Albion (36 page)

NOAH: Welcome, wife, into this boate.

WIFE: And have thou that for thy mote!

So she punches him. Any admirer of English comedy will recognise these scenes as still fresh and still familiar. Even in the mummings or “momeries” there appear men “compleynyng on hir wyves, with the boystous aunswere of hir wyves.” The prevalence and popularity of the subject, however, are not easy to define. Has it to do with some general fear of sexual feeling among the English, incident upon “the beistlie lust, the furious appetite”? As the Wife of Bath puts it:

For trusteth wel, it is an impossible That any clerk wol speke good of wyves

In the mystery plays Eve is scorned for having first tasted the apple, and of course Noah’s Wife is the second mother of mankind. The misogyny latent within the English imagination may derive from buried biblical sources.

M
rs.
Noah was
of
course played by a man, as were the other “good gossopes,” and so we must look to the pageant wagons of the medieval period for the first spectacular manifestations of English “drag.” Combining a fear of the feminine with a latent homo-eroticism, it has been a staple of native humour ever since. The medieval stage convention, particularly of a man dressed as an old or ugly woman, was effortlessly extended into the Elizabethan theatre where Juliet’s nurse and Mistress Quickly became comic heroines. The tradition of boy acting is sufficiently well known, although it might be added that French and Italian drama introduced female actresses with more speed and efficiency than the English. Old habits die hard. When French women appeared on the stage of Blackfriars in 1629 their performance was described by the puritan Prynne as “an impudent, shameful, unwomanish, graceless, if not more than
whorish
attempt.”

Transvestism in England was not confined to the stage. During the Feast of Fools the Lord of Misrule chose “twenty or sixty of an hundred lustiguts to serve him” who were dressed in female clothes “borrowed for the moste part of their pretie Mopsies.” The male “mummers” and “hobnobs” of succeeding centuries have also characteristically appeared as women, thus emphasising the levelling or anarchic humour present in folk-drama of every kind.

It was present, too, in the manifestations of populist violence in England. There is a pamphlet of 1649 describing “divers men in women’s apparell” who attacked a group of Diggers in Surrey. One historian has commented that cross-dressing was used “to
enforce
popular morality, or at least to make it known, to signify it.”
⁹
This may be seen as an inheritance from dramatic or festive transvestism. In Wiltshire bands of peasants protested against the enclosure of common land by dressing as women and calling themselves “Lady Skimmington”; it was a way of breaking class barriers as well as sexual boundaries and testifies, perhaps inadvertently, to the English love of mixing or mingling different forms. Two male weavers in female disguise, calling themselves “General Ludd’s Wives,” led a crowd in the destruction of looms and factories in Stockport; the riots against turnpike tolls and other taxes were led by men in “drag” and became known as the “Rebecca riots.” Foreign observers noted with some alarm the presence of transvestite clubs or public-houses in London. There were transvestite balls and dances; there were also celebrated transvestites, like the Chevalier d’Eon, who preferred to remain in England rather than risk prosecution overseas. The penalty for transvestism in France was public burning, while the presence of various clubs and pubs in England indicates a less censorious attitude. This accommodating response must in large part be derived from the continuing dramatic tradition, in which male cross-dressing was associated with fun and badinage. It may be recalled here that in Shakespeare’s only “English” comedy,
The Merry Wives of Windsor
—a play almost entirely devoted to sexual innuendo and double entendre—Falstaff is dressed up as “the fat woman of Brentford.”

The
first Ophelia
was played by Nathaniel Field; Lady Macbeth was impersonated by Alexander Cooke; Robert Goffe took the roles of both Cleopatra and Juliet. Even though female actresses were first admitted upon the stage after the Restoration, female impersonators still appeared with them. In 1661 Pepys watched Kynaston in the title role of Ben Jonson’s
The Silent Woman
with “the loveliest legs that ever I saw in my life.” It is part of the English appetite for theatricality and heterogeneity. These female impersonators soon ceased to be credible actors, however; like Tate Wilkinson or James “Nursery” Nokes, they became comic figures instead. A plump and ill-favoured Charles Bannister played Polly in
The Beggar’s Opera
. In a pantomime of 1702 “my counterfeit Male Lady is delivered of her two Puppets, Harlequin and Scaramouche.” Harlequin himself, in later manifestations, was often dressed as a woman in order that he might deceive the Clown. The celebrated Grimaldi played “Queen Roundabellyana” in
Harlequin and the Red Dwarf
, Dame Cicely Suet in
Harlequin Whittington
and the Baroness in
Harlequin and
Cinderella
. He was perhaps the original “drag” performer.

