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2. La Renaissance anglaise

A friendly ghost, a head in a well, a mute madwoman – and much more: weird comedy in Peele’s The Old Wife’s Tale (1595); or, Jack the friendly ghost

Charles Whitworth

Résumés

Les fantômes aimables sont plutôt rares dans le théâtre anglais. On s’attend à ce qu’ils soient plutôt vindicatifs, colériques, laids. Quand les auteurs essaient de créer des fantômes sympathiques, des problèmes surgissent, car les fantômes ne sont pas censés être gentils. George Peele a inventé, dans sa comédie The Old Wife’s Tale, le personnage de Jack, le spectre (apparemment) d’un jeune homme récemment décédé. Ses amis souhaitent le voir enterré dignement dans le cimetière de la paroisse. Pendant ce temps, Jack s’occupe à rendre service. Jack n’est pas le seul être étrange dans le monde onirique de la pièce : il y a, entre autres, un sorcier, une folle muette, une tête qui parle dans un puits. Tout ceci dans un « conte » raconté par une vieille dame à deux visiteurs inattendus, tard la nuit. Autant le statut existentiel de Jacques est ambigu, autant il est clair qu’il est l’agent de l’heureux dénouement de l’intrigue principale, avant de disparaître dans une scène finale dramatique.

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1Friendly ghosts are few and far between, and a truly friendly ghost who tries to convince people that he/she is friendly, has a very hard time of it. In the late 1930s, an American writer-cartoonist team, Seymour Reit and Joe Oriolo, created ‘Casper the Friendly Ghost’. Over the following decades, many dozens of Casper cartoon films and TV series were made, and dozens of comic books were published.

2Casper is a ghost-child with a New York accent who inhabits a haunted house. His adult ghost-relatives delight in scaring people. But little Casper is a nonconformist ghost: he would prefer to make friends with people. He leaves his home and goes out into the world, hoping to find friends. However, the people and animals that he meets scream: ‘A ghost!’ and run away. The distraught Casper eventually attempts to commit suicide (apparently forgetting that he is already dead) by lying down on a railway track. But he then meets two children who become his friends. The children's mother, widowed and poor, is at first frightened of Casper, but later welcomes him into the family after he frightens off a nasty landlord who, not caring to own an apparently ‘haunted’ house, tears up the mortgage and gives the mother the house.

  • 1 Thomas L. Berger, William C. Bradford, Sidney L. Sondergard, An Index of Characters in Early Modern (...)

3Friendly ghosts are few and far between in early modern English drama as well. Cheerful, grateful, helpful ghosts, like Casper, are rarer still. An Index of Characters in Early Modern English Drama: Printed Plays, 1500–1660, lists just over eighty Ghosts, plus a handful of Phantasms and/or Spirits.1 A bare dozen of the plays listed from the entire period covered by the volume, are comedies, or include in their dramatis personae, ghosts that might be considered benign or sympathetic figures, or that are treated in a comic mode. In Cymbeline, Act V Scene iii, for example, the ghosts of Posthumus’s parents and brothers who appear to him in a vision as in an apparition’ in the William Shakespeare’s First Folio’s stage direction – conjure Jupiter who brings comfort and a promise of good fortune to the sleeping Posthumus. The ghosts then thank Jupiter and vanish (Oxford Shakespeare, ed. Roger Warren, V.iii.216 s.d.). These are sympathetic, comforting apparitions, but are not themselves the agents of aid to their sleeping son and brother. It is Jupiter, a god, not a ghost, who, after launching a thunderbolt, gives the ghosts a tablet, which they place upon the sleeping Posthumus, who will read the godsent message when he awakens. Then, in the Folio’s terse stage direction, they ‘Vanish’.

  • 2 On hoax ghosts see also Chris Salamone’s article in this issue, ‘“’Las sir! I’m no Ghost”: The misp (...)

