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ISSN 2279-7149 (online)
2013 Firenze University Press
e Prince and the Hobby-Horse:
Shakespeare
and the Ambivalence of Early Modern Popular Culture1
Natália Pikli
Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest (<natalia.pikli@t-online.hu>)
Abstract
e Shakespearean hobby-horse, mentioned emphatically in Hamlet, brings into focus
a number of problems related to early modern popular culture. In the late sixteenth
and early seventeenth centuries the word was characterised by semantic ambivalence,
with simultaneously valid meanings of a breed of horse, a morris character, a foolish
person, and a wanton woman. e overlapping of these meanings in dierent cultural
discourses of the age (playtexts, emblem books, popular verse, pictures) exemplies
the interaction of dierent productions of early modern popular culture, from social
humiliating practices to festivals and public playhouses. is attests to a complex
circulation of cultural memory regarding symbols of popular culture, paradoxically
both ‘forgotten’ and ‘remembered’ as a basically oral-ritual culture was transformed
into written forms. In this context, the Hamletian passage gains new overtones, while
the dierent versions of the playtext (Q1 & 2: 1603, 1604, F: 1623) also oer insights
into the changing attitudes regarding popular culture, as it became gradually com-
mercialised and politicised in the following decades. Finally, Shakespeare’s e Winter’s
Tale and Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair solidify a critical and sceptical attitude, which
seems to have signalled the end of ‘Merry Old England’ on-stage and o-stage as well.
Keywords: Ben Jonson, Cultural Memory, Popular Culture, Transition, William Shakespeare.
1. e Hobby-Horse Forgotten and Remembered: the Paradox of Remembrance
‘For O for O the hobby-horse is forgot’ (3.1.133, Jenkins ed.)2 – Hamlet’s
recollection of the forgotten hobby-horse before e Murder of Gonzago
brings into focus signicant problems of early modern popular culture, and
its inherent ambiguity in a state of transition. e hobby-horse – together
with old wives’ tales and fairies – was evocative and symbolic of a popular
culture,3 which was simultaneously remembered and forgotten, cherished and
recalled with nostalgia as ‘Merry Old England’ while being stigmatised by the
growing emotional and attitudinal distance on the part of the more educated
and the middling sorts (Lamb 2006). In addition, in the late sixteenth and
early seventeenth centuries forms of popular culture became commercialised
in the context of a nascent money industry as well as being appropriated by
royal image-making practices and politics (Hutton 1994). is ambivalence
Journal of Early Modern Studies, n. 2 (2013), pp. 119-140
http://www.fupress.com/bsfm-jems
is highlighted and dramatised in Shakespearean plays, which not only present
but problematise popular culture in opposition to other contemporary plays
and dierent cultural discourses of the age, which usually represent a less
equivocal view. e Shakespearean hobby-horse diers from the ones which
feature in anti-festivity Puritan writings (Stubbes 1583; Gosson 1579; 1582),
ballads, emblem books, poems, songs and other plays in this respect, therefore
examining its appearance and specic meaning in the given context may oer
us a subtle and many-layered view on problems associated with early modern
popular culture.
e hobby-horse stands at the intersection of dierent meanings and
discourses in Shakespeare’s age. e textual records regarding the hobby-horse
are the most frequent in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries,
which period is also characterised by the multiplication of meanings around
the hobby-horse, which could refer to a small Irish breed of horse, the wick-
erwork-and-costume dancing, prancing hobby-horse of the morris dance,
as well as to wanton women and fools (e Oxford English Dictionary 1989,
‘hobby-horse’). erefore, the question of what the hobby-horse, this symbol
of popular culture, meant precisely in dierent discourses and contexts of the
age oers a challenging eld of research, as a brief overview will attempt to
outline, followed by a closer focus rst on Hamlet, then on e Winter’s Tale
and Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair for comparison and in order to illustrate the
ongoing process of change regarding popular culture.
Shakespeare’s Hamlet, probably written in an uneasy period of Elizabeth
I’s late reign yields a complex outlook on dierent forms of use and abuse of
popular culture. e ambivalent attitude of the educated is clearly palpable
in Horatio’s sceptical words and Hamlet’s malevolent jibes at Polonius and
Claudius (to Polonius ‘He’s for a jig or a tale of bawdry or else he sleeps’,
2.2.496, Jenkins ed., of Claudius/fool ‘the king of shreds and patches’,
3.4.103, Jenkins ed.). However, the references to jigs, games, ballads, songs
and the hobby-horse create a signicant subtext, which proves meaningful
not only in relation to the play’s intrinsic problems but also to a wider con-
text. Prince Hamlet’s appropriation of popular culture is more profound and
multi-layered than suggested by Bristol, who emphasises Hamlet’s aptitude
to carnivalesque equivocation and laughter but places this mostly in scenes of
grotesque mortality: when Hamlet is speaking about the politician Polonius’s
corpse as food for ‘political worms’ (4.3.20) and when he is talking to the
gravediggers (5.1; see Bristol 1998, 246-250). I propose that the ‘downward
carnivalesque movement articulated by Hamlet, the players, and the grave-
diggers’ compromising Claudius’s political appropriation of Carnival, used ‘as
a means for reinforcing and making legitimate his otherwise dubious political
authority’ (Bristol 1998, 244) needs to be analysed in a broader framework.
Prince Hamlet’s relation and use of the hobby-horse and its peers sheds light
on complex issues both within and outside the play. is appropriation also
-
recalls one of the basic dilemmas of denition with regard to popular culture,
which is also subject for ardent debate in Shakespeare’s age: what constitutes
‘popular’ culture, is it ‘of the people’ or ‘for the people’ (Burke 2009, 7-15)?
e dominant mood of Hamlet is obviously characterised by a strong
feeling of nostalgia, which is also inherent in the idea of popular culture of the
age. Elizabethan plays are interspersed with frequent recollections of ‘Merry
Old England’, though the exact reference of this phrase remains obscure. As
early as 1552 Dr. John Caius wrote about ‘the old world when this country
was called merry England’ (quoted in Hutton 1994, 89), which became an
enduring and often repeated expression in Elizabethan works and after the
accession of James I, the reign of ‘Good Queen Bess’ seemed a lost golden age.
According to the shifting periodical limits of living memory, or oral history,
each bygone age appeared less complicated and easier to have lived in, the
phrase ‘it was never a merry world since’ gaining in popularity. Nevertheless,
nostalgic recollection was completed and gradually substituted by criticism
and scepticism regarding popular culture in the plays of the Jacobean period.
Shakespeare’s e Winter’s Tale (1611) oers a dierent commentary on the
subject, especially in the light of Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (1614), which
presents the world of cony-catchers and the grotesque carnival of the fair with
much less sympathy. Although Jonson was always more sceptical and con-
sciously keeping aloof from being identied with the masses (cf. the paratext
of his play, analysed later), the shift is conspicuous even in Shakespeare. e
delicately balanced ambiguity of belief and disbelief, sympathy and scorn
regarding hobby-horses, jigs and ghost-lore in Hamlet became replaced by a
more disillusioned and sceptical look on such form of popular culture in e
Winter’s Tale (see Laroque 2011). is shift will be analysed in depth in the
nal part of this article.
