Clive,
I am going to answer a few things today but will have to come back to this another day to comment fully on your comments. I will simply add to this reply as I get the time. What I skip over I am only temporarily ignoring.
"In durance", so you suggest, means "continually". Surely, in the context, the most likely meaning of "durance" is "Forced confinement, imprisonment; constraint" (OED, 5).
I quite agree
I do not follow your explanation of Tom’s arithmetic. Is this how it goes? "Fifteen" is recorded by the OED in the now obsolete sense of "fifteenth". Line 3 of verse 2 ("& of forty bin three times fifteen") therefore indicates "three fifteenths of forty", which is eight. Thus Tom was securely locked up in prison ("in durance soundlie caged") for eight years. The first two lines are more puzzling. Nigel offers one interesting idea. I wonder if a simpler explanation is available, however - namely, that this is not meant to make sense. The speaker offers himself as a madman, after all. Perhaps the lines should be paraphrased - crazily - like this: "Of the past thirty years I have been mad for forty, and for eight years of those forty I was securely locked up in prison".
This and the next question need to be answered together. see below.
"Under twenty-one he would not have money available to him and if older one supposes he would have been wiser." - You imply here and elsewhere that Tom at twenty-one inherited money. I see no evidence for this. Also, if Tom were in fact entitled to such an inheritance, it is not necessary to assume that he must have inherited it at twenty-one. A later age could well have been stipulated in any (supposed) will.
My explanation in my post was very poor. Reading those sections of "Tom 'O Bedlam" I recognized a "proverbial story"--an often told tale--a young man reaches his majority recieves his inheritence, goes on a spree becoming infatuated with a whore, she takes him for everything he has got, dumps him and he winds up in debter's prison. In my casual readings of 16th century literature I have come across that tale a couple of times. I recognized that "Tom's tale" was really that same tale being told as a riddle. Tom's original audience would be familar with his "often told tale of morality" but we are not. It is not a tale we tell any more. It is not included in our list of "boy meets girl" stories that our own modern literature repeats over and over again. BUT A 16TH CENTURY AUDIENCE WOULDNT NEED ALL THE FACTS TO GET THE MESSAGE--THEY ALREADY KNEW THE STORY AND COULD FILL IN THE BLANKS. Since I knew the tale I knew how old Tom was when he got his inheritencd--21, then add the proverbial year long spree and that takes him to 22. If he is now thirty then he has been in prison 8 years--3/15 of 40 equals 8----30-8=22. The arithmitic works out. It makes sense in terms of the proverbial story.
The "twice twenty" is a little more difficult--I have decided that it a hyperbolic phrase and has no arithmetical significance. "Twice twenty enraged" means "completely mad" or "hugely mad" "mad to the greatest extent possible" "twice twenty times mad". The other alternative is that it does mean 2/20 of 30 or three years mad---The meaning of the whole stanza being that Tom got tossed into debter's prison at the age of 22, served a total of 8 years but after the first five years the horrendous conditions of prison drove him mad--he was mad only for the last 3 years of his prison term. This makes a certain sense since madmen, after a time were set free from prison while debters were kept till they payed their debts--as I understand it--but the prison system back then is something I have an incomplete knowledge of so I could be wrong.
"Twice twenty" and "forty" of the next line are actually unconnected in meaning. Solving the riddle requires that you "not" connect them. A riddle is designed to confuse but be perfectly clear once you get the solution.
While "stews" were brothels, the word is derived from the use (in earlier times as, apparently, more recently) of heated bath-houses for immoral purposes. So, though an oblique allusion in "pottage" to brothels cannot be absolutely ruled out, it seems to me unlikely. Much more likely is the presence mentioned by Graves of an obscene allusion in "cockle", so that "with a thing thus tall" is a phallic brag, "thing" being a euphemism continuously alive in the language from the middle ages. (Graves also refers to "cockle-bread" as an aphrodisiac", but though the OED suggests a potentially obscene allusion, both derivation and sense remain unclear.)
Having a "bowl of cockle pottage" at a "stew" meant going to a whorehouse and fucking a whore. That I am absolutely sure of. "A thing thus tall" I am still not sure of.I now have a possible solution for the line "with a thing thus tall, skie blesse you all" which I will insert in my original post.
I suggest that "Conquest" here refers to the Norman Conquest of England in 1066.
I believe my gloss in my post is 100% correct.
The fourth verse is undoubtedly baffling. While I cannot say I understand it as a whole, I have one or two thoughts to offer. You suggest that "Sowce=souse meant to splash". The difficulty I have with this is that "souse" (or "sowce") does not seem to have been used as a past participle, as your reading requires. The past participle in all its senses is always "soused" (or a cognate spelling). To read the word as you do, I think you have to assume a copyist’s error, but from the available texts there seems to be no reason to make this assumption, especially as simpler interpretations are to hand. One is Graves’s suggestion that "sowce" means "sow’s", conventions in the use of apostrophes not having been standardised at the time of the manuscript under discussion. On this reading the line means "When I have shaved my beard short, my face being as hairy as a sow’s etc.". Sows, so Graves implies, are notably hairy. I propose an alternative reading, however, one more relevant to the following lines with their apparent references to drinking and drunkenness. This, based on a hint in the OED, takes the use of sow in "sowce face" ("sow’s face") as having the force it does in these quotations, which the OED lists under "sow" (i.e. female pig): "Some sowe dronke, swalowing meate without measure,this means pigging out on food, glutonary Some maudlayne dronke, mourning loudly and hye"This means lusting after a whore, drunk on a whore, exactly Tom's condition--"With a thought I took for Maudline from 1509 and, from 1522, "Yet shal ye find mo yt drink themself sow drunk of pride to be called good felowes, than for luste of the drink self."This says that some people spend their time in taverns more out of "peer pressure" (because they want their friends to like them) than because they actually like to drink. Of course back in 1522 no one had yet coined the pharase "peer pressure" but they obviously had noted the behavior. If this is right, then the line means, "When I have shaved close the beard on my drunkard’s face".