4In Francis Beaumont’s citizen comedy, The Knight of the Burning Pestle (c. 1610), the grocer’s apprentice Rafe, imposed upon the players by the insistent Citizen and his Wife, appears in his final scene ‘with a forked arrow through his head’ (ed. Michael Hattaway, New Mermaids (1969, 1995), V.v.277 s.d.). He has apparently been killed twice, once by Death who sprinkled a pound of pepper over him as he sat in his shop, and again by the forked arrow, shot by Death, as Rafe took the air in Moorfields. His two lengthy dying speeches parody ghosts’ speeches from The Spanish Tragedy, Hamlet, and Richard III, among others. But Rafe is not so much a ghost, as one of the walking dead, arrow in the head and all. On his final line ‘Oh, oh, oh, etc.’ (V.v.329), he exits on his own two legs. In the same play, Jasper Merrythought only pretends to be a ghost, to frighten his unsympathetic master, his sweetheart’s father.2 In Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, a Queen’s Men’s play more or less contemporary with George Peele’s The Old Wife’s Tale (c.1590), there are devils, a brazen speaking head, the ‘spirit’ of Hercules, a conjurer and magical devices. Peele has two heads, one of them speaking from a well, a conjurer, Echo, two Furies – and a helpful ghost. Such things were clearly commonplace and popular in the public theatre of the 1580s and early 1590s, and playwrights responded to the demand.

5But what mainly interests us here, are ghosts, in OED’s sense 8: ‘The soul of a deceased person, spoken of as appearing in a visible form, or otherwise manifesting its presence, to the living’ (incidentally, OED lists thirteen different senses for the substantive ghost). Casper is such a ghost; he was once a living boy. Spirits, familiars, phantoms, apparitions, visions – there are hosts of such things in drama and other literature, from all ages and cultures. But it is those ‘souls of deceased persons’, and their appearances on stage that concern us – ghost scenes.

6Peele’s The Old Wife’s Tale was published in a quarto printed by John Danter in 1595, of which four copies survive. The title page claims that the play was performed by the Queen’s Men. The pros and cons as to the credibility of that claim, and the possibility that the play may initially have been written for a special, private occasion, and first performed by a children’s company, are canvassed in my New Mermaids edition (1996; xix–xxi).

  • 3 In the New Mermaids editions (1984; 1996), I follow Frank S. Hook, in the standard critical edition (...)
  • 4 There are no act or scene divisions in the quarto.
  • 5 Eumenides, from the Greek eumenes, well-disposed, gracious. Peele may recall the name of the hero’s (...)
  • 6 See Pierre Kapitaniak’s article in this issue, ‘Bending one’s eye on vacancy? Stage ghosts, Shakesp (...)

7There is no Dramatis Personæ in the 1595 quarto and thus no indication of Jack’s existential status.3 At his first appearance, three-quarters of the way through the play-within, the quarto’s laconic stage direction is ‘Enter Jack’. But we have already heard about Jack in an earlier scene, late in the first half of the play. He is the subject of a lively, near-violent dispute between his friends Wiggen and Corebus, and the Sexton and Churchwarden of the parish, over costs for his burial in the churchyard (439-510; the only scene in which these four characters appear).4 It is thus clearly implied that Jack is recently deceased, and that his body awaits burial. There is no suggestion that his ghost, like Hamlet’s father’s, is ‘Doomed for a certain time to walk the night, / And for the day confined to fast in fires’ (Hamlet, ed. G. R. Hibbard, Oxford Shakespeare, 1987, I.v.10–11). It is rather Jack’s body that his friends, quite understandably, wish to see properly interred in the churchyard, that is, given a Christian burial, with the normal rites including a peal of bells. Another character, Eumenides, the Wandering Knight, intervenes here to pay for the burial and the accompanying rites, and to prevent Jack’s friends and the parish functionaries from coming to blows.5 Thus the dead Jack is the beneficiary of a good deed by the romance hero. His ghost, or something, will ultimately return the favour and repay the Knight’s generosity, but at this point in the play-within, he is only a deceased person fondly remembered by his friends. Indeed, just as, paradoxically, Jack is often invisible when he appears,6 he is a more or less permanent absent presence throughout when he is not on stage; he is mentioned by name some sixteen times in his absence. We are not allowed to forget Jack, dead or alive.

