A Brief Note on King John

In her recent paper Shakespeare, Guy of Warwick, and Chines of Beef, Katherine Duncan-Jones discusses the ‘Philip, sparrow’ passage in King John (see my previous post), and concludes that if the Bastard’s ‘sparrow’ reference in the passage is an allusion to Guy of Warwick, then that play must “ante-date King John, and cannot be later than the mid-1590s”. I want to make the brief point here that while this conclusion is perfectly reasonable, it’s not necessarily correct.

King John is usually dated 1595/6 and must have existed by 1598 at the latest (when Francis Meres mentioned it in Palladis Tamia), hence Duncan-Jones’s conclusion that if this passage in King John is an allusion to Guy, then the latter “cannot be later than the mid-1590s”.  The problem with this is that it implicitly assumes that performances of King John in the mid-1590s actually contained the ‘Philip, sparrow’ passage, and this is by no means certain. The only record of the play we have is the text in the First Folio, and how closely this text matched actual performances in Shakespeare's time, we have no idea.

If the ‘Philip, sparrow’ passage was integral to King John this wouldn’t be such a problem; we could be reasonably confident that it existed in any performance of the play. But the passage is the opposite of integral. It’s extremely short (14 lines). It’s entirely detachable from the main text.  It doesn’t exist in The Troublesome Raigne. It seems to serve some ‘immediate and topical point’ (see Cooper quote in The Mysterious James Gurney), and editors have ‘strained’ to interpret it (see Duncan-Jones quote in There's Toys Abroad). The passage looks like an addition to me, and my own tentative dating of Guy to 1598 is predicated on that assumption.

There's Toys Abroad

This is a follow up to my earlier post The Mysterious James Gurney. In that post, I discussed the possibility, first raised by E.A.J. Honigmann in his 1954 Arden edition of King John, that the following passage in that play might be an allusion to Sparrow in Guy of Warwick:

Enter Lady Faulconbridge and James Gurney

Bastard O me! ‘tis my mother. - How now, good lady?

What brings you here to court so hastily?

Lady Faulconbridge Where is that slave, thy brother? where is he,

That holds in chase mine honour up and down?

Bastard My brother Robert? old Sir Robert’s son?

Colbrand the giant, that same mighty man?

Is it Sir Robert’s son that you seek so?

Lady Faulconbridge Sir Robert’s son! Ay, thou unreverend boy –

Sir Robert’s son? – why scorn’st thou at Sir Robert?

He is Sir Robert’s son, and so art thou.

Bastard James Gurney, wilt thou give us leave awhile?

Gurney Good leave, good Philip.

Bastard  Philip? – sparrow! – James,

There’s toys abroad: anon I’ll tell thee more.

Exit Gurney.

In her recent book, Shakespeare: Upstart Crow to Sweet Swan: 1592-1623, Katherine Duncan-Jones points out that standard explanations of the Bastard’s reaction to being called Philip are “distinctly strained”, and that an alternative interpretation, consistent with the passage being an allusion to Sparrow in Guy of Warwick, is possible:

“Though it has been suggested that the Bastard rejects the name ‘Philip’ because he should now, since being publicly acknowledged as the son of Coeur de Lion, be called ‘Richard’, this seems distinctly strained, for it is not the Christian name that is definitive of his descent. I wonder whether there may not, rather, be an allusion here to The Tragical History, in which Guy of Warwick’s jesting companion, who is at his side in both England and Palestine, is called ‘Philip Sparrow’. Audience members familiar with The Tragical History may have recognized this as the Bastard staking out a claim for analogous proximity to King John, as his mirthful sidekick.”   

Standard editorial efforts at explaining that mysterious one-line wonder, James Gurney, are also ‘distinctly strained’:

“James Gurney Shakespeare rarely names plebian characters so precisely unless there is an ulterior motive. Perhaps the precision here hints that the Bastard has been ‘democratically’ friendly with his mother’s servants, as does Gurney’s addressing him by his first name;” [A.R.Braunmuller, King John, Oxford Edition, 1989]

Braunmuller’s unconvincing attempt to explain the precise naming of James Gurney demonstrates how hard it is to make sense of this passage in King John when you have no inkling that Shakespeare’s ‘ulterior motive’ may have been to allude to Guy of Warwick.

Even Honigmann, who obviously did have an inkling, finds it hard. In the last line of the passage, the Bastard tells James Gurney “There’s toys abroad: anon I’ll tell thee more”. Honigmann reads ‘There’s toys abroad’ as ‘There’s rumours abroad’, suggesting that it is “curious” that “Shakespeare drags in the Guy story” then adds “there’s rumours abroad”.