My contention is that Hamlet represents a specic period in transition
when what is being lost and forgotten is still fresh in the memory, i.e. the ghost
of popular culture haunts the play so strongly that hobby-horses, fools and such
phenomena are forgotten and remembered with the same power, while a dec-
ade later commercialised and written forms of popular culture overwrite and
seem gradually to eace the original ones. is process is strongly connected
to the transition from an oral and ritually based popular culture to written and
xed forms, which, according to Jan Assmann, corresponds to a specic phase
in cultural memory when ‘ritual coherence’ is replaced by ‘textual coherence’,
the former characteristic of societies without writing, where a cyclical concept
of time supports the collective memory represented in never-changing ritu-
als. Textual coherence appears with literacy, and coalesces with the gradually
canonised solidity of the stream of tradition, when ritual becomes text, which
might be dangerous as it leaves room for alternative interpretations. In ad-
dition, texts may also be forgotten by not being read, therefore writing both
preserves and endangers particular elements of cultural memory (Assmann
2006, 101-121). In A Midsummer Night’s Dream eseus’s words on ‘the poet’s
pen’, which ‘gives to airy nothing / a local habitation and a name’ (5.1.16-17)
may serve as an informative comment on this, highlighting the ambiguity
that, although writing serves the purposes of preservation, xing meaning
and ‘shaping’ things, there are potential concomitant side-eects: the danger
of distortion and misapprehension in reception and interpretation as well as
due to the power of consciously ‘distorting’ poetic imagination. Writing thus
may even paradoxically be a means of forgetting, as the ‘vessel’ which contains
the formerly quite amorphous content might also drop out of memory by
not being read and not being cyclically-communally repeated. us lieux de
mémoire,4 places for remembering become textual loci, though their inter-
pretation is individualised and they become subjects for potential criticism
as opposed to a former communal understanding. e problem of truth and
authenticity as associated with writing features strongly in e Winter’s Tale,
where the palpable lies in ballads are considered ‘true’ if written – at least to
a naive country shepherdess, Mopsa: ‘I love a ballad in print, a life, for then
we are sure they are true’ (4.4.261-262). We also nd a deep ambivalence in
the words of the oracle at Delphi as well which are both sounded and written
in a parchment. e problem of verity in e Winter’s Tale proves the conten-
tion that Shakespeare incorporated early modern popular culture in his plays
in a much more complex way than most of his contemporaries: not only in
corpo, i.e. as images and references evocative of a wider background5 but also
as corporeal manifestations of his poetic ideas.
2. e Hobby-Horse as a Palimpsest of Meanings: Morris Characters, Fools, Toys,
Horses and Whores
e most curious phenomenon related to the hobby-horse is that the OED
records most meanings (a special breed of horse, the morris hobby-horse, a
fool, a loose woman, a plaything; but not the usual present-day meaning of a
‘favourite theme or pastime’) by references from the second half of the sixteenth
century or later. is fact denitely attests to its popularity in Elizabethan and
early Jacobean times as well as to a curious overlapping of meanings in the age,
which creates a form of palimpsest. Although one meaning may be superimposed
on another as dened by the specic context, it can only partially eace other
possible meanings, the remnants and echoes of which keep inuencing semantic
reference. erefore the hobby-horse presents a complex phenomenon, varied
in meaning and interpretation as well. In an attempt to uncover the partially
hidden layers, the latency of meanings in the hobby-horse, the relation between
contemporaneous but diering uses of the same word will be addressed, pro-
viding potential explanations for a curious mingling of meanings in the word
‘hobby-horse’, to which several scholars have called attention without oering
wholly satisfying reasons for the phenomenon.6
-
e Oxford English Dictionary as well as the LION bibliography7 attests to
the fact that the time of the hobby-horse being so (in)famously ‘forgotten’ cor-
responds to the time of its most frequent appearance in texts of cony-catching
pamphlets, Puritan anti-festival attacks, songs and – most importantly – of
plays. According to the number of records in e Oxford English Dictionary,
the primary meaning in the age was the hobby-horse of medieval and early
modern festivities: ‘a gure of a horse, made of wickerwork, or other light
material, furnished with a deep housing, and fastened about the waist of one
of the performers, who executed various antics in imitation of the movements
of a skittish and spirited horse’ (OED 1989, ‘hobby-horse’). It featured in
morris dances,8 both in popular and elite surroundings, in rural or urban
festivals, aristocratic entertainments and on the stage. Pictorial representations
of it include the so-called Betley window (stained glass window of the early
sixteenth century in a house at Betley, Staordshire) and the image of morris
dancers with a hobby-horse along the ames, from c. 1620 (detail of the
Dutch artist Vinckenboom’s ames at Richmond, with the Old Royal Palace, at
the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge). Hutton briey summarises the elusive
history of the hobby-horse as follows: ‘[T]he rst surviving refence to it is in
a late 14th-century Welsh poem by Gryyd Gryg, who implied that it was a
new development’. Later ‘it features as part of parochial nance … by 1500
it was part of the entertainments of the royal court and familiar in Cornwall,
where the author of the play Beunans Meriasek seems to describe it as travelling
with a troupe. ereafter it is encountered in the midland’s churchwardens’
accounts … but none earlier than 1528’ (Hutton 1994, 61). Despite the
sketchy nature of records, the interaction of and easy travel between popular
and elite pastimes is not dicult to trace already in the early history of the
hobby-horse. e history of the morris, of which the hobby-horse appears an
almost inalienable part, demonstrates not only this oscillation between royal
court and village church ale but also attests to it becoming a commodity, the
most striking example being William Kemp’s Nine Daies Wonder (1600), the
written account of his solo morris production, which both in performance
and afterwards in print was aimed at individual prot.
e earliest morris reference in Shakespeare is made to Jack Cade in
Henry VI, Part 2, act 3, scene 1: ‘I have seen / Him caper upright like a wild
Morisco / Shaking the bloody darts as he his bells’ (3.1.363-365) or in the
mostly Fletcherian late collaborative play of e Two Noble Kinsmen, where
a whole group of morris-dancers gives a performance.9 As opposed to the
examples given in the following pages, these earliest and latest Shakespearean
references work more as direct evocative poetic devices than complex textual
loci. ey had actual reference e.g. to the actor playing Jack Cade, Will Kemp,
who already by then was regarded as a famous morris dancer and clown.
e popularity of the hobby-horse of the morris in Shakespeare’s age
might also be aligned with the concept of monstrosity and the grotesque, so
catching and attractive to the Elizabethan age. e late sixteenth century was
characterised by simultaneous anxiety and curiosity regarding the ‘monstrous
man-beast’, which corresponded to the then dominant form of the tourney-style
hobby-horse, where man and beast are both visible as opposed to the earlier full
costumes (tourney with a headmask). In this light, even Claudius’s reference to
the French horseman oers a disturbing and not easily decipherable comment:
And they can well on horseback, but this gallant
Had witchcraft in’t. He grew unto his seat,
And to such wondrous doing brought his horse
As he been incorps’d and demi-natur’d
With the brave beast. (4.7.83-86, Jenkins ed.)