8When Jack appears for the first time, as previously noted, the quarto gives no indication that he is a ghost, or a walking dead man, or a living being. There is nothing macabre or menacing about Jack, he does not demand revenge, or otherwise haunt the living. All he, or rather his friends, ask is a decent burial. He may be for the moment a spirit in limbo, but his soul does not appear to be in torment. His status is ambiguous: Jack is dead, but Jack appears, speaks, acts in the remainder of the play. That is – and this may be a rarity in the catalogue of theatrical ghosts – it is the living who seek a Christian benediction for Jack, in the form of a proper burial, and not the soul/spirit/ghost of the deceased itself that seeks retribution or satisfaction of any kind. Jack enters to Eumenides (line 673), with a cheerful greeting: ‘You are well overtaken, sir’. That he is meant to be invisible is suggested by Eumenides’ response: ‘Forbear, I say! Who is that which pincheth me?’ (677). Perhaps he merely steals up behind Eumenides to pinch him; in any case, the audience must see him. A lot happens in the following few lines: Jack offers his service to Eumenides, who replies, ‘Alas, pretty lad, I know not how to keep myself, and much less a servant, my pretty boy, my state is so bad’ (685–86). Thus in the space of eight lines or so, Jack must have become visible to Eumenides, or the latter could not address him as ‘pretty lad’, ‘my pretty boy’. Jack proceeds to demonstrate that he knows all about Eumenides, where he comes from, his quest, and particularly that he has just paid for the burial of a poor man and has almost nothing left in his purse – ‘but one three half-pence’ (697) – eliciting from the astonished knight the exclamation ‘I think this boy be a spirit! – How know’st thou all this?’ (694).

  • 7 In a mainly prose text, line numbering depends upon the layout of the edition used. In the 1996 New (...)

9The Jack who now enters into the knight’s service is clearly corporeal; as he describes himself, ‘a neat, handsome and cleanly young lad, about the age of fifteen or sixteen years’ (680–82). He immediately begins repaying Eumenides’ kindness, ordering a meal, which when a Hostess appears with it, the knight refuses to eat, thinking that he cannot pay for it. But at Jack’s insistence, he looks in his purse, and finds it full of money (725). Jack, whether alive or dead or something in between, or both, is clearly possessed of magical powers. From this point on, he will be a major actor in the romance plot of the strange tale told by the old wife Madge, that has become a play and come to life on the stage. Yet in terms of presence on stage, and lines spoken, Jack can only be considered a minor, or at the least, a secondary character. As noted previously, he first enters only three-quarters of the way through the play, and he speaks barely eighty lines, or less than ten percent of the whole.7 Of course, that is usually the case with ghosts: they appear, do what they have to do, and disappear. Or they may remain on stage, as spectators or Chorus, like Don Andrea in The Spanish Tragedy. The onstage audience of three in The Old Wife’s Tale remain in the frame, outside the action of the play-within, comment upon it, but have no role in it, and they are not ghosts. (The ‘play’, we recall, is a tale told by the old, somewhat earthy wife Madge – ‘Nay, either hear my tale or kiss my tail!’ (111) – to two of the lost pages who wander to her house in the night). Jack, it seems, is available to help Eumenides and perform other essential tasks, because he/his body is awaiting burial. Is he then really a ghost? His friends say he is dead; the stage direction for his first entrance says simply ‘Enter Jack’.

  • 8 Henslowe’s Diary, ed. R. A. Foakes and R. T. Rickert, Cambridge University Press, 1961, p. 325.

10Jack exits and enters repeatedly in the next 200 lines: a total of ten comings and goings – a ghostly busybody. At line 783 occurs the charmingly cryptic yet detailed stage direction: ‘Enter Jack, invisible, and taketh off SACRAPANT’s wreath from his head, and his sword out of his hand’. Disarming and rendering harmless the conjurer Sacrapant is yet another of Jack’s helpful deeds. His invisibility, explicitly indicated here, must imply some sort of stage convention that makes it immediately evident to the audience. We may recall the entry in Henslowe’s Diary, where ‘a robe for to goo invisibell’ is among items bought for the Admiral’s Men in 1598.8 So, if Jack enters here in a costume that is understood to make him ‘invisible’, he must then not have been wearing that particular item on his previous appearances, although he seemed to be invisible to Eumenides on his first entrance at line 673. We are here confronted with questions about Elizabethan stage conventions concerning the representation of invisibility, of ghosts, spirits, angels or demons. Such questions just cannot be definitely answered from the scant evidence available in such directions as we find in The Old Wife’s Tale.