The “Dame” part did not properly emerge until the middle of the nineteenth century, however; she arrived on stage with an actress as “Principal Boy,” a feat of double cross-dressing which is unique to the English theatre. The fact that the Dame has stayed and stayed, still bobbing up in the Christmas pantomime season, is evidence enough for the continuing English fascination with this truly native type. Jefferini played one of the Ugly Sisters at Sadler’s Wells in 1841; George Robey was the “Queen of Hearts,” Malcolm Scott “the Woman Who Knows,” and the celebrated Dan Leno first appeared as Mother Goose on the stage of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, on Boxing Day 1902. Dan Leno played many women—the spinster, the milkmaid, the put-upon servant—and the supposition that “low comedy” represents the voice of the people is embodied in his small, frail form. One commentator has suggested that Leno’s “insight into the manners and customs of the working class was acute, and his acquaintance with their vocabulary extensive and peculiar”;
¹⁰
in turn, the audience of the music-hall boxes loved and celebrated Leno as one of themselves. Here we may return to the Dames of the medieval mysteries or the transvestite mummers, in their own way signifying the life of their communities. This may seem a long way from the “drag” acts in local public-houses, or from those television entertainers who intermittently dress as women for comic emphasis, but the same strong English preoccupation is nonetheless present. It is one of those manifestations of the English imagination which elicit wonder and incredulity; it is truly inexplicable but there, perhaps, lies its strength and persistence.

English clowns: Richard Tarlton and Will Kemp

An English Bible

Title page to the Bible translated into English, 1539

CHAPTER 37

In the Beginning

In the beginning
was the word. Aelfric referred to Genesis as
gecynd-
boc,
the book of beginnings, and we may find in its successive translations and redactions the history of the English word from its origins. The earliest version of Genesis, in the Old English of the late seventh or early eighth century, translated from a mixed Old Latin and Vulgate version, begins

Her aerest gesceop ece drihten, helm eallwihta, heofon and eorthan

“Now first the everlasting lord, protector of all things, made heaven and earth.” The two poems in the Junius manuscript, Genesis A and Genesis B, comprise almost three thousand lines of verse; they are accompanied by ink drawings as illustrations, which emphasise the importance attached to this first book of the Old Testament.

The earliest translation of Genesis in Middle English emerges in a poem of rhyming couplets which opens:

In firme biginning of noght Was hevene and erthe samen wroght

“In the first beginning of nothingness, heaven and earth were made together.” Details and digressions are incorporated within this early biblical narrative; some of them are as familiar and domestic as the marginal scenes in illuminated manuscripts, and some of them are borrowed from the context or content of medieval romance. There is evidence to suggest, too, that the narrative also became the subject of minstrels’ song. A later medieval version of Genesis, tentatively dated to the fourteenth century, is composed in the form of a metrical paraphrase:

how god, that beldes in endlese blyse, all only with hys word hath wroght, heuyn on heght for hym and hys, this erth and all that euer is oght

It is noticeable how the alliterative measure of Old English effortlessly emerges, as if in recounting the story of origins the poet instinctively turned to the original cadences of the language. This is also the pattern of Genesis in the medieval plays:

At my bydding now made be light! Light is goode, I see in sighte

The vocabulary itself is borrowed from Old English to emphasise the ancientness of the theme. Yet that which is most ancient is still of pressing and permanent significance; the actors in the mysteries conceived the drama in contemporary terms, and the words of Old English still lived within the texture of the modern language. The author of
Cursor Mundi
, which paraphrases Genesis in rhyming couplets, remarks that he has translated the narrative into English precisely because of its contemporary presence and significance. “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” and “The Merchant’s Tale” in The
Canterbury Tales
allude by allegory and analogy to the action of Genesis, while Langland uses its themes and images throughout
Piers the Plowman
. He refers to the book as

Genesis the gyaunt, the engendroure of vs alle

so that the text itself becomes the procreator not only of words but of destinies.