Although Jenkins and other editors gloss this passage briey as either a personal
allusion to the cavalier mentioned in Castiglione or as a reminder of Claudius’s
comparison to a satyr and ‘of kindred animal images’ (Hamlet, Jenkins ed.,
gloss. 369, 543-544), the half-man-half-horse image of the Norman strongly
recalls Hamlet’s hobby-horse, the ‘incorps’d’ half-man, half-beast monster.
Although Jenkins also refers to centaurs here, the phrase ‘grew into his seat’
rather evokes the shape of the hobby-horse (cf. the Betley window) in the
audience’s imagination than the centaur, which presents not a man riding a
horse, but the man’s upper body substituting for the head and neck of the
horse. In addition, the centaur belonged to Humanist erudition, while the
ever-present morris hobby was well known to the masses. e reference to
witchcraft (rather than magic) also rearms the strong link to popular culture.
e early modern hobby-horse was also a play-horse (as it is even today):
‘a (childs) hobbie-horse, bastob, ou cheval du bois d’un enfant’ (Sherwood
1632, French-English Dictionary, as quoted in OED 1989), appearing in a
number of pictorial representations of the age both in England and on the
Continent.10 When surfacing in texts, however, it often became a complex
object of both nostalgia and dismissal as a children’s pastime not t for grown-
up men. George Puttenham’s reference to this toy – though alluding to both
attitudes – emphasises the nostalgic aspect, scolding King Agesilaus though
in very cautious wording with a tone of lenient moralising:
No more would it be seemely for an aged man to play the wanton like a child, for it stands
not with the conueniency of nature, yet when king Agesilaus hauing a great sort of
little children, was one day disposed to solace himself among them in a gallery where
they plaied, and tooke a little hobby horse of wood and bestrid it to keepe them in play,
one of his friends seemed to mislike his lightnes, ô good friend quoth Agesilaus, rebuke
me not for this fault till thou haue children of thine owne, shewing in deede that it
came not of vanitie but of a fatherly aection, ioying in the sport and company of his
little children, in which respect and as that place and time serued, it was dispenceable in
him & not indecent. (Puttenham 2011, 234; emphasis mine)
-
e hobby-horse in this meaning appears as an object of nostalgia, thus adding
another interpretation to the Hamletian complaint of the forgotten hobby-horse
even for an early modern audience – the yearning for a lost Golden Age, that
of easy play, innocence and childhood. e easy association between popular
village festivities, children, foolishness and the toy hobby-horse also appears
in the engraver Francis Delaram’s one-page print entitled Will Sommers King
Heneryes jester. It features Will Sommers with a jester’s cap tucked in his belt
while in the background a boy is riding a hobby-horse surrounded by other
forms of childish and popular entertainment. e verses printed below rearm
the association between visual appearance and essence: ‘What though thou
thinkst mee clad in strange attire, / Knowe I am suted to my owne deseire …
All with my Nature well agreeing too’.11
e toy hobby-horse features as a worthless trie in Jonson’s Bartholomew
Fair, and in Peacham’s emblem book, Minerva Britanna (1612) in Vanae merces.
Ad Nauplaum, where the woodcut presents an ape holding a hobby-horse, a
windmill, a fox’s tail, beads and a rattle. e verse castigates foolish knights
who return from their adventurous sea expeditions parading like Jason though
only bringing back tries instead of the golden eece: ‘Hee is thence return’d
a worthy Knight awaie, / And brought vs back beades, Hobbie-horses, boxes
/ Fannes, Windmills, Ratles, Apes, and tailes of Foxes’ (Peacham 1612, 168).
Foolishness provides the origin for the third meaning in Shakespeare’s
age. In Much Ado About Nothing the hobby-horse becomes a synonym for a
dim-witted, stupid man or fool, with Benedick referring contemptously to
Don Pedro and Claudio when exiting with Leonato: ‘I have studied eight or
nine wise words to speak to you, which these hobby-horses must not hear’
(3.2.64-66). e morris called for easy association as the Fool was another
traditional gure of the morris dance, and both the hobby-horse and the Fool
were responsible for a close interaction with the audience, collecting donations
and frolicking with members of the audience: the Fool beating them with
his bauble or pig’s bladder, the hobby-horse pulling girls under its costume.
In the Betley window the hobby-horse appears with a ladle in its mouth for
collecting donations, the ladle referring to the direct addressing of the audi-
ence as the hobby-horse cajoled the onlookers to pay. Foolishness and levity
are easily attached to the behaviour of both the hobby-horse and the Fool
during the morris dance; therefore the conation of the two meanings must
have seemed uncomplicated and easily available for an early modern audience,
well-versed in the traditions of the morris.12 As the phrase ‘the hobby-horse is
forgot’ gained in popularity around the turn of the century, the interchange-
ability of fools and hobby-horses seems to have turned into substitution, as
Ben Jonson also attests:
But see the Hobby-Horse is forgot.
Foole, it must be your lot,
To supply his want with faces
And some other Buon graces.
You know how …
(Ben Jonson, Entertainment at Althrope, 1603, ll. 286-290)13
e association between wanton women and the hobby-horse, however,
proves more complicated, although it is well-known from the following
Shakespearean quotations:
: But O – But O –
: ‘e hobby-horse is forgot’
: Call’st thou my love a ‘hobby-horse’?
: No, master. e hobby-horse is but a colt, and your love perhaps a hackney.
(Love’s Labour’s Lost, 3.1.26-30)
[speaking to Cassio about the handkerchief]: is is some minx’s token,
and I must take out the work; there, give it the hobby-horse, wheresoever you had
it, I’ll take out no work on’t.
(Othello, 4.1.151-153)
: My wife’s a hobby-horse; deserves a name
As rank as any ax-wench that puts to
Before her troth-plight.
(e Winter’s Tale, 1.2.276-278)
e hobby-horse in the previous quotations is explained in the glossaries as
a ‘wanton, loose woman, even a prostitute’, which meaning is further sup-
ported by the words ‘minx’ or ‘hackney’ or ‘ax-wench’, all alluding to a
pejorative, degraded image of women, closely associated with sexuality. (e
‘O’ of Armado’s love pains being another bawdy reference to the female geni-
tal organ). How and when did the image of hobby-horses played by a man
and the image of wanton women intermingle? Folklore and anthropological
studies explain this by pointing to the fertility aspect implied by the hobby-
horse (Brissenden 1979, 6), who frightened and captured girls, sometimes
taking them away ‘under its skirt’, i.e. the costume, which might account
for a transposition of bawdy sexuality from one to the other. is is nicely
expressed in the following short verse from Cobbes prophecies, his Signes and
Tokens (Anonymous 1614, D3r), which shows hobby-horses and women in
parallel grammatical structures and a rhyming pattern, emphasising an equal
share of joy for both parties:
But when the Hobby-horse did wihy,
oh pretty wihy,
en all the Wenches gaue a tihy,
oh pretty tihy.