11A central question is begged by the quarto’s failure to specify that Jack, the character who takes a major part in the play following his first entrance, is a ghost. All we know of Jack before that belated appearance, is that he is dead, and that his friends want to bury him. Is the Jack who takes such a crucial role in the final scenes of the play, then truly a ghost? I am not sure. Perhaps his status, deliberately left vague in the quarto text, is simply of a piece with the ambiguous, fairy-tale, dream-like ambiance of the old wife’s tale. Jack is a dead man, but Jack figures centrally in the play’s action, is the major agent in the dénouement of the romance plot, even wielding a sword (offstage) to decapitate the wicked conjurer, with whose head he returns: ‘Enter Jack with a head in his hand (836 s.d.). A macabre element is thus present, though subjacent, even in this light-hearted comedy. That is often the case with ghost stories: remember that little, sweet Casper, star of so many children’s cartoons, who attempted to commit suicide by throwing himself upon a railway line? It is a sort of sick joke, i.e., it is all right, because he is already dead and so cannot be killed again by a speeding train. Jack is dead, his body unburied (and should be mouldering), but up he pops and does all sorts of good deeds, before leaping into a convenient hole in the ground/trap in the set. That is, his benevolent missions accomplished, he lays himself to rest. It is bodies that are buried, not ghosts. Here again the quarto’s terse stage direction is explicit, if still noncommittal about his existential status: ‘Jack leaps down in the ground’ (880 s.d.). Jack is obviously embodied by an actor.

12Before his final exit, Jack has reminded the somewhat slow-witted Eumenides that he had paid ‘for the burying of a poor fellow’ (876–77). That episode seems to have been forgotten – Jack buries himself; the Sexton and Churchwarden who had earlier so churlishly refused to bury him are long gone, as are Jack’s friends Wiggen and Corebus. Eumenides closes Jack’s story in a single, perfunctory line – ‘Jack? What, art thou gone? Then farewell, Jack’ (881) – before turning his attention to the ‘beauteous Delia’, the object of his quest whom he had rescued, with Jack’s help of course, from the clutches of the wicked sorcerer.

13Peele seems to have been fond of apparitions and other supernatural phenomena which, as we have seen, were à la mode at the time, and to have enjoyed exploiting their theatrical potential. His small handful of plays from the 1580s and 1590s contain several such elements. The Arraignment of Paris, the first English play to advertise itself as A Pastoral on its title page (1584), contains a troupe of gods, both pastoral and Olympian, as well as nymphs, muses and the Fates. In Edward I (published 1593), Queen Elinor sinks spectacularly into the ground at Charing Green, only to arise shortly afterwards at Potter’s Hithe, somewhat befuddled but apparently none the worse for her subterranean adventure. The Battle of Alcazar (published 1594) includes a dumb show, with three Ghosts, Nemesis, three Furies, Death and Fame.

14It is thus not surprising to find such an abundance of strange, weird or fantastical elements in The Old Wife’s Tale. As well as having a predilection for supernatural spectacle, Peele does not shun the macabre, or the threat of violence, even in such a light-hearted fantasy as this. In his Old Testament drama, David and Bethsabe (published 1599), the audience is treated to the scene of King David’s rebel son Absalon being caught by the hair in an oak tree as he tries to flee, then being stabbed by David’s loyal captain Joab (‘Take that, as part of thy deservèd plague’, l. 1527), then apparently being hacked to death by Joab’s soldiers, and his body thrown in ‘some ditch amidst this darksome wood’ (l. 1559). This may be more or less true to Peele’s biblical source (2 Samuel 18:9-15), but it is also spectacular Elizabethan stage horror.

  • 9 There is perhaps a biblical echo here, of the story of King Solomon who proposed to divide a living (...)

15In the final scene, Jack insists that Eumenides honour his pledge to share evenly all that he may win with his benefactor, i.e. Jack himself (735–38). When Jack demands that Eumenides cut his lady Delia in half, the drama teeters on the edge of horror.9 But of course it is only a ritual testing of the knight’s fidelity as in many an Arthurian romance – ‘Stay, master! It is sufficient I have tried your constancy’ (875) – and Jack, satisfied and free at last, leaps into the ground, with a farewell ‘God be with you all!’ (880). Ghost, walking dead man, ‘spirit’ – Jack had the moral authority to test the hero’s honour, as well as the power to resolve the entire plot by destroying the wicked conjurer, and hence his maleficent spells. In this play’s world, the supposedly dead wield power that no living person, even a conjurer, can lay claim to. Nevertheless, in the end, Jack ‘dies’, again, and buries himself, presumably forever. But that ‘forever’ is only in a play within a tale within a play that is called a tale told by an old woman…

  • 10 Thomas Lodge, Wit’s Misery and the World’s Madness (1596), sig. H4v.

