[Clive Watkins]

Hello again!

That Tom’s woes involve in part his encounters with Maudlin is clear enough, and it is reasonable to assume that his original audience, whatever this was, would have grasped this point. That he inherited a fortune which he then squandered is, however, by no means clear from the text which has come down to us.

In your original post you write as follows of the verse that begins "When I short have shorne my sowce face": "Basically this says that Tom (in short time) spends all his money on his whore and winds up in debtor's prison… Tom has made a fool of himself and used up his inheritance." But it is far from clear which words in this line, or in the subsequent lines, tell us that Tom has spent all his money on his whore. (Surely, too, it is wilful to read "short" as meaning "in short time" when one of the key images in the line concerns shaving.)

Of course, "short" cannot mean "short of cash" (which you do not suggest). This is a relatively modern usage; at the time of the Earle MS (1615), the word had not, it seems, acquired this idiomatic sense. The earliest appearance of "short" in this sense occurs in a quotation from 1752: "Being run short of money"; and in 1762 we find "I am so short in cash, that I am not able to pay my workmen".

By the way, your confidence that Tom must have been twenty-one when he inherited his supposed fortune still needs defending. In England in past centuries, different ages of majority applied in different circumstances. The source of this confidence seems to be your sense of what you see as the underlying tale, but which version are you relying on? To use it in support of your case, you will have to demonstrate its currency in a period relevant to the Earle MS.

Your new idea that "Twice twenty" in "Twice twenty enraged" is merely an intensifier is unnecessary - as well as unEnglish. Surely the point is the craziness of the arithmetic, part of the Abraham-man’s act to convince his audience he is mad. Furthermore, your willingness to distinguish between the apparent nonsense of line 2 and line 3 (""Twice twenty" and "forty" of the next line are actually unconnected in meaning") begs questions. On what basis are you deciding that part of the text is coherent and part is not? Or that two parts of the text are consistent with each other and two other parts are not? (In this connexion it is worth asking why you decided to exclude from your consideration of the verse beginning "The palsie plagues my pulses" and "The Gipsie snap & Pedro".)

"Having a "bowl of cockle pottage" at a "stew" etc." - Of course, the word "stew" is not mentioned anywhere in the surviving text, though of course the general sense of the lines seems clear.

As to your interpretation of the "Conquest", it is good to hear of your absolute confidence that "your gloss… is 100% correct."


I do think your project, though interesting, will need to address two fundamental matters before you can explicate this poem. One is the status of the text, which is uncertain. So far, this discussion-thread has relied on Graves’s text (itself based on unspecified research by Jack Lindsay), with the suppression noted above of verses 5 and 7. Graves was in many respects and on some topics a good scholar, but to achieve certainty of interpretation on the basis of a text whose authenticity you have not yet firmly established seems doomed.

The second point (it is clearly connected to the first) is the question of the intended or expected audience for the "original" text, assuming such a text could be established. Without going the whole way with Graves, there are strong reasons for believing that we have here a poem (or song) which arose within a particular social and cultural milieu, the well-attested vagabondage that occurred in England in the later sixteenth century. Your reading assumes the poem is a riddle. Riddles are written for specific audiences, and their difficulty is gauged by their contrivers in relation to the ability of their audience to decipher them. (As you say in your last post, a "riddle is designed to confuse but be perfectly clear once you get the solution.") So, riddles designed for children make assumptions different from those designed for adults; and of course among adults there can be wide variations in interpretative skill - and also of general education and background knowledge. What audience do you imagine for your "original" text? To whom is Tom’s "riddle" addressed?

As I noted elsewhere in connexion with your account of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 107, I have enjoyed thinking about these things and am to that extent grateful to you for provoking the discussion. I can see no way, however, in which anything further I might have to say on this present topic would be of any help to you.

Clive Watkins