-
‘Wihy/Wehee’ indicates the horse’s sound from Middle English times onwards,
‘tihy/teehee’ already appeared in relation to female sexual joy in Chaucer’s e
Canterbury Tales, where Alisoun, the young wanton wife in ‘e Miller’s Tale’ did
‘tehee’ (line 3740), i.e. tittered and giggled after Absolon kissed Nicholas’s backside.
OED records this word meaning ‘a representation of the sound of a light laugh,
usually derisive … usually in female use’, citing examples ranging from Middle
English to early modern times (OED, ‘wehee’ and ‘tehee’). e onomatopoeic
nature of both rhyming words (wihy, tihy) even more emphatically refers to the
strong orality or the ‘acoustic factor’ and the atmosphere of joyful and bawdy
entertainment shared by women and men in the costume of the hobby-horse.
However, the shift in gender still poses a problem. e Maid Marion
or the Lady of the morris was usually played by men, and although we have
ample evidence of cross-dressing in festivals and on the stage, they mostly entail
men dressed up as women, while in these Shakespearean passages there seems
to be no uncertainty of gender – they directly refer to women. (Although we
must bear in mind the fact that, as all female parts were played by boys or
men, a double-edged irony may also be at work in these references). Despite
the problematics of gender on stage, this overlapping of meanings must be
explained as we nd the association of wanton women and hobby-horses in
other texts of the age. Light women and hobby-horses featured in playtexts
and even in later emblem books, as in George Wither’s recounting of warnings
against marriage: ‘Some, fancy Pleasures; and such Flirts as they, / With ev’ry
Hobby-horse will run away’ (Wither 1635, Book 2, XXI). Breton’s Pasquils
Mistresse, 1600 is even more interesting in this respect as it records the use
close to the concepts appearing in Hamlet. Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark
exhibits a scornful attitude to women he considers unvirtuous, Ophelia and
Gertrude. Breton’s ‘unworthy mistress’ is also compared to dierent animals
(cow, sow, parrot, fox), as ‘she can simper like a mare / and like a hobby-
horse can holde her heade’ (Breton 1600, D1r) while playing the wanton on
a wooden bench. Consequently, wanton women and hobby-horses are easily
brought into meaningful connection by Shakespeare’s age.
As another explanation for equating wanton women and horses, I suggest
that dierent semantic elds and circulating cultural narratives intermingled
in the last decades of the sixteenth century as popular shrew-narratives were
superimposed on the tradition of the vanishing (and commercialized, cf.
Kemp’s) morris. e early modern shrew narratives implied the association
of taming women and horses, which was even further strengthened by the
original meaning of a ‘hobby’, i.e. a kind of Irish horse. Florio’s Italian-English
dictionary (1598) explains Vbino as ‘a hobbie horse such as Ireland breedeth’, in
1609, Dekker’s Gvll’s Horne-book also refers to real horses: ‘At the doors, with
their masters hobby-horses, to ride to the new play’ (OED, ‘hobby-horse’).14
e concept of ‘mounting or leaping’ women sexually also helps connect the
two concepts, for which a great number of examples can be detected in the
age. ‘To take his leap’ was the technical term for the copulation of mare and
stallion. According to Lamb, ‘to take a hobby-horse turne or two’ also referred
to the illicit sexual activity inherent in the gure of the hobby-horse.15
Besides the comparisons in dramatic texts between the gait of the horse
and the wife – both considered goods of the husband (Hartwig 1982)16 – the
conduct books of the age, advising good household management frequently
referred to the similarities of taming horses and wives (Heaney 1998; Sloan
2004), which was made even more direct by the ‘homeopathic’ practices
of early modern ballads. (E.g. Here Begynneth a Merry Jest of a Shrewd and
Curste Wyfe, Lapped in Morelles Skin, for Her Good Behavyor, as reprinted in
Dolan 1996, 257-288). Social humiliating practices, like the Skimmington
ride, carting, or the scold’s bridle also associated the loose tongues and loose
behaviour of women with horses. e Skimmington ride, though intended
to punish mismatched couples, henpecked husbands and shrewish wives,
featured a neighbour as a substitute victim, who had to ride through the vil-
lage, often facing the tail of the horse amongst peals of laughter and derision
(Ingram 1984). e association between a mismatched horse and rider and
wife and husband was easy to make for the early modern onlookers, due to
the still prevalent analogous thinking of the supposed superiority of husband
over wife, human over beast, will/reason over passion.17
Some forms of punishment for shrews and scolds also entailed humilia-
tion and association with horses. e two categories (the shrew representing
‘home misrule’, the scold being a legal category) often overlapped, as women’s
major weapon has always been their tongue, and any female subject opposing
the traditional hierarchy was often demonised as a shrew, a scold or a witch
(Boose 1991; Dolan 1996). One form of punishment was carting, where
the female oender was put on an open cart and wheeled through the town.
Although not on a horse, the horse-drawn cart and the woman on it were
in metonymical relation, being objects of derision and shame, as it is clearly
recognised by Shakespeare’s Katharina Minola, who dees being made a stale,
i.e a laughing stock for men’s derision – after references to courting/carting
her are made (1.1.52-58).
e scold’s bridle served as an even more obvious connection between
unruly horses and women – although the rst extant references to it come
from after Shakespeare’s career, it might have been known earlier. e metal
cage surrounding the woman’s head was equipped with a metal (often spiky)
gag put into the mouth, eectively silencing and hurting the unruly member
of the female body. e scold was then led through the town/village, often
on a leash, thus emphasizing not only her inferiority but also her bestiality
and similarity to horses. e rst pictorial reference comes from 1655 from
Ralph Gardiner’s England’s Grievence Discovered (London, 1655), where we
see a scold with the metal cage on her head and the tongue suppressor in her
mouth, being led on a leash by a man (reprinted in Dolan 1996, 291). Even
-
today, boisterous horses are said to have a ‘rigid or hard’ mouth, which needs
to be tamed, and managing the horse relies heavily on the controlling power
of the horse’s bridle, on the power over its mouth. Although some scholars
doubt that such an instrument of humiliation and torture was in use in
Shakespeare’s time, the numerous references to bridling the unruly tongue
in texts and images of the age proves that this association was ready-made for
Shakespeare’s contemporaries. e verb ‘bridle’ also appeared in prestigious
normative discourse, as e.g. in the Homily of the State of Matrimony, appearing
in e Second Tome of Homilies, of Such Matters as Were Promised and Entitled
in the Former Part of Homilies (rst published in 1563, as reprinted in Dolan
1996, 170); marriage was supposedly ‘brydlyng the corrupt inclinations of the
eshe’. In conclusion, the overlapping of unruly women and horses might ac-
count for the semantic interchangeability of wanton women and hobby-horses.