Wycliff ’s Bible, or the “Lollard Bible,” opens thus: “In the bigynnyng god made of nought: hevene and erthe/Forsothe the erthe was idel: and voide: & derknessis weren on the face of depthe.” These simple words, translated “for the profit of English men” in 1395, mark the beginning of what may be called the defiantly English translation of the sacred scriptures. Wycliff was a theologian and philosopher who challenged the jurisdiction of the Pope in England and who questioned the sacramental teaching of the Church itself. He can be seen in one sense as the academic voice of the Lollards, a loosely knit group of religious reformers who called for the removal of episcopal authority and a radical reshaping of the sacramental system. They detested all the trappings of authority, and found the Holy Spirit within the humble worship of ordinary men and women. The words of the “Lollard Bible,” then, may be said to mark the origins of English “Nonconformity” and to contain the seeds of the Reformation. They represent a genesis indeed. As one biblical historian has written recently, the “translation of the Bible into English would be a social leveller on an hitherto unknown scale.”
¹
If “simple men,” to use Wycliff ’s phrase, can read and understand the Bible then they may take its lessons to heart; the Bible might then become an agent of social revolution. And if simple men interpret the scripture, without the mediatory agency of the doctors and priests of the Church, the whole fabric of ecclesiastical authority might be shaken. In the prologue to the “Lollard Bible,” written by many hands and not simply by his own, Wycliff cites the example of Bede and Alfred as if the power and significance of the Old English masters could still be employed in the fourteenth century. There is, again, a continuity.

Wycliff ’s English has been described by Dean Milman as “rude, coarse, but clear, emphatic, brief, vehement, with short stinging sentences, and perpetual hard antithesis”; Wycliff himself believed that “a flowery, captivating style of address is of little value compared to right substance.”
²
Here too lies one of the sources of the English imagination, rooted as it is in the speech of the people and conveyed in “clear” vernacular; this concern for “substance” is a mark of the native inclination towards the practical and the pragmatic, and is one which emerges in the language of English philosophy and experiment. If indeed we can say that the predilections of Wycliff ’s faith emerged triumphantly at the time of the Reformation and the Elizabethan settlement, when the vernacular Bible was in the ascendant, then we may agree with one historian of Englishness “that religion was from the very first mingled with the sense of English identity, and that the history of English religion and the history of England are in many epochs inseparable.”
³
The English became, in one favourite phrase, “the people of a book.”

The natural successor of Wycliff was William Tyndale, who translates the opening lines of Genesis in the following manner:

In the beginnying God created heaven and erth. The erth was voyde and emptye and darcknesse was upon the depe & the spirite of God moved upon the water

This represented the first English translation from the Hebrew original, commonly considered to be the language of God Himself, but Tyndale declared that his native idiom was designed to “sucke out the pithe of the scripture” in knowing or unwitting imitation of Wycliff ’s desire to elicit the “substance” of the sacred words. Thus he gives to the serpent a demotic vocabulary not unlike that of the devils in the mystery plays. “Ah, syr,” the evil one whispers to Eve; and then, in a later passage, he is casually reassuring with “Tush, ye shall not dye.” The tree itself is “lustie” to Eve’s eyes and, when she and Adam discover their nakedness, “they sawed fygge leves togedder and made them apurns”; “apurns” is a sixteenth-century variant of aprons. Tyndale employs such homely terms as “mesyllynge” for drizzle and “tyllman” for farmer, emphasising the native and vernacular idiom to which he aspired. In Genesis, Joseph is described as “a luckie felowe” wearing a “gaye” coat.

Tyndale translated only the Pentateuch, the first five books, and was never able to expedite an entire translation of the Old Testament. He had left England for Germany in 1525 in order to print and publish his work without fear of harassment or interruption from the authorities. He was already suspected of heresy; it was not clear whether he was a Lollard or a Lutheran but, at a time when the established Catholic Church was being undermined by reformers, it did not much matter. Ten years later, he was entrapped by an English agent in Antwerp, imprisoned and then strangled at the stake before his body was burnt. Yet he had managed to complete an English version of the New Testament which, in its earliest printing, included marginal notes that Thomas More and others believed to be of a Lutheran tendency. He had deemed the work to be in “proper English,” by which he meant a clear and lucid style aptly expressing the meaning of the original. While engaged in that purpose he fashioned a language of devotion that was unparalleled for its beauty and clarity until the publication of the King James Bible, which itself borrows heavily from Tyndale’s earlier translations. He came from the Vale of Berkeley in the Cotswolds, an area much loved by Lollards and Lollard preachers in the fourteenth century, and the whole wealth of the native language flooded within his classical and European learning to create an instrument of speech both subtle and supple. “Axe and it shalbe geven you. Seke and ye shall fynd. Knocke and it shalbe opened unto you.” Tyndale was a master of the short phrase, placed within the movement of a larger cadence, and this in turn is based upon a Gloucestershire dialect touched by wider understanding; it is a paradigm of the English imagination itself. It might be noticed here that Tyndale’s English reproduces “the rhythm of the original Hebrew” as well as that ancient tongue’s “balance, imagery and conciseness of expression”;
⁴
it is another example of the ability of the English to adapt, to borrow and to synthesise. In similar fashion Tyndale created phrases which will live as long as the English language itself, such as “my brother’s keeper” in Genesis as well as “the powers that be” and “a law unto themselves.” He invented words, like “atonement” and “scapegoat,” which have also entered the language as visible tokens of the immense influence which his translation exerted.

