letters from this fascinating time, some related to the Shakespeare Authorship Question.
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