The Old Showmen and the Old London Fairs. Frost Thomas

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СКАЧАТЬ the Egyptian Hall. Three hundred years ago, it was called the decollation of St. John the Baptist, and was performed upon a table, upon which stood a dish to receive the head. The table, the dish, and the knife used in the apparent decapitation were all contrived for the purpose, the table having two holes in it, one to enable the assistant who submitted to the operation to conceal his head, the other, corresponding to a hole in the dish, to receive the head of another confederate, who was concealed beneath the table, in a sitting position; while the knife had a semi-circular opening in the blade to fit the neck. Another knife, of the ordinary kind, was shown to the spectators, who were prevented by a sleight of hand trick from observing the substitution for it of the knife used in the trick. The engraving in Malcolm’s work shows the man to be operated upon lying upon the table, apparently headless, while the head of the other assistant appears in the dish.

      That lusus naturæ, and other natural curiosities, had begun to be exhibited by showmen in the reign of Elizabeth, may be inferred from the allusions to such exhibitions in The Tempest, when Caliban is discovered, and the mariners speculate upon his place in the scale of animal being. It seems also that the practice of displaying in front of the shows large pictures of the wonderful feats, or curious natural objects, to be seen within, prevailed in the sixteenth century, and probably long before; for it is distinctly alluded to in a passage in Jonson’s play of The Alchymist, in which the master of the servant who has filled the house with searchers for the philosopher’s stone, says,

      “What should my knave advance

      To draw this company? He hung out no banners

      Of a strange calf with five legs to be seen,

      Or a huge lobster with six claws.”

      Some further glimpses of the Bartlemy fair shows of the Elizabethan period are afforded in the induction or prologue to another play of Jonson’s, namely, the comedy of Bartholomew Fair, acted in 1614. “He,” says the dramatist, speaking of himself, “has ne’er a sword and buckler-man in his fair; nor a juggler with a well-educated ape to come over the chain for the King of England, and back again for the Prince, and sit still on his haunches for the Pope and the King of Spain.” The sword and buckler-man probably means a performer who took part in such a mimic combat of man and horse, as is represented in the illumination which has been referred to. The monkey whose Protestant proclivities are noted in the latter part of the passage is mentioned in a poem of Davenant’s, presently to be quoted.

      We cannot suppose absent from the metropolitan fairs the celebrated performing horse, Morocco, and his instructor, of whom Sir Walter Raleigh says, “If Banks had lived in older times, he would have shamed all the enchanters in the world; for whosoever was most famous among them could never master or instruct any beast as he did.” That Shakspeare witnessed the performances of Morocco, which combined arithmetical calculations with saltatory exercises, is shown by the allusion in Love’s Labour Lost, when Moth puzzles Armado with arithmetical questions, and says, “The dancing horse will tell you.” Sir Kenelm Digby states that the animal “would restore a glove to the due owner after the master had whispered the man’s name in his ear; and would tell the just number of pence in any piece of silver coin newly showed him by his master.”

      Banks quitted England for the Continent with his horse in 1608, and De Melleray, who witnessed the performance of the animal in the Rue St. Jacques, in Paris, says that Morocco could not only tell the number of francs in a crown, but knew that the crown was depreciated at that time, and knew the exact amount of the depreciation. From Paris, Banks travelled with his learned horse to Orleans, where the fame which they had acquired brought him under the imputation of being a sorcerer, and he had a narrow escape of being burned at a stake in that character. Bishop Morton says that he cleared himself by commanding his horse to “seek out one in the press of the people who had a crucifix on his hat; which done, he bade him kneel down unto it, and not this only, but also to rise up again, and to kiss it. ‘And now, gentlemen,’ (quoth he), ‘I think my horse hath acquitted both me and himself;’ and so his adversaries rested satisfied; conceiving (as it might seem) that the devil had no power to come near the cross.”

      We next hear of Banks and his horse at Frankfort-on-the-Maine, where Bishop Morton saw them, and heard from the former the story of his narrow escape at Orleans. Their further wanderings cannot be traced; and, though it has been inferred, from a passage in a burlesque poem by Jonson, that Banks was burned as a sorcerer, the grounds which the poet had for assigning such a dreadful end for the famous horse-charmer are unknown, and may have been no more than an imperfect recollection of what he had heard of the Orleans story.

      A hare which played the tabor is alluded to by Jonson in the comedy before mentioned; and this performance also was not unknown to earlier times, one of the illuminations copied by Strutt showing it to have been exhibited in the fifteenth century. When Jonson wrote his comedy, the amusing classes, encouraged by popular favour, were raising their heads again, after the sore discouragement of the Vagrancy Act of Elizabeth’s reign, which scheduled jugglers and minstrels with strolling thieves, gipsy fortune-tellers, and itinerant beggars. Elizabeth’s tastes seem to have inclined more to bull-baiting and bear-baiting than to dancing and minstrelsy, juggling and tumbling; and, besides this, there was a broad line drawn in those days, and even down to the reign of George III., as will be hereafter noticed, between the upper ten thousand and the masses, as to the amusements which might or ought to be permitted to the former and denied to the latter.

      In the succeeding reign the operation of the Vagrancy Act was powerfully aided by the rise of the Puritans, who regarded all amusements as worldly vanities and snares of the Evil One, and indulgence in them as a coquetting with sin. As yet they lacked the power to suppress the fairs and close the theatres, though their will was good to whip and imprison all such inciters to sin and agents of Satan as they conceived minstrels, actors, and showmen to be; and Bartholomew Fair showed no diminution of popular patronage even in the reign of Charles I.

      “Hither,” says the author of a scarce pamphlet, printed in 1641, “resort people of all sorts and conditions. Christchurch cloisters are now hung full of pictures. It is remarkable, and worth your observation, to behold and hear the strange sights and confused sounds in the fair. Here, a knave in a fool’s coat, with a trumpet sounding, or on a drum beating, invites you to see his puppets. There, a rogue like a wild woodman, or in an antic shape like an incubus, desires your company to view his motion; on the other side, hocus pocus, with three yards of tape or ribbon in his hand, showing his art of legerdemain, to the admiration and astonishment of a company of cockoloaches. Amongst these, you shall see a gray goosecap (as wise as the rest), with a ‘What do ye lack?’ in his mouth, stand in his booth shaking a rattle, or scraping on a fiddle, with which children are so taken, that they presently cry out for these fopperies: and all these together make such a distracted noise, that you would think Babel were not comparable to it.

      “Here there are also your gamesters in action: some turning of a whimsey, others throwing for pewter, who can quickly dissolve a round shilling into a three-halfpenny saucer. Long Lane at this time looks very fair, and puts out her best clothes, with the wrong side outward, so turned for their better turning off; and Cloth Fair is now in great request: well fare the ale-houses therein, yet better may a man fare (but at a dearer rate) in the pig-market, alias pasty-nook, or pie-corner, where pigs are all hours of the day on the stalls, piping hot, and would cry, (if they could speak,) ‘Come, eat me!’”

      The puppets and “motions” alluded to in the foregoing description were beginning to be a very favourite spectacle, and none of the puppet plays of the period were more popular than the serio-comic drama of Punch and Judy, attributed to Silvio Florillo, an Italian comic dramatist of the time. According to the original version of the story, which has undergone various changes, some of which have been made within the memory of the existing generation, Punch, in a paroxysm of jealousy, destroys his infant child, upon which Judy, in revenge, belabours him with a cudgel. The exasperated hunchback seizes another stick, beats his wife to death, and throws from the window the two corpses, which attracts the notice of a constable, who enters the house to arrest СКАЧАТЬ