Shakespeare's Hobby-Horse and Early Modern Popular Culture

Natália Pikli

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000431636
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Shakespeare-Drama

This book explores the ways in which the early modern hobby-horse featured in different productions of popular culture between the 1580s and 1630s.

Natália Pikli approaches this study with a thorough and interdisciplinary examination of hobby-horse references, with commentary on the polysemous uses of the word, offers an informative background to reconsider well-known texts by Shakespeare and others, and provides an overview on the workings of cultural memory regarding popular culture in early modern England.

The book will appeal to those with interest in early modern drama and theatre, dramaturgy, popular culture, cultural memory, and iconography.

1

The hobby-horse and the early modern morris dance

DOI: 10.4324/9781003054238-1

Oral culture in transition

The marketing potential of widely recognizable, and thus profitably evoked popular phenomena like the morris dance and the hobby-horse propelled an already ongoing change affecting the predominantly oral-ritual culture of country traditions. Sixteenth-century England was characterized by rapidly changing cultural conditions: the dizzying series of religious shifts between Catholicism and varying forms of Protestantism coincided with the advance of literacy and printing, which fostered a thriving cultural market by the end of the century. A growing number of people were able to read at least blackletter, “vulgar” print, and even illiterate people participated in written or printed culture, as broadside ballads were sung, learnt, and pasted over chimneys in taverns, with sermons and plays performed in front of audiences. The transition from illiterate-oral to literate and print culture was further complicated by their co-existence and continuous interaction, with elements of one being transferred to and employed by the other in numerous different ways. The complicated history of the morris and the hobby-horse in the 16th and early 17th centuries cannot be separated from the ongoing changes in the early modern mindset. The introduction of typographical print and growing literacy rates,¹ largely occasioned by the Reformation, affected people's thinking as well as cultural production.

Historians and cultural historians, such as David Cressy, Tessa Watt, and Linda Woodbridge, emphasize the complexity of early modern literacy, which was rather a spectrum than a literate–illiterate binary. It could range from the ability to read printed blackletter material, for instance, ballad broadsides, without being able to write down one's name, to the full literacy of reading and writing, including handwritten materials. The top tier of literacy included full comprehension and the basics of Humanist erudition, and it was the result of grammar school or university education for men, or of careful home tutoring for women. Nonetheless, in the period literacy rates rose steadily: although geographically varied, data show that at the beginning of Elizabeth's reign only one in five English men could sign his own name, and only one woman in twenty; by 1642 this increased to one in three for men and one in ten for women.² These are maximum numbers, since, as Cressy warns, this did not indubitably confirm that they were fully literate, because reading was taught first, and handwriting was acquired later. This suggests that the ones who only attended the so-called “petty school” (occasionally some girls as well) probably learnt how to read the simplest form of print, whereas reading Roman type and handwriting, together with the ability to write, were taught later and separately.³ Geographical variations and degrees of literacy created an intricate “patchwork” of early modern thinking and writing to an effect never experienced before, consequently mingling popular and elite cultures in various forms.⁴ There were areas where general literacy reached higher numbers, like London, but this did not necessarily mean that other parts of the country were untouched by the spread of literacy and print.