The effect of Tyndale’s New Testament was, however, immediate and profound. Soon after its publication in Worms, in 1526, copies were smuggled into England from Antwerp, Cologne and Worms; they could be purchased clandestinely in Coleman Street, Honey Lane, or Hosier Lane. Sir Thomas More, then Lord Chancellor, denounced “nyght scoles” of dissent and sedition, where individuals and families read from Tyndale’s translations before worshipping together. A native of Chelmsford, William Maldon, decided to remedy his illiteracy precisely in order to read Tyndale’s New Testament; he described the poor men of his town who “did sit reading in lower end of church, and many would flock about to hear them reading.” When one eminent divine condemned the fact that the teachings of Wycliff were once more abroad—“trying to infiltrate this country of ours with the old and damnable heresy of Wycliff ”—the important connection is made clear. To impart the scriptures in English, apparently plain and simple English at that, was to create an entirely new religious world. As one eminent historian has written of the period after the Reformation, “Henceforth both those who accepted the Anglican supremacy and those who dissented from it expressed their beliefs in the sanctified idiom of Tyndale. God had found a voice, and the voice was English.”
⁵

That is why Thomas More’s The Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer is the most important religious polemic in English culture. With some half a million words of dispute and controversy, it is also certainly the longest. Yet the theme was the single most pressing of the period. As More put it, “bytwene Tyndale and me no thynge ellys in effecte, but to fynde out whyche chyrche is the very chyrche.” The English translation had in effect subtly shifted both the grounds of belief and the practice of faith; by substituting “congregation” for “church,” “elders” for “priests,” “repentance” for “penance,” “love” for “charity” and “knowledge” for “confession,” Tyndale seriously undermined the Catholic Church’s claims of universality and primacy. Their conflict represented a struggle for the soul of England itself and, although this is not the occasion to sift the dust of forgotten theological controversies, it is at least worth observing that More’s Confutation was entirely composed in English. This is in marked contrast to his most famous and distinguished work,
Utopia
, which was written in Latin for a European audience. Now More was directly addressing his compatriots and fellow citizens. The result was a spirited debate in the vernacular:

TYNDALE: Marke whyther yt be not true in the hyest degree . . .

MORE: Tyndale is a great marker. There is nothynge with hym now but marke, marke, marke. It is a pytye that the man were not made a marker of chases in some tenys playe.

TYNDALE: Iudge whyther yt be possible that any good sholde come oute of theyr domme ceremonyes and sacramentes.

MORE: Iudge good crysten reader whythyr yt be possyble that he be any better than a beste oute of whose brutyshe bestely mowth, commeth such a fylthye fome.

Tyndale was a grave and learned scholar; More a distinguished humanist on the European model. Yet in this dialogue they resort to the oldest patterns and resources of the language, as if there the real truth might be elicited. Thomas More in particular reverts to the power of alliteration as a way of conveying his anger, and indirectly as a token of the power of inherited speech.

The
appetite for
English translation, once awakened, became immense; it is as if the whole spiritual history of the world was now available to the plough-boy and the household, and over the next thirty years no fewer than five great translations of the Bible appeared; significantly, all of them were to a large extent based upon Tyndale’s original. The first complete English Bible, published in 1535, was the work of Miles Coverdale; he appears to have had little direct engagement with the original texts but, in characteristically English manner, arranged a compilation of all previous translations. His version is characterised by its ease and naturalness, harmonising previous versions and rendering euphonious existing ones; it anticipates the extraordinary achievement of the King James Bible, which, despite its role as a translation of translations, is a unique work of art. Coverdale was of pragmatic and conciliatory nature, and he took the middle way; he was concerned to resolve differences between translations, and to smooth out complexities, and it has been said that he possessed a “real gift in melodious expression” and that his translation “excels in the music of its phrasing.”
⁶
This capacity suggests in turn that English music may itself spring out of moderation and conciliation; it is perhaps significant, therefore, that he introduced within the language such phrases as “loving kindness” and “tender mercy” which might have sprung from the lips of Richard Rolle or Julian of Norwich.