Since Giles was writing down what he heard--I can go along with "souce" being "sow's". The line then means "when I have run through all my money". He cuts off his beard (wastes his resources) by acting like an unthinking appetite driven pig. He has been drunk not on wine but on sex. Drunk a horny barrel meant "was sexually obsessed and acted out his obsession totally like drinking an entire barrel of wine".
I do not readily see the next two lines as referring to a debtor’s prison and to the task of pounding oakum. (One of my grandfathers, who died in his late eighties over forty years ago now, had been the labour-master in a poor house in the south of England till the early 1930s, when the system was overhauled. He was an acute observer of human beings and had the gift of vivid speech. I well remember his accounts of his experiences, including the supervision of male vagrants in the beating of oakum, a product for which, as late as his adult years, there was still a market.) I speculate, therefore that "oaken inne" means an oak wood (Graves suggests an oak tree), that to "pound" means to shut up or enclose (i.e. to impound), that "skin" is elliptical for the skin-bottle in which Tom keeps his liquor, a possession so valuable he refers to it as a garment made of gold cloth, "guilt" being an archaic spelling of "gilt". I feel uneasy about your suggestion that "guilt apparrell" is French for "apparent guilt". I was just trying "oakum" to see how it looked and to see if anyone commented. An oaken inn was actually the stocks. I am of the opinion that no lawyer back then would have had difficulty with "a suit of gilt appariel". It was probably a common joke that died out when the law changed about debters. Lawyers just forgot it. They lost the background.
The moon’s shepherd was surely Endymion of whom Selene, the moon goddess, was enamoured. The story was well-known in the period, Lyly, for instance, having written a play, "Endimion" (1591), based on the story, and Michael Drayton a narrative poem, "Endimion and Phœbe" (1595). I gave that some thought but decided for Apollo though it is pretty much of a toss-up. I have never read "Endimion" or Endimion and Phoebe" but when I get a chance I'll look at them and see if they contain a "deciding" factor.
I do not understand "the first doth horne the star of morne". "To horn" is to make a cuckold of, and, as you say, Aphrodite (Venus) certainly cuckolded her husband, Hephaestus, by lying with Ares (Mars). But the star of morn (not, surely, "stars" as posted) is Phosphor, the light-bearer (the planet Venus as seen at dawn, which, in the evening sky, becomes Hesper.) Though in a footnote Graves avers that "the Moon cuckolds Lucifer", who is the cuckold here, and who the cuckolder ("the first… and the next")?This is why I decided on Apollo. Apollo was the god of shepards and the stars sheep. The moon at morning was said to enter the arms of the sun. I am sure our understanding of this line will only increase as we play around with it.
On a wider aspect of the topic, to assume that the poem as it has come down to us is a set of riddles intended to puzzle and amuse its hearers is to assume something about the social and cultural context in which it flourished (that is, beyond the sanitising framework of anthologies). Graves proposes that its origins lie with the "Abraham-men", genuine and also sham beggars and lunatics, who wandered about England in the late sixteenth century living (or preying) upon casual charity. They seem to have constituted a recognisable subculture, with its own styles of dress (or undress), its characteristic dodges and special "turns", of which this poem is perhaps an instance. That such a subculture existed is evidenced not just by many contemporary prose accounts but also by Shakespeare’s introduction of the figure of Poor Tom into "King Lear", a figure he presumably thought would be recognised by audiences in 1604-5, more than three decades after the passing in 1572 of an act imposing severe penalties (including, after a third offence, the death penalty) on such vagabondage. I have been heading toward the conclusion that "Tom" has no one author but a couple. Graves thought that also--about the only thing he may have gotten right. But who knows what I will think six months from now. I dont. The existence of the various companion pieces to the poem, which Graves discusses, makes the same point. It is no doubt likely that there is a deliberate element of puzzle-making here; but given the kinds of audience - on the street or lane but also in the study and the theatre - to which this and other such poems might be regarded as having been addressed, and given, too, the underlying economic purpose of such "turns" in presenting a convincing impression of madness, is it is not just as likely that some lines are in fact meant to be nonsense? Indeed, one might suppose that, to the degree that they approach towards, without quite attaining, a cunning kind of sense, they achieve that end to even greater effect.Elizabethan writers didnt write "nonsense". Shakespeare's "The Phoenix and the Turtle" is just a riddle (which I have solved--after going through a process similar to what I am doing now with "Tom"). Language puzzles were big back then.
As I said in an earlier message, "Good luck"!
I appreciate the imput. Thanks Clive.
ewrgall
[This message has been edited by ewrgall (edited June 19, 2001).]
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