It is curious, but even more so than Honigmann himself thought. His suggestion would have been more convincing if instead of using a strained interpretation of ‘toys’ as ‘rumours’ he had just assumed that ‘toys’ meant what it generally meant in the Elizabethan period.

A check of the OED shows that in the abstract sense, ‘toy’ meant:

1. Amorous sport, dallying, toying; with pl., an act or piece of amorous

sport, a light caress.

2. A sportive or frisky movement; a piece of fun, amusement, or

entertainment; a fantastic act or practice; an antic, a trick.

3.a. A fantastic or trifling speech or piece of writing; a frivolous or

mocking speech; a foolish or idle tale; a funny story or remark, a jest,

joke, pun; a light or facetious composition.

3.b. (a) A light, frivolous, or lively tune. Obs.  (b) A particular turn or

phrase of melody in a bird's song

4.a. A foolish or idle fancy; a fantastic notion, odd conceit; a whim,

crotchet, caprice.

4.b. spec. A foolish or unreasoning dislike or aversion

5. gen. A thing of little or no value or importance, a trifle; a foolish or

senseless affair, a piece of nonsense; pl. trumpery, rubbish.

All these meanings convey the same general sense for ‘toy’ i.e. something trifling, light, foolish or idle, and this is the sense in which Shakespeare always uses it e.g.

More strange than true: I never may believe

These antique fables, nor these fairy toys.        (Midsummer Night’s Dream)

‘Rumours abroad’ is really not a good fit for ‘toys abroad’, and Honigmann missed an opportunity here. ‘There’s toys abroad’ could easily have been understood at the time as ‘there’s a foolish or idle tale ... a light or facetious composition ... abroad’ - perfectly apt, if the words were meant to allude to Guy of Warwick.

Nine Sparrows

In my paper Ben Jonson's 'Villanous Guy', I suggested that as part of his general lampooning of Ben Jonson in Satiromastix, Thomas Dekker had included an allusion to Guy of Warwick. Satiromastix was part of the ‘Poets' War’ (or ‘Poetomachia’ or ‘War of the Theatres’), a stage quarrel around 1599-1601 involving a sequence of plays by Jonson, Dekker, Marston and probably Shakespeare.

If Dekker alluded to Guy of Warwick during the Poets' War, might not Shakespeare have as well? Shakespeare’s part in the ‘war’ is disputed, but many scholars believe he was involved, and James Bednarz in Shakespeare & The Poets' War (2001) argues the case for this strongly, and, in particular, for the key role played by Troilus and Cressida in Shakespeare’s involvement.

A major part of Bednarz’s argument is that Shakespeare uses the character of Ajax in Troilus to satirise Jonson. This is not a new idea. It has been championed by a number of scholars, and goes back to the nineteenth century. Of course, it is also disputed by others.

I don’t intend to discuss the merits of this identification of Jonson with Ajax in Troilus, except to say that I believe it is sufficiently strong to warrant looking very closely at passages in the play involving Ajax. If Ajax is in part a representation of Jonson, then the following scene (Act 2, Scene 1) is especially interesting:

Enter Achilles and Patroclus

Achill. Why, how now, Ajax, wherefore do ye thus?

How now, Thersites, what's the matter, man?

Thers. You see him there, do you?

Achill. Ay: what's the matter?

Thers. Nay, look upon him.

Achill. So I do: what's the matter?

Thers. Nay but regard him well.

Achill. Well? - why, I do so.

Thers. But yet you look not well upon him, for who-

somever you take him to be, he is Ajax.

Achill. I know that, fool.

Thers. Ay, but that fool knows not himself.

Ajax. Therefore I beat thee.

Thers. Lo, lo, lo, lo, what modicums of wit he utters –

his evasions have ears thus long. I have bobbed

his brain more than he has beat my bones: I will

buy nine sparrows for a penny, and his pia mater

is not worth the nineth part of a sparrow. This lord,

Achilles - Ajax, who wears his wit in his belly and

his guts in his head - I'll tell you what I say of him.

No prizes for guessing what I’m going to say next. I suspect this 'Lo, lo, lo, lo' rant by Thersites, with its extended insulting of Ajax, may be a reference to Sparrow in Guy of Warwick. Yes, yes, I know about 'confirmation bias'. And I know that sometimes a sparrow is just a sparrow. But bear with me.

Thersites insults Ajax by criticizing his “modicums of wit” and then declares "I will buy nine sparrows for a penny, and his [Ajax’s] pia mater is not worth the nineth part of a sparrow". In other words, Ajax’s brain is not even worth one ninth of one ninth of a penny – basically, it’s worthless.

