Holland's Influence on English Language and Literature

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Chapter XXI Jest Books and Anecdotes (Fool-literature) - Howleglass (Ulenspiegel)

Jest books and anecdotes have played a remarkable part in the literature of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In his ‘Studies on the literary relations between England and Germany,’ Charles H. Herford has a very interesting chapter on the subject. In this chapter he shows how the stimulus for this ‘fool-literature’ of jests and anecdotes came from the Italian Renaissance; how from Italy this movement went to Germany, from Germany to the Netherlands, and how the most famous jest books were translated from the Dutch into French as well as into English, and finally how in England and. Scotland this kind of book was looked at.

The humanistic movement of the Renaissance opened not only the stores of all the wit and humor, the satires, the jests and the anecdotes of the Greek and Roman literature, but was as well the stimulus for literary men in western Europe to enrich their literature with the stories that lived among the people and with the jokes and anecdotes that were retold from generation to generation.

During the late mediaeval time certain typical figures, often a priest or a monk, became the protagonists of these anecdotes. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when democracy arose, when free cities grew rapidly in population and in wealth, and

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when all kinds of industry were rising, it was especially the class distinction which became the inexhaustible source of jests and anecdotes. A school teacher, a village preacher, a tailor, an innkeeper, a shoemaker or a blacksmith, a peasant, a miller or a barber, were alternately made the butts of popular wit, while the hero of many stories of that kind was often one or the other popular citizen who had got some reputation for wit amongst his fellow citizens. Among those personalities, around whose names have been collected a large number of jokes and anecdotes, written down in special books by which they got an immortality of their own, there are in Germany, for instance, Amis, the Kalemberger, Rausch, Markoff and Ulenspiegel, especially the last.

‘Amis is the German counterpart of the Abbot of Canterbury; the Kalemberger is the facetious parish priest, who outwits his parishioners, makes game of his bishop, and extracts unintended bounties from his patron; Rausch, the young novice in the convent, who lays traps for the friar and the cook; Markhoff, the foul but witty boor, who paralyzes the wisdom of Solomon with keen rejoinders, and his modesty with the tricks of an unclean animal; Ulenspiegel, the knavish peasant who retaliates on the haughty citizens with strokes in which the literature of the ‘Swank’ probably reaches its acme of fatuous insolence. In these homely, yet vivid figures, and particularly in Ulenspiegel, the best known and the most purely national of all, the low life of the later Middle Ages in Germany lives before us; we hurry to and fro between tavern and workshop, highway and market-place, stable and scullery. Every line of Ulenspiegel vividly records the essential qualities of the society which made a hero of him; its gross appe-

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tites, its intellectual insensibility, its phlegmatic good humour, its boisterous delight in all forms of physical energy and physical prowess, its inexhaustible interest in the daily events of the bodily life, and the stoutness of nerve which permitted it to find uproarous enjoyment in mere foulness of stench. The whole interest of Ulenspiegel for us is social, not literary; all his jests together would scarcely yield a grain of Attic salt; we could not read the book but for the light which it throws upon a society which could and did.’¹

‘The first extant versions of Ulenspiegel, says Herford, take us to Strassburg, where in 1515 the earliest known editions, and in 1519 that till recently regarded as such and attributed to Murner, were published. From Strassburg it passed to Angsburg (ed. 1540) and Erfurt (ed. 1532-38) and Northwards to Cologne (Servais Kruffter's undated edition), thence to Antwerp (undated ed. 1520-30) and from Antwerp to Paris and London.’²

‘The Antwerp edition - a canto containing about one-half the stories of the original - was the basis of the French version of 1532 and its successors, and of the English version, printed probably between 1548 and 1560 by William Copland.’³ This English version, translated from the Dutch, was entitled ‘Howleglass - Here beginneth a merye jest of a man called Howleglass, and of many marvelous thinges and jestes that he did in his lyffe.’

It was therefore not the German but the Dutch Ulenspiegel which was introduced into England, and this Dutch version differed very much from the Ger-

1 Charles H. Herford, Studies in the literary relations of England and Germany, Cambridge, 1886.

2 Ibid, 285.

3 Ibid.

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man, as far as many things were left out and one new chapter brought in, viz., ‘How Howleglass answered the man who asked him about the way.’¹ Besides this, the English version contained a chapter with verses entitled ‘How Howleglass came to a scholar to make verses with hym to the use of reason.’²

Neither in England nor in Scotland did the Ulenspiegel, under his new name of Howleglass, find sympathy among the strong religious people of the Protestants of that time. But at least in England, under the reign of the not very religious Queen Elizabeth, and under the merry-making Stuarts, existed all the time a strong party, which was humanistic rather than religious, in the eyes of which Howleglass found more favor, so that, as Herford says, he ‘gravitated at once to the class of native jesters,’ lost all foreign associations, and became an inseparable member of the Brotherhood of Scogins and Skeletons, Robin Goodfellows and Robin Hoods, and his history took its place in the library of Captain Cox, etc.³ On the contrary, in Scotland the name of Howleglass ‘became a taunt, if not an insult, and was intruded into the most acrid region of the polemical vocabulary.’⁴ The land of John Knox seemed not to be the best country for Howleglass.

1 In Dutch, Hoe Ulenspieghel anworde eenen man die nae den wech vraghede.’ Herford, p. 286.

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid, 288.

4 Ibid, 287.