16A friendly, grateful, helpful ghost – if that is what Jack is – plays a far more important part in his play than, for example, some pale-faced ‘ghost which cried so miserably at the Theater, like an oyster-wife, ‘Hamlet, revenge!’’.10 Whatever spooky ghost Thomas Lodge may have seen or heard calling upon Hamlet for revenge and that he recalls in that allusion, in the year his pamphlet with this tantalizing reference appeared, Peele died. He was buried at St James’s, Clerkenwell, on 9 November 1596. His ‘ghost’ returned in 1607 in another pamphlet, The Merry Conceited Jests of George Peele, fictional, fantastical and fabulous, full of incredible tales about another lively, witty dead man, Peele himself.

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Notes

1 Thomas L. Berger, William C. Bradford, Sidney L. Sondergard, An Index of Characters in Early Modern English Drama: Printed Plays, 1500-1660, rev. edition, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

2 On hoax ghosts see also Chris Salamone’s article in this issue, ‘“’Las sir! I’m no Ghost”: The misprision of spectral presence in Caroline drama’.

3 In the New Mermaids editions (1984; 1996), I follow Frank S. Hook, in the standard critical edition of Peele’s works, in specifying ‘a ghost’ beside Jack’s name in the list of characters, The Life and Works of George Peele, gen. ed. C. T. Prouty, vol. 3: The Dramatic Works of George Peele, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1970, p. 386. It is perhaps preferable to leave his status undetermined, as does Patricia Binnie in the Revels Plays edition (1980), p. 36. Quotations are from the 1996 New Mermaids edition.

4 There are no act or scene divisions in the quarto.

5 Eumenides, from the Greek eumenes, well-disposed, gracious. Peele may recall the name of the hero’s friend in John Lyly’s play, Endymion. See David Bevington, ed., Endymion, The Revels Plays, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1996, p. 75, n. 2.

6 See Pierre Kapitaniak’s article in this issue, ‘Bending one’s eye on vacancy? Stage ghosts, Shakespeare and the question of visibility in English drama’.

7 In a mainly prose text, line numbering depends upon the layout of the edition used. In the 1996 New Mermaids edition of The Old Wife’s Tale, there are 898 lines; Jack has eighty-three of them. There are 905 lines in the first New Mermaids edition (1984).

8 Henslowe’s Diary, ed. R. A. Foakes and R. T. Rickert, Cambridge University Press, 1961, p. 325.

9 There is perhaps a biblical echo here, of the story of King Solomon who proposed to divide a living child between two women who each claimed that the child was hers. The real mother who wanted the child to live was willing to give it to the false one, who agreed that the child should be cut in two. Thus the king knew who was the true mother (I Kings 3.16–28).

10 Thomas Lodge, Wit’s Misery and the World’s Madness (1596), sig. H4v.

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Charles Whitworth, « A friendly ghost, a head in a well, a mute madwoman – and much more: weird comedy in Peele’s The Old Wife’s Tale (1595); or, Jack the friendly ghost »Arrêt sur scène / Scene Focus [En ligne], 11 | 2022, mis en ligne le 31 décembre 2022, consulté le 29 mars 2024. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/asf/2274 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/asf.2274

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Charles Whitworth

Charles Whitworth is a Professor emeritus, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3. MA, PhD, University of Birmingham. Founding director, IRCL (UMR 5186, CNRS). Comité national, CNRS, 2004-2008. Editor, Three Sixteenth-Century Comedies, New Mermaids (1984); The Old Wife’s Tale, 2nd edition (1996); The Comedy of Errors, Oxford Shakespeare (2002; 2008), et al. Editorial boards, Cahiers Elisabéthains; Études Théologiques et Religieuses.
Charles Whitworth est un Professeur émérite, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3. MA, PhD Université de Birmingham, GB. Directeur-fondateur IRCL (UMR 5186 du CNRS). Comité national du CNRS, 2004-2008. Editeur, Three Sixteenth-Century Comedies, New Mermaids (1984); The Old Wife’s Tale, 2e édition (1996); The Comedy of Errors, Oxford Shakespeare (2002; 2008), et al. Comités de rédaction, Cahiers Elisabéthains; Études Théologiques et Religieuses.

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