Editors of Troilus and Cressida have tried to explain the phrase 'nine sparrows for a penny' here – why Shakespeare chose nine rather than some other number - but without much success. Baldwin, in the New Variorum edition (1953), tried to derive the phrase from two biblical references, and subsequent editors have either ignored the phrase entirely or just quoted Baldwin (Palmer, 1982 Arden; Muir, 1982 Oxford, and Bevington, 1998 Arden) e.g.

73. nine sparrows for a penny] The average price between Matthew x.29 (two for a farthing) and Luke xii.6 (five for two farthings), as Variorum noted.

[Kenneth Palmer (ed.), Troilus and Cressida, Arden Shakespeare (1982), 154]

Baldwin's gloss is ingenious, but hardly convincing. Why Shakespeare would have bothered to average two different costings of sparrows from the Bible just to come up with the words “nine sparrows for a penny” is beyond me. If he had wanted to make a biblical reference he could have just referred to Matthew, say, and said something like: "I will buy two sparrows for a farthing, and his pia mater is not worth half a sparrow". That would have been insulting enough.

Rather than being the result of some abstruse computation, the 'nine sparrows' here is probably just a reflection of the scene in the Iliad from which this passage in Troilus and Cressida is derived. In the Iliad, Ulysses (not Ajax) beats Thersites for his railing, and shortly afterwards follows a passage about a brood of eight sparrows and the mother sparrow (making nine sparrows) being eaten by a serpent, thus portending nine years of fighting with Troy. That ‘nine sparrows for a penny’ gives a price equal to the average of the prices in Matthew and Luke is probably just a genuine coincidence.

If Shakespeare did get the nine sparrows from the Iliad, that was just a starting point. He then constructed an attack on Ajax based on the worth of nine sparrows and a redoubled emphasis on nine: "I will buy nine sparrows for a penny, and his pia mater is not worth the nineth part of a sparrow". The attack on Ajax is thus focused on sparrows, nine and worth. Or - if Bednarz and others are correct - the attack on Jonson is focused on sparrows, nine and worth. If so, it is hard (for me, anyway) not to see this as a rejoinder by Shakespeare to Jonson’s satirising him as Sparrow in Guy of Warwick.

Under my scenario, ‘sparrows’ alludes to ‘Sparrow’, of course. But what of ‘nine’ and ‘worth’ in the attack on Ajax? I suspect it is meant to allude to the Nine Worthies - and by implication Guy of Warwick, who was one of the Worthies. If this seems far-fetched, consider this: in Love's Labour's Lost Shakespeare had already explicitly connected Ajax with the Nine Worthies, in particular the Ninth Worthy:

You will be scraped out of the painted cloth for

this. Your lion, that holds his poleaxe sitting on a close-stool,

will be given to Ajax. He will be the ninth Worthy.

So is this 'Lo, lo, lo, lo' passage in Troilus and Cressida really an allusion to Jonson, Sparrow and Guy of Warwick? Or am I just suffering from a bad case of confirmation bias?  

I don't know. But I do think the passage is intriguing enough to give it a 'curious' rating.

Maybe even a curious+.

The Mysterious James Gurney

Scholars sometimes find themselves in a position where they think they may have discovered an important association of some kind, but aren’t really sure if it’s just coincidence or the real thing. This poses a dilemma: should they publish what they have, or wait for more evidence to come in?

A common technique to deal with this dilemma is to go ahead and note the association, but just say it is ‘curious’. It’s a pretty good strategy. If you turn out to be right, the association was worth noting, and you get the credit; if it turns out you were wrong, well, all you said was that it was curious.

E.A.J. Honigmann used this technique when glossing the following passage in his 1954 Arden edition of King John:

Enter Lady Faulconbridge and James Gurney

Bastard O me! ‘tis my mother. - How now, good lady?

What brings you here to court so hastily?

Lady Faulconbridge Where is that slave, thy brother? where is he,

That holds in chase mine honour up and down?

Bastard My brother Robert? old Sir Robert’s son?

Colbrand the giant, that same mighty man?

Is it Sir Robert’s son that you seek so?

Lady Faulconbridge Sir Robert’s son! Ay, thou unreverend boy –

Sir Robert’s son? – why scorn’st thou at Sir Robert?

He is Sir Robert’s son, and so art thou.

Bastard James Gurney, wilt thou give us leave awhile?

Gurney Good leave, good Philip.

Bastard  Philip? – sparrow! – James,

There’s toys abroad: anon I’ll tell thee more.