The 1960s witnessed a rise in theoretical interest pertaining to the transformation of oral culture to a written one, the so-called “technologizing of the word.” The works of Eric A. Havelock, Walter J. Ong, and Marshall McLuhan⁵ still prove indispensable, since they laid down the groundwork for such research. Some of their ideas have been contested and modified, for instance, by Adam Fox and Daniel Woolf, who emphasize that the general Havelock-Ong model describing literacy (and print culture) as a progress of visuality, superseding and eradicating the previous ritualistic-oral culture is far too simplistic. As Fox and Woolf emphasize, the uneven spread of print and the still active practice of scribal communication created a vibrant and multilayered form of communication in the long early modern period in England, between 1500 and 1850, which also corresponded to the period of the hand-operated press in technological terms. Different and varying degrees of literacy allowed for a wide and varied spectrum of readers, many of whom could not write properly but were avid consumers of cheap print. Therefore, a complicated picture of this period emerges, based on the tripartite and mutually influential relationship of speech, writing, and print, forming a hybrid model of communication and cognition.⁶ What needs to be considered with equal significance are, as Ong mentioned earlier, and later Bruce R. Smith's monograph emphasized, early modern people's highly developed aural skills and the widespread use of oral-aural communication forms in early modern England. As Smith warns when analyzing Philip Stubbes's description of the morris dance in The Anatomy of Abuses, “morris dancing is as much about sound as it is about movement,” that is, the devilish cacophony, “a synaesthetic synchrony of pipes, drums, bells, hands, arms, legs, and feet is the essence of the event.”⁷ Consequently, examining hobby-horse references in the printed products of the age which remained to us, one needs to re-imagine and re-evaluate them in the complex interaction of oral, aural, and written factors.

As Havelock and Ong pointed out, the transition from oral culture to chirographic (written) and later to typographic (print) cultures called for new ways of organizing human thought. Although in Phaedrus and the Seventh Letter Plato complained about how writing was mechanical, inhuman, passive, unresponsive, weakening the memory, and consequently, the mind, the way to abstract philosophical thinking was paved by the invention and interiorizing of the Greek alphabet, which facilitated the survival of Plato's own works in writing.⁸ Besides unavoidable changes, however, a certain resiliency of oral phenomena could be observed, partly lingering on from preliterate times as “oral residue,” partly as “secondary orality” in literate societies with the introduction of new situations for orality, for instance, television. Ong's term of “secondary orality” originally referred to “present-day high technology culture,” sustained by different forms of electronical media.⁹ However, in a broader sense, every culture with literacy develops varied forms of “secondary orality.” McLuhan's metaphor of media overlap, repeated by Ong, remains the most illustrative explanation for early modern England as well: different media “move through one another as do galaxies of stars, each maintaining its own basic integrity but also bearing the marks of encounter ever after.”¹⁰ Havelock pointed out how the appearance of alphabetic literacy in ancient Greece contributed to analytical thinking, similarly to the introduction and mass produce of typographical print in the 16th century, which resulted in a watershed change, especially regarding the availability of ideas. This boom of information, however, came with a price: the dangers of communicative closure and potential forgetting, as was pointed out with reference to cultural memory in the Introduction. Ong called attention to the fact that although print “mechanically as well as psychologically locked words into space and thereby established a firmer sense of closure than writing could,” such finiteness was not untouched by the co-existing orality, since “Written words are residue.” He also mentions the conservatism of writing, its “freezing” of codes, referring to Oppenheim.¹¹ These lines of thought were elaborated later by Jan Assmann, whose theory of cultural memory differentiates between phases of “ritual coherence” and “textual coherence,” mostly focusing on pre-Biblical times, but his model holds true to the popular culture of early modern England (see Introduction). When originally oral-aural phenomena were transformed into print, such “vessels” of information codified, fixed them in memory, often with a normative moral. However, this could equally result in loss of memory: once something was put down in writing or print, freed of the ritualistic repetition by given communities, it could easily be forgotten if the book was not read.