3. Hamlet: Haunted by the Ghost of Popular Culture
In such a varied semantic context Hamlet’s hobby-horse deserves revisit-
ing. Although a number of brilliant studies touched upon the problem of
the hobby-horse, they mostly focused on other aspects.18 e lines in act 3,
scene 2 surrounding e Murder of Gonzago are pregnant with meanings and
gestures related to popular culture, and oer us a new and enriched reading
not only of this passage, but also of the play itself. ese passages prepare the
onstage and ostage audience for the play-within-the-play while commenting
on it continuously, and nally they serve as an epilogue to both e Murder
of Gonzago and the dramatic action of Hamlet in this scene.
e King’s neutral question (‘How fares our cousin Hamlet?’) launches
the rst puns on Hamlet’s part with air/heir (‘I eat the air, promise-crammed’)
and Polonius’s role as Caesar as a capital/Capitol calf – with a potential extra-
dramatic reference to the Julius Caesar performance of the newly opened
Globe in 1599. en Hamlet turns to Ophelia, and to the bawdy: ‘Shall I
lie in your lap?’, ‘at’s a fair thought to lie between maids legs’. is bawdi-
ness is strengthened by the sexual innuendo inherent in Hamlet’s answer of
‘nothing’, which was also a slang expression for the female privy parts and
the pun on ‘country/cuntry manners’.19 Consequently, Hamlet, the Prince of
Denmark, acts as a Lord of Misrule, arranging for a light and lewd entertain-
ment during festival time, like e.g. the twelve days of Christmas. According
to Hutton, Lords of Misrule reigned under dierent names in dierent sur-
roundings throughout the sixteenth century, employed by mayors, sheris,
universities, inns of court and even by the royal household. e most famous
one was George Ferrers at the end of Edward VII’s reign, who organised
indoor entertainments and outdoor spectacles like e.g. a hobby-horse joust,
had his own coat-of-arms and retinue, and ‘combined the traditional fun of
inversion and parody with a dash of Renaissance metaphysics’ (Hutton 1994,
90-91). Although in Elizabeth’s reign the name was used more loosely to de-
note dierent carnivalesque leaders (Stubbes called a summer lord a Lord of
Misrule), the original association of Lords of Misrule and organised indoor
(Christmas) festive spectacle seems to have been retained, at least partially.
In this light, Hamlet may be considered a Lord of Misrule, who acts out a
spectacle himself – combining and performing the roles of the fool and the
harassing hobby-horse as well. us Hamlet is the fool, the ‘only jig-maker’,
twisting and playing on words while performing the role of the hobby-horse,
who plays with a girl. His words carry a strong sexual meaning even before
the (in)famous hobby-horse makes an appearence in the lines following:
: So long? Nay then, let the devil wear black, for I’ll have a suit of sables! O
heavens - die two months ago and not forgotten yet! en there’s hope a great man’s
memory may outlive his life half a year. But, by’r lady ’a must build churches then,
or else shall ’a suer not thinking on, with the hobby-horse, whose epitaph is ‘For
O! for O! the hobby-horse is forgot’. (3.2.127-133, Jenkins ed.)
Hamlet’s role as the Lord of Misrule is rearmed by the way he comments
continuously on what is going on on stage and o stage, nally presenting a
song in easy and catchy meter, in style quite similar to Lear’s Fool’s chants:
What, frighetd with false res?
en let he stricken deer go weep,
e hart ungalled play,
For some must laugh while some must weep –
us runs the world away! (Q1 9.174-178)
e end of the scene in Q2 also strengthens Hamlet’s positioning as the Lord
of Misrule – at the end of the scene (before Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
enter), he rounds o the on-satge and o-stage preformance with calling for
music several times.
: Ah ha! Come, some music! Come, the recorders!
For if the King like not the comedy
Why then belike he likes it not, perdie.
Come, some music! (Q2 3.2.283-287)
is passage cannot be found in Q1, and in the Folio the two messengers enter
before this call for music, which gives a dierent interpretation to the scene,
rather attaching it to the later ‘recorder’ metaphor; however, Hamlet’s role as
an organiser of entertainments seems indisputable. e relation of the three
texts is still subject of scholarly debate. Nevertheless, what proves instructive
from our point of view is to what extent and how they feature carnivalesque
references to popular culture. In act 3 scene 2 even the shortest Q1 version
features the ‘capitol calf’, the ‘jig-maker’ and the hobby-horse forgotten,
-
though the memory is not of a ‘great man’ but a ‘gentleman’.20 Curiously,
in Q1 possible references to bawdy carnival are rearmed (while the sexual
‘groaning’ is cut from the Folio), where even Ophelia appears joyfully taking
part in irtation, while Hamlet’s lines are much more abrupt and rude:
: Your jests are keen, my lord.
: It would cost you a groaning to take them o.
: Still better – and worse!
: So you must take your husband. (to Players) Begin! Murderer, begin! A
pox! Leave thy damnable faces and begin! Come! ‘e croaking raven doth bellow for
revenge!’ (Q1 9.160-164)
In addition there are some textual versions that pose a dilemma – the ‘poopies’
in Hamlet’s oer to Ophelia in ‘I could interpret the love you bear if I saw the
poopies dallying’ (ll. 144-145) might refer to the ‘puppets’ of the other texts (a
clear reference to popular culture) as a simple printing error but it also might
mean the female genitals, according to ompson and Taylor glossing this
phrase. is latter interpretation strengthens the bawdy in the interaction of
Hamlet and Ophelia, which is even more underlined by the fact that previ-
ously Q1 featured the (in)famous and equivocal (nunnery/brothel) ‘Go to a
nunnery’ eight times (7.162-194) as opposed to Q2 and F, where it appears
only ve times. In conclusion, the earliest Q1 version shows the most traces of
being a cut version for the public theatre as opposed to its title page that refers
to prestigious surroundings of earlier performances of Cambridge and Oxford
(Patterson 1989, 16), and we might say that this view is supported by its ruder
language. Interestingly, even the ‘good’ Q2 a year or two later exhibits more
vulgarities than the more prestigious Folio, as e.g. in Hamlet’s earlier monologue
in act 2, scene 2, the well-known Folio rst-line being ‘O, what a rogue and
peasant slave am I!’ (2.2.544). Although it is a passionately coarse soliloquoy
in all versions, featuring asses, John-a-dreams, scullions (kitchen servants) and
drabs (whores), the change in the Q2 very rst line is still shocking as Hamlet
cries out: ‘Why, what a dunghill idiot slave am I’ (Q2 7.404).