Exit Gurney.

Honigmann noted that the passage "would suit A. Harbage's thesis that Guy Earl of Warwick (1661) ('by B.J.') contains an early satire of Shakespeare ... It is curious that Shakespeare drags in the Guy story [by referring to Colbrand, the giant who Guy fights and defeats in the romance legend of Guy of Warwick] ... then recalls P.Sparrow ... whom B.J. first associated with Guy, adding ‘There’s rumours abroad’”.

In other words, it looks like the passage is a response by Shakespeare to being satirised as the clown Sparrow in Guy of Warwick. A number of scholars believe that the passage is exactly that. Helen Cooper discusses it at length in Guy of Warwick, Upstart Crows and Mounting Sparrows, Katherine Duncan-Jones accepts it in Shakespeare, Guy of Warwick, and Chines of Beef, and even Helen Moore, who is not committed to Harbage’s hypothesis, concedes in her Malone Society Edition of Guy of Warwick that it is “undoubtedly ‘curious’”.

A key, albeit very short, role in this pasage is that of James Gurney (spelled alternately ‘Gurney’ and ‘Gournie’ in the First Folio, but also spelled ‘Gournay’ at the time). James Gurney enters with Lady Faulconbridge, says one line, ‘Good leave, good Philip’, then exits. It’s not a role for the ages, though Samuel Taylor Coleridge was apparently quite excited by it [Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge]:

“For an instance of Shakespeare’s power in minimis, I generally quote James Gurney’s character in King John. How individual and comical he is with the four words allowed to his dramatic life!”

Ignoring Coleridge’s excess of zeal (or laudanum), we can see that James Gurney’s only real purpose in the passage is to serve as the prompt for the Bastard’s outburst “Philip? – sparrow! – James, There’s toys abroad”, as Helen Cooper noted:

“The juxtaposition of Colbrand and Sparrow suggests at the least an association on Shakespeare's own part. It also raises the further possibility that the [Bastard's] exclamation had some immediate and topical point recognisable by both players and audience ... Gurney, to whom the 'Sparrow' remark is made, seems to be introduced only in order to give the excuse for it.” [my italics]

This should put us on the alert for any other oddities about James Gurney, and there is indeed another one -  that he is called James Gurney at all. That is, it is odd that this inconsequential character is fully named. Characters with only one line in Shakespeare are usually just given a generic name ('Page’, 'Gentleman’, 'Commoner' etc), or at most only a first name (see Shakespeare characters, sorted by number of lines). The First Folio doesn’t tell us who James Gurney actually is, but he is usually assumed to be a servant, so why does Shakespeare go to the bother of fully naming him? Just ‘Servant’ would have sufficed, or if something more personal was required (though it doesn’t seem to be, really), just ‘James’ would have been fine. But ‘James Gurney’? Why did Shakespeare bother to give him a full name, and why did he make it ‘Gurney’?

Originally, I suspected that the answer to this question might lie in an allusion to some historical figure called Gurney, but after much fruitless Googling of the Gurneys I could only come to this conclusion - the Gurney family didn’t leave much of a mark on history. This left one alternative: that the meaning of the name itself might be the point. Since the etymology of the name Gurney is not of great general interest, this also led to much fruitless searching. Eventually, however, I stumbled on the following: Daniel Gurney, Supplement To The Record Of The House Of Gournay, London, 1858, a tome from the 19th century dedicated to the ‘House of Gournay’. On page 725, there’s a section on the origin of the name Gurney.

Now if you have read the Background or Articles section of this blog you will know my hypothesis: the clown Sparrow in Guy of Warwick is a satirical response to Shakespeare’s original satire of the Isle of Dogs affair in The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Sparrow’s genesis, if you like, was The Isle of Dogs, “a peninsula in the Thames known for its wet, marshy conditions”. Imagine my surprise then when I read the following in The House of Gournay:

“The derivation of the name Gournay appears to arise from this circumstance: Gore in Saxon, and I believe in Celtic, means mud, the Saxon genitive of which is Gorena; and Eye, which means waters, or island, is the second syllable of the word; hence Gorena-eye, the muddy waters or island.”

‘Muddy waters or island’! What are the chances that to a character whose only apparent purpose is to provoke an allusion to Sparrow in Guy of Warwick, Shakespeare has given a name more than a little evocative of the Isle of Dogs? For my hypothesis this is surely a Eureka moment?

Not really. More like a ‘you cannot be serious’ moment i.e. too good to be true.

But I’m recording it here anyway. It's surely worth noting as ‘curious’.