Such paradoxes in cultural memory appear in the use of the phrase of “For o for o the hobby-horse's forgot,” which resounds in many works at the turn of the century (see Chapter 2), curiously marking the most active period of remembering the hobby-horse and Merry Old England. The printed sources from which later scholars attempt to reconstruct and understand the age, often retained certain oral characteristics as “residue,” not only in subject matter but as stylistic features. The following analyses will exemplify how cheap quartos recording songs (Thomas Morley's and Thomas Weelkes's madrigal books) or song-like poems (Cobbes Prophecies) and prose pamphlets describing country customs (Old Meg of Herefordshire) contain residual features of orality. In addition, they testify to the agonistic and repetitive inclination of poet singers and their preference for fixed aggregative phrases.¹² This way the “forgotten hobby-horse” joins ancient aggregates like “the brave soldier” or “the sturdy oak.” Agonistic name-calling featured in printed playtexts and oral theatrical performance as well: Kent's carnivalesque abuse of Oswald in King Lear recalls the verbal bar fights still alive in rural societies. The fact that both the otherwise highly different quarto (1608) and folio (1623) versions of the play contain this passage with only minor variations, accentuates the widespread popularity of such “genres” of oral entertainment with urban London audiences.

KENT: Thou whoreson Z, thou unnecessary letter (to Cornwall) – my lord, if you’ll give me leave, I will tread this unbolted villain into mortar, and daub the wall of a jakes with him. (To Oswald) Spare my gray beard, you wagtail?

…

A plague upon your epileptic visage!

Smile you my speeches, as I were a fool?

Goose, an I had you upon Sarum Plain,

I’d drive ye cackling home to Camelot.¹³

The paradigm change that print and increasing literacy occasioned was fostered by the mass production of cheap print by the end of the 16th century and contributed to the complicated transformation of oral culture phenomena into commercially viable forms. The broad dissemination and ready affordability of popular print throughout the country changed the cultural landscape of early modern England. Cheap quartos and octavos could be bought for a couple of pennies, for roughly a third or a half of a labourer's daily earning; ballads only cost a penny or two and could also be enjoyed without needing to buy them. Interest in popular print crossed social boundaries. As Julie Crawford illustrates, “the wealthy Lady Frances Wolfreston collected “penny merriments,” and Archbishop William Sancroft copied the popular tale of Old Meg into one of his notebooks, and the 1625 inventory of the Norfolk gentleman Sir Roger Townshend included “The crying murther in 4o” [quarto].”¹⁴ The commercial book trade, though centralized in London under the printing monopoly of the Stationers’ Guild, established in 1557, reached almost all parts of the country via effective distribution networks: post, carrier, local bookshops, agents and provincial booksellers, street-hawkers, chapmen and even by illegal means, via smugglers. Cheap print therefore could manipulate public opinion, or, alternatively voice “popular error,” just as much as provide pure entertainment, though it was rarely devoid of some moralizing or normative conclusion, as exemplified in the closing stanzas of ballads.¹⁵

The advance in print culture and the number of targeted readers may be illustrated by the staggering rise in the number of new titles published per year: according to Fox and Woolf's numbers, from approximately 46 in 1500 to 259 in 1600 and 577 in 1641. Raymond's data also show an unprecedented rise: from the decade 1500–1509 we have 439 printed books (still extant), while between 1650 and 1659 16,523 books were printed. With the estimated print run of 1,500 copies per title, counting in the ballad broadsides (between 600,000 and four million in number),¹⁶ an abundance of printed material could reach a steadily growing number of readers, even if literacy and print spread unevenly in 16th-century England. Differing attitudes of Catholics and Protestants to individual literacy as well as the interaction between oral and printed forms of sermons and devotional works produced a complicated model of cultural production and consumption.¹⁷ Therefore, a simple replacement or evolutionary model, suggesting an easy and one-way transition from orality to literacy and print does not hold true. Early modern England was characterized by a sort of reciprocal interaction, a symbiotic synergy of different media forms. This corresponds to the interactive relationship between popular and elite forms of entertainment, as the case studies in the following chapters illustrate. To take one example, Ong convinc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Note on texts
• Introduction
• 1 The hobby-horse and the early modern morris dance
• 2 Living nostalgia and the cluster of allusions around 1600
• 3 Gender, prejudice, and popular dramatic medleys
• 4 The hobby-horse in university plays and on politicized 
public stages
• 5 Hobby-horses in cheap print and iconography (1610s-1635)
• Appendix
• Index