Although the references to contemporary theatre can be found in all ver-
sions, Q1 puts more emphasis on ‘playing the clown’. In the scene where Hamlet
instructs the Players, Q1 features several sentences that are unique to this early
text only. Interestingly, Hamlet seems to mock the same extemporizing he is
engaged in at the moment. Indeed, his lines are full of catchphrases and jokes
which were presumably current then; in a word, he is acting the clown while
mocking him, which rearms the carnivalesque in his complex character:
: And – do you hear? – let not your Clown speak more than is set down.
ere be of them, I can tell you, that will laugh themselves to set on some quantity of
barren spectators to laugh with them – albeit there is some necessary point in the play
then to be observed. O, ’tis vile and shows a pitiful ambition in the fool that useth it.
And then you have some again that keeps one suit of jests – as a man is known by one suit
of apparel – and gentlemen quotes his jests down in their tables before they come to the
play, as thus: ‘Cannot you stay till I eat my porridge?’ and ‘You owe me a quarter’s wages’
and ‘My coat wants a cullison!’ and ‘Your beer is sour!’ and, blabbering with his lips and
thus keeping in his cinquepace of jests when, God knows, the warm Clown cannot make
a jest unless by chance – as the blind man catcheth a hare – masters, tell him of it’. (Q1
9.23-38; sentences in italics only in Q1, not in Q2 or F)
ese subtle dierences underlie the shift in attitudes to popular culture
that characterised the rst decades of the seventeenth century, which will be
examined in the following section. e years 1600-1604 (Hamlet’s concep-
tion and the rst quartos) display a transitory period in the sense that both
the old and the new seem equally powerful – the old world being associated
with the ‘merry England’ of hobby-horses, fools, and Old Hamlet, with the
feeling of times unavoidably changing. Under such circumstances memory
and forgetting ght an equal battle, which is epitomised in Hamlet’s forget-
ting and recalling the hobby-horse in a play where the Clown/Fool features
only in his spectacular absence, partly as performed and recalled by the Prince
or as a skull.
4. e Winter’s Tale and Bartholomew Fair: from Criticism to Scepticism
e transformation of popular culture due to its commercialisation and later
politicisation are palpable in the plays of the 1610s. One example for this is the
attitude of the educated middling sorts and the aristocracy towards elements of
popular culture.21 After eseus’s clear refusal of ‘antique fables’ in the 1590s,
Horatio’s cautious attitude to popular folklore in Hamlet is palpable in his
answer to superstition about ghosts: ‘So have I heard and do in part believe it’
(1.1.170, Jenkins ed.). He believes and he does not; as a Wittenberg-educated
Humanist scholar, he should not, but recalling his Danish identity and faced
with the ghost, he must. A shift is detectable even in this respect: eseus’s
clear refusal attests to a rather solid framework of thinking about popular
and elite culture in Elizabeth’s reign, while Hamlet is a work of transition: the
old world is crumbling apart, Elizabeth is aging without an heir, the famous
clown Will Kemp has gone on a solo commercial venture with his nine-day
morris, and popular culture has been commodied with success (cf. the Globe
eatre). However, the memory of a lively and ritually stable popular culture
is still strong. A decade later, e Winter’s Tale already voices criticism and
scepticism regarding the verity and authenticity of popular culture, when e.g.
Antigonus’s dream of ghosts is presented as more of a parodic piece with its
exaggarations than an authentic and persuasive account of ghost-lore, and his
refusal to accept folk superstitions is soon overwritten by credulous belief in
shrieking ghosts. Antigonus’s character is further discredited by his sudden
and strange death as ‘exit pursued by a bear’.
-
:
I have heard, but not believ’d, the spirits o’ th’ dead
May walk again: if such thing be, thy mother
Appear’d to me last night; for ne’er was dream
So like a waking. To me comes a creature,
Sometimes her head on one side, some another;
I never saw a vessel of like sorrow,
So ll’d and so becoming: in pure white robes,
Like very sanctity, she did approach
My cabin where I lay; thrice bow’d before me,
And gasping to begin some speech, her eyes
Became two spouts; the fury spent, anon
Did this break-from her: …
And so, with shrieks
She melted into air. Arighted much,
I did in time collect myself and thought
is was so and no slumber. Dreams are toys:
Yet for this once, yea, superstitiously,
I will be squared by this.
(e Winter’s Tale, 3.3.16-27, 36-41)
In this late play even Shakespeare criticises the authenticity of popular culture
(or presents, as Laroque calls it, ‘the hybridity of popular culture’, Laroque
2011). Not only Autolycus, the balladmonger, pedlar and conman/cony-
catcher is a less sympathetic and lively character than Bottom and Falsta, but
the verity of anything belonging to popular culture is touched with dramatic
irony. e naive country shepherdess, Mopsa, ensures us that textualised
versions are true (‘I love a ballad in print, a life, for then we are sure they are
true’ 4.4.261-262), while the topic of ballads is outrageously nonsensical:
: Here’s one, to a very doleful tune, how a usurer’s wife was brought to
bed of twenty money-bags at a burden, and how she longed to eat adders’ heads
and toads carbonadoed.
(e Winter’s Tale, 4.4.263-266)
Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, which – according to a 1631 title page and
the Induction – was performed in the Hope eatre in 1614, exhibits open
criticism and sarcasm regarding popular culture. Most of the Induction consists
of the monologue of the Scrivener, an educated man, who is condescending
and disillusioned. He condemns nostalgia for the ‘sword-and-buckler age of
Smitheld’ and the bad taste and judgement of the audience, who still swear
that the best plays are the 25-year-old Jeronimo or Andronicus (i.e. omas
Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy and Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus). He openly criticises
playwrights ‘like those that beget Tales, Tempests, and such like drolleries’
(Ind. 124-125), and expresses his scorn for playwrights and plays that cater
for the lowly taste of the masses. Even the hobby-horse is mentioned not in its
usual context but as a reference to the sexual liberty of the fair: ‘Nor has he the
canvas cut i’ the night for a hobby-horse man to creep in to his she-neighbour
and take his leap there!’ (Ind. 19-21). Here, the hobby-horse man is the seller
of toy hobbies, who has sex (‘takes a leap’) in the booths during the Fair.
e underlying dramatic irony that discredits popular culture in e Win-
ter’s Tale thus becomes more obvious in Ben Jonson, paradoxically especially
in Bartholomew Fair, which is supposedly his most carnivalesque play, the
dramatisation of the marketplace itself. However, the grotesquely fat body of
Ursla, the pig-woman, who sells all kinds of esh from pork to young wanton
girls is more disgusting than alluring in its vitality. Falsta was said to ‘lard
the earth’ as he was walking, but Ursla’s sweating and later injured body is a
far cry from the fat knight’s carnivalesque vitality. She is sweating and whin-
ing so profusely that a spectator cannot but help but laugh at her – instead
of with her, which would stand closer to the universal and inclusive nature
of carnival laughter (Bakhtin 1984, 11-12). Although she is the ‘fatness of
the Fair’ (2.2.112) and is associated with carnival on several occasions, her
being a scold (cf. reference to ‘cucking-stool’, 2.5.106), a prostitute and a
bawd rather reinforces the commercial aspect of the utopian ‘Lubberland’
(3.1.71), which undermines the opportunity for presenting an exuberant
festive popular culture.
