We British: The Poetry of a People. Andrew Marr

a classmate of Shakespeare’s more famous schoolboy:

      Forsooth Sir, my mind is this, at few words

      All my pleasure is in catching of birds

      And making of snowballs, and throwing the same.

      For which purpose to have set in frame,

      With my godfather God I would fain have spoken,

      Desiring him to have sent me by some token

Where I might have had great frost for my pitfalls*

      And plenty of snow to make my snowballs.

      This once had, boys lives be such as no man leads

      O, to see my snowballs light on my fellows heads

      And to hear the birds, how they flicker their wings

      in the pitfall, I say it passeth all things.

      Perhaps, on reflection, he’s more like an early English Dennis the Menace.

      In the end Jupiter realises that everybody wants a different kind of weather, and that to help one would be to destroy somebody else:

      All weathers in all places if men all times might hire,

      Who could live by other?

      Therefore he’s going to leave the unpredictable and ever-changing British weather where it is; which at least gives people something to talk about for the next few hundred years. Everybody is pleased – the schoolboy offers to make some snowballs for Jupiter the next time he’s back.

      By the middle of the century, it’s to drama that we look for the spirit of the times. That’s the case with the religious fanaticism already discussed: another leading playwright of the pre-Shakespearean theatre was John Bale, whose morality plays were basically anti-Catholic tirades, slashing in every direction at enemies of the true Protestant faith. In his Three Laws, for instance, Sodomy appears on stage boasting about how successful he is, particularly with the Catholic clergy:

      In the first age I began,

      And so persevered with man

      And still will if I can

      So long as he endure.

      If monkish sects renew,

      And popish priests continue

      Which are of my retinue

      To live I shall be sure.

      Clean marriage they forbid,

      Yet cannot their ways be hid …

      … In Rome with to me they fall,

      Both Bishop and Cardinal

      Monk, Friar, priest and all,

      More rank than they are ants.

      Example in Pope Julye,

      Which sought to have in his fury

      Two lads, and to use them beastly,

      From the Cardinal of Nantes.

      The accusation that priestly celibacy led straightforwardly to interfering with boys, particularly choirboys, seems to go back a long way; this is the uncensored language of the Protestant Reformation in full flood, many miles away from the aureate stanzas of the poets in the anthologies. Again, the boys who grew up to become the great playwrights of Elizabethan and Jacobean Britain were brought up on this kind of thing. In the same John Bale play, when Sodomy and Idolatry cackle together, surely we can hear the echo of the witches in Macbeth:

      Let her tell forth her matter

      With holy oil and watter,

      I can so cloyne and clatter

      That I can at the latter

      More subtleties contrive

      I can work wiles in battle,

      if I do once but spattle

      I can make corn and cattle

      That they shall never thrive …

      John Bale in his 1539 play Kynge Johan is also the author of the first history play we know of in English; sadly, he makes that too into little more than a diatribe against the wickedness of the Catholic Church.

      Much more genial plays are two versions of comedies by Terence, Ralph Roister-Doister from 1566, by the Eton and Westminster teacher Nicholas Udall; and Gammer Gurton’s Needle, first acted a year later at Christ’s College, Cambridge, and probably written by John Still, who later became the Bishop of Bath and Wells. These were two sober fellows – Udall was known for the severity of his thrashings of schoolboys, and Still was an eminent professor of divinity. But in each case they caught the tone of contemporary language in ways that none of the earlier morality plays had quite achieved. Roister-Doister is the story of the attempted wooing, then unsuccessful abduction, of a rich widow. Here is the villain’s boy or servant, protesting at the effect on him of Ralph’s frantic pursuit of his woman. The satirical asides on his work with the lute and gittern (a small stringed instrument of the time) are particularly wonderful.

      … now that my maister is new set on wooing,

      I trust there shall none of us finde lacke of doing:

      Two pair of shoes a day will now be too little

      To serve me, I must trot to and fro so mickle.

      – Go bear me this token, carry me this letter,

      Now this is the best way, now that way is better.

      Up before day sirs, I charge you, an hour or twain,

      Trudge, do me this message, and bring word quick again,

      If one miss but a minute, then his armes and wounds,

      I would not have slacked for ten thousand pounds.

      Nay see I beseeche you, if my most trusty page,

      Go not now about to hinder my marriage,

      So fervent hot wooing, and so far from wiving,

      I trow never was any creature living,

      With every woman is he in some loves pang,

      Then up to our lute at midnight, twangle-dome twang,

      Then twang with our sonnets, and twang with our dumps,

      And hey-hough from our heart, as heavy as lead lumps:

      Then to our recorder with toodleloodle poope

      As the howlet out of an ivy bushe should hoope.

      Anon to our gitterne, thrumpledum, thrumpledum thrum,

      Thrumpledum, thrumpledum, thrumpledum, thrumpledum thrum.

      This is a play known mainly to scholars these days, but I hope I’m not alone in feeling that some of these lines are worthy of Shakespeare: it’s the kind of thing we might have had from Malvolio at his most ridiculous.

      In Gammer Gurton’s Needle we have an even thinner plot – old lady loses her precious and valuable sewing needle in the leather trousers of her servant Hodge while mending them. Predictably it eventually turns up in his bottom. But again, the play is full of the authentic-sounding dialect of Cambridgeshire in Tudor times. Here is the opening speech, delivered by a servant who stumbles across the house in the immediate chaos of the needle’s loss:

      Many a mile have I walked, divers and sundry ways,

      And many a good man’s house have I been at in my days;

      Many a gossip’s cup in my time have I tasted,

      And many a broach and