Ursla, the commercial woman, cannot raise festive laughter since Jonson’s
Fair is a commercial venture, where the foolish ones are duped, stripped and
robbed.22 Jonson’s scepticism and scorn about anything belonging to popular
culture is evident from his use of popular culture. As a shrewd playwright, he
employed elements and symbols of popular culture, but his authorial inten-
tion was evident from the start: his satirical attitude aimed at uncovering the
ills and follies, his comedies always served some form of social corrective. In
Bartholomew Fair hobby-horses appear as toys, cheap and useless commodities
in the Fair, belonging to ‘such like rage’ as babies (dolls) and puppet-plays
(Prologue, ll. 4-6). Even the 1631 Quarto Title Page attests to a judgment
passed on popular culture, with a quotation from Horace’s Epistles, referring
to the laughing philosopher Democritus, implying that he would laugh at
this audience as well, on the grounds that they are ‘deaf donkeys’.
e ‘discovery’ of the ills of popular culture is supported by the presenta-
tion of the character of Cokes, whose name refers to him being a ninny and an
ass (Hibbard’s gloss, 34). He comes from the country and stupidly buys up the
whole store of toy hobbies and dolls. He has a child’s fancy for toys, while his
carelessness about his things and the simple joy of stealing a pear, as well as his
utter enjoyment of the puppet-show underlie the equation of fools, children and
hobby-horses. He is described by other characters as ‘a child i’faith’ (5.4.194),
or ‘a resolute fool … and a very sucient coxcomb’ (3.4.36-37). His nostalgic
recollection of his childhood memories of listening to ballads at the reside and
-
looking at them pasted up in the nursery (3.5.43-45) emphasises his naivety
that can only be compared to Mopsa’s in e Winter’s Tale.
Bartholomew Fair represents the corruption of popular culture on several
levels. Jonson aptly illustrates the commercialised ‘underworld’ of the fair in
Nightingale the ballad-singer and the cutpurse Edgeworth’s criminal duo, who
strip Cokes bare of all he possesses, following in the vein of cony-catching
pamphlets and literature (on cony-catching see Pugliatti 2003). ey also recall
their counterpart in e Winter’s Tale, Autolycus. e ballad titles and themes
are as nonsensical as the ones in e Winter’s Tale, with an even stronger touch
of parody, like e.g. ‘e Windmill blown down by the witch’s fart’ (2.4.16).
Although anti-festivity Puritans like Stubbes are also mocked in the gure of
Zeal-of-the-land Busy, this character discredits not only hypocritical Puritans
but also hobby-horses and other elements belonging to popular culture. Curi-
ously, while Jonson mocks the Elizabethan Puritan Stubbes, he also discredits
the vigour of country festivals, which can be felt even in Stubbes. However,
in Bartholomew Fair such carnivalesque symbols become associated not with
devilry but with childhood nonsense in Busy’s answer to Leatherhead, a seller
of toy hobbies. e two passages are worth quoting in full:
us al things set in order, then haue they their Hobby-horses, dragons & other
Antiques, togither with their baudie Pipers and thundering; Drummers to strike vp
the deuils daunce withal … marche these heathen company towards the Church-yard,
their pipers pipeing, their drummers thundring, … dancing, … their handkerchiefs
swinging about their heds like madmen, their hobbie horses and other monsters.
en, after this, about the Church they goe into the church-yard, where they haue
commonly their … banqueting houses set vp, wherin they feast, banquet & daunce
al that day & (peraduenture) all the night too. And thus these … furies spend the
Sabaoth day. (Stubbes, 1583, M2r-v)
: What do you lack, gentlemen? What is’t you buy? Rattles, drums, babies –
: Peace, with thy apocryphal wares, thou profane publican – thy bells, thy dragons,
and thy Toby’s dogs. y hobby-horse is an idol, a very idol, a erce and rank idol;
and thou the Nebuchadnezzar, the proud Nebuchadnezzar of the Fair, that sett’st it
up, for children to fall down to and worship. (3.6.49-56)
e puppet-show at the end – meant to crown the commercial festival of the fair
– also plays on the ambivalence of puppets, which are simultaneously presented
as living characters and clothes on a stick. e Puppet of the Ghost of Dionysos
is seen as a toy hobby-horse (5.5.56), and all majesty of either ghosts or ancient
gods is ridiculed in the show and in the comments by the spectators. e nal
komos, when everyone is invited to ‘drown the memory of all enormity in your
biggest bowl at home’, forcing even Justice Overdo to remember that he is ‘but
Adam, esh and blood’ (5.5.90-97), though it recalls the generous open door
and table of the wealthy at Christmas in Tudor England, is actually a form of
punishment for Overdo’s pretensions. Finally, the Epilogue addressed to the King
tilts the play even more denitely towards elite entertainment, where hobby-
horses and ‘such like rage’ are only recalled as childhood folly. e nal stage
in the process of the hobby-horse’s degradation is its politicisation by Milton in
1645: ‘e word Politician is not us’d to his maw, and therupon he plaies the
most notorious hobbihors, jesting and frisking in the luxury of his nonsense’
(as quoted in OED, ‘hobby-horse’). By the end of the golden age of Renais-
sance theatre the high-spirited and merry hobby-horse of the morris became
an object of disgrace and stupidity, rst as associated with wanton women then
with childhood nonsense to be discarded and scorned. e ambiguities inher-
ent in the polysemous hobby-horse of earlier decades seem to have given way
to a less equivocal and more elitist approach to popular culture by the 1640s.
1 An earlier version of the rst part of this article has appeared as Pikli 2012. e issues
developed in the 2012 text were those I presented for discussion at the Ninth World Shakespeare
Congress (Prague, 17-22 July 2011). e present article is a dierently oriented and further
elaborated reection on the theme of the hobby-horse.
2 As later on the several textual versions of Hamlet will be contrasted, from this point on I
refer to the dierent editions in the following way: ‘Jenkins ed.’ refers to the conated version
of Arden 2 when the textual dierences are of little siginicance, while Q1, Q2, F refer to the
critical editions of these texts by ompson and Taylor in Arden 3.
3 I agree with Mary Ellen Lamb’s proposition that together with fairies and old wives’
tales, the hobby-horse should be considered as a symbol of popular culture, with diering
interpretations in diering ‘productions’ (Lamb 2006, 1-25 et passim).
4 ‘Such aides-mémoires are also the lieux de mémoire, memory sites in which the memory
of the entire national or religious communities is concentrated, monuments, rituals, feast days
and customs’ (Assmann 2006, 8-9).
5 Relying on the audience’s intimate knowledge of the things mentioned, the references
to popular culture such as mentioning a ‘maypole’, ‘May Day’, usually worked as ‘popular
emblems that conjure[d] up an entire scene in which the carefully coded symbols were familiar
to everyone’ (Laroque 1993, 46). Laroque’s phrase of a ‘popular emblem’ is particularly apt
– partly due to the popularity of emblem books in the age, but more importantly alluding to
the method of ut pictura poesis, the interdependence of word and image in an emblem. is
way even a direct verbal reference to a hobby-horse, like the one in Love’s Labour’s Lost, could
evoke a whole range of meanings and images, especially if this potential was exploited by the
poet – and Shakespeare was never one to miss such a chance.
6 Cf. ‘e sexual connotations of the hobby-horse were both feminine and masculine. In
the femimine sense, the hobby-horse is equated with a whore, or at least a promiscuous person’
(Brissenden 1979, 5). ‘As for the word “Hobby-horse”, it acquired a succession of meanings,
beginning as “gee-gee”, “pet hobby” or childish fancy, and ending up as “woman of easy virtue
or dissolute morals” ’ (Laroque 1993, 46).
7 In the period 1477 to 1640 the Literature Online database lists 9 entries and 10 hits
in poetry, 35 entries and 75 hits in drama, 4 entries and 4 hits in prose for the ‘hobby-horse’.
8 Due to space constraints, the mysterious history of the medieval hobby-horse cannot be
treated here. I will simply recall that E.K. Chambers mentions and describes the hobby-horse
in his wide-ranging account of the medieval stage (Chambers 1903, 142, 196-197). However,
one interesting fact needs to be mentioned here: Cawte translates the fourteenth-century Welsh
-
poem, which expresses a nostalgic (!) attitude to the ‘once magnicent’ hobby-horse (Cawte
1978, 11). Jane Garry’s article tracing the history of the morris from agricultural ritual and
folk custom and then to courtly entertainment and popular theatre makes a highly valuable
attempt at following the morris through the centuries; however, a lot of questions cannot
be answered with certainty – therefore the real ‘history’ and meaning of the morris remain a
challenge and a mystery (Garry 1983).
9 Brissenden’s informative essay on Shakespeare and the morris collects all these references,
although he does not oer any serious categorisation and explanation for them.
10 Cf. e.g. an early sixteenth-century Flemish calendar, in the British Library, and a French
wood carving from 1587, as they appear in Endrei and Zolnay 1986, 15-16, 32-33.
11 Cf. the digital reproduction in Folger Shakespeare Library ART 256-916, <http://luna.
folger.edu/luna/servlet/s/6859o4>, accessed 15 Dec 2011.
12 Brissenden’s explanations for this line seem less persuasive to me: ‘He [Benedick] may
merely mean that Claudio and Don Pedro are dim-witted, like a hobby-horse, or perhaps he is
being contemptuous, as the Variorum editor seems to suggest, since the hobby-horse had fallen
into disfavour under Puritan inuence. A third possibility is that Benedick is implying that their
talk is as empty as the hobby-horse’s wooden mouth, manipulated by the dancer to open and shut
with a dry clacking sound, but signifying nothing’ (1979, 6). However, neither Benedick appears
as one with Puritan sympathies nor the reference to the full-costumed hobby-horse (complete with
headmask and snapping mouth) seems probable, as the late sixteenth – early seventeenth-century
hobby-horses were rather the visible composite of a half-man, half-horse being.
13 Quoted by Montgomerie 1956, 219. Although Montgomerie’s numerous associations
between Hamlet and diverse folklore phenomena are denitely interesting, they are, however,
too easily made without further analysis, therefore the reader is not convinced of their validity.
14 It is important to note that the third record the OED provides for this meaning seems
incorrect if one reads the source more carefully: in Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair 3.4. ‘A Carroch …
with four pyed hobbyhorses’ as quoted in OED s.v. ‘hobby-horse’ is actually an ironic remark by
Wasp on the childish ignorance of Cokes, who bought up the toyshop with all the hobby-horses
and dolls, therefore the ‘little odd cart’ and the four hobby-horses may be actual toy hobbies:
‘You are in Smitheld; you may t yourself with a ne easy-going street-nag for your saddle again
Michaelmas term, do. Has he ne’er a little odd cart for you to make a caroche on i’ the country,
with four pied hobby-horses? Why the measles should you stand here with your train, cheaping
of dogs, birds and babies? You ha’ no children to bestow ’em on, ha’ you?’ (3.4.21-27).
15 ‘A respected and well-loved performer at church ales in the reign of Henry VIII, the
hobby-horse came to signify low taste or even illicit sexuality by the close of Elizabeth’s reign’
(Lamb 2006, 15).
16 Hartwig also mentions a 1534 treatise on husbandry which contains the word ‘brydell’,
the ‘leaping’, the idea of commodity and the management and ‘gait’ of horses and women.
17 A similar attitude is observable in late sixteenth-century Hungarian libellous verse con-
demning unruly women, and comparing them to mares and horses to be tamed (cf. Pikli 2010).
18 Lindley focuses on revenge tragedy, Liebler on wider-ranging anthropological issues
and Bristol on a more generally conceived idea of carnival and Claudius’s appropriation of
it. ese aspects would also deserve revisiting in light of what is said about the hobby-horse.
However, this may only be the topic for a later study.
19 Smith refers to this pun and such inherent bawdiness in country ballads (1999, 171).
20 e lines are the following: ‘Nay, then, there’s some likelihood a gentleman’s death my
outlive his memory. But, my faith, he must build churches then, or else he must follow the
old epithet: “With ho, with ho, the hobbyhorse is forgot!” ’
21 Supporting the claims of Lamb and Burke, regarding the ‘withdrawal of the elite’.
22 Cf. the process of commercialisation of festivity, Bartholomew Fair and Smitheld in
Haynes 1984.
Works Cited
Anonymous (1614), Cobbes Prophecies, his Signs and tokens, his Madrigalls, Ques-
tions and Answeres, with his Spiritual Lesson in Verse, Rime, and Prose, <http://
openlibrary.org/books/OL23289044M/Cobbes_prophecies_his_signes_and_to-
kens_his_madrigalls_questions_and_answeres>, accessed 15 Dec 2011.
Assmann Jan (2006 [2000]), Religion and Cultural Memory. Ten Studies, Stanford
(CA), Stanford University Press.
Bakhtin Michail (1984 [1965]), Rabelais and His World, Bloomington (IN), Indiana
University Press.
Boose L.E. (1991), ‘Scolding Brides and Bridling Scolds: Taming the Woman’s Unruly
Member’, Shakespeare Quarterly 42, 2, 179-213.
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