The first place I
came across the extraordinary old ballad known variously as Loving Mad Tom or Tom o’ Bedlam’s Song was in Rosemary Sutcliff’s delightful
children’s book Brother Dusty-Feet, which
I must have borrowed from Ilkley Public Library when I was nine or ten. Set in
Elizabethan times, it tells the story of orphan Hugh Copplestone who runs away
from his unkind aunt’s West Country home with his dog Argos, and joins a band of
travelling players. In the middle of Chapter 5 a ‘tall wild figure’ looms up out of
the dusk and joins the players’ campfire. He is a Tom-o’-Bedlam, a Bedlam
beggar, who sings softly to himself a magical verse which (Sutcliff explains) ‘was
a song that all the Tom-o’-Bedlams sang as they came and went along the roads’:
With a
host of furious fancies
Whereof
I am commander,
With a
flaming spear and a horse of air,
To the
Wilderness I wander.
With a
knight of ghosts and shadows
I
summoned am to tourney
Ten
leagues beyond the wide world’s end;
Methinks
it is no journey.
Soon
after, in a firelit ritual, the Tom-o’-Bedlam gives Hugh ‘seisin of the road’.
Not all
very tall people look like kings, but this one did, at least to Hugh; the king
of a lost country. […] He leaned down suddenly to stare into Hugh’s face, his
mad dark eyes blazing in the firelight. ‘Have you kept your vigil?’ he
demanded. ‘Have you kept it alone, with none but the stars and the Ancient Ones
for company?’
Hugh assents,
and the Tom-o’-Bedlam uses his dagger to cut a small square of turf which he
places in Hugh’s hands.
‘Now
swear fealty to the Brotherhood. Swear by the white dust of the road, and the
red fire at the long day’s end, and by the thing that always lies over the brow
of the next hill.’
The turf felt crumbly and damp in
Hugh’s hands, and faintly warm from the fire; and rather breathlessly, he swore
fealty.
‘So,’ said the Tom-o’-Bedlam. ‘That
is your Seisin. Seisin of the Road; Seisin of the Brotherhood.’
He drew himself up to his full
splendid height, and stood looking down at the gatherine round the fire. Then
he dropped the dagger on the trampled turf, where it stuck point down,
quivering and gleaming in the light of the flames.
And before it had stopped quivering,
he turned away, flinging up his arms to the night sky with a strange wild
gesture that made his ragged sleeves seem like wings; and als though he had
suddenly lost interest in the whole thing, wandered off into the darkness. As
he went, they heard him singing again:
‘With a knight of ghosts
and shadows
I summoned am to tourney
Ten leagues beyond the
wide world’s end;
Methinks it is no journey.
I loved Brother Dusty-Feet, and Tom-o’-Bedlam’s
song was a strong enchantment. I had a good memory for verse, and it stuck. A
few years later in my teens, I came across the whole poem in English and Scottish Ballads edited by
Robert Graves, and around about the same time, the folk-rock band Steeleye Span
released an album Please to See the King
containing a song called Bedlam Boys which
name-checked Tom-o’-Bedlam and sounded very similar, yet didn’t have the verses
I remembered so well from Brother Dusty-Feet.
Of course I knew ballads were found in many variants, so I assumed this was the
reason – but it seemed odd that Steeleye Span would choose one that left out such
wonderful lines.
But there I left the puzzle – if it was a puzzle – for more than twenty
years until, married and living in America, my husband and I were invited to a
regular folk-music session hosted by friends in their home. One evening I asked
if anyone there could perform Tom-o’-Bedlam
and lo and behold! a couple of very good musicians promptly gave a great
rendition of Steeleye Span’s Bedlam Boys.
‘You know,’ said I as they finished,
‘I’ve always wondered why that version doesn’t have the wonderful lines about the host of furious fancies and the knight of ghosts and shadows. I know
it exists; I remember reading it in Robert Graves’ book of English and Scottish
ballads.’ The two guys who’d performed it grinned, and one of them suggested
that Graves had probably written those lines himself, as they were obviously
far too good to be true!
I was rather cast down. I couldn’t
argue, having no proof, but although he might have had the poetic power to do
it, and even the urge – Graves sometimes did rewrite other poets’ work in order to
‘correct’ their ‘faults’ – I didn’t think he would have meddled with an old
ballad and passed it off as original. Still, there again it rested, only now
whenever I thought of Loving Mad Tom,
there was this question mark hanging over it.
Move on another couple of decades. I’m
reading one of Rudyard Kipling’s collections of short stories, Debits and Credits. One story, The Propagation of Knowledge, concerns
the schoolboy characters of Stalky &
Co. in whose exploits Kipling exaggerates and glorifies the events and
characters of his own schooldays. In this particular tale the short-sighted and
bookish Beetle (based on Kipling himself) discovers an old book in the school
library called Curiosities of Literature.
This
evening he fell upon a description of wandering, mad Elizabethan beggars, known
as Tom-o’-Bedlams, with incidental references to Edgar who plays at being a
Tom-o’-Bedlam in Lear, but whom
Beetle did not consider at all funny. Then, at the foot of a left-hand page,
leaped out on him a verse – of incommunicable splendour, opening doors into
inexplicable worlds – from a song which Tom-o’-Bedlams were supposed to sing.
It ran:
With a
heart* of furious fancies
Whereof
I am commander,
With a
burning spear and a horse of air
To the
wilderness I wander.
With a
knight of ghosts and shadows
I
summoned am to tourney,
Ten
leagues beyond the wide world’s end –
Methinks
it is no journey.
He sat,
mouthing and staring before him, till the prep-bell rang…
There can be
little doubt that this is the genuine experience of the young Rudyard Kipling,
for the Tom-o’-Bedlam poem itself serves no further purpose in the story. Instead,
Beetle and his friends ransack the book for other fascinating scraps of
information – such as the theory that Bacon wrote Shakespeare – with which they
can tease, provoke and distract their teachers.
Curiosities of Literature is
a real book written by Isaac D’Israeli, father of Benjamin Disraeli, published
in several volumes between 1791 and 1823. I went hunting online and found the lonely second volume of a three-volume set published in 1881 by
Frederick Warne, going cheap. I snapped it up, and there at the foot of a left-hand page,
just as Kipling describes, is the whole poem with that magical final verse. And
more! D'Israeli introduces the ballad with a lengthy essay in which he describes
this ‘race of singular mendicants’ whom he claims ‘appear to have been
the occasion of creating a species of wild fantastic poetry’ (my italics). The resources of
Bedlam (Bethlehem Hospital for the insane, founded 1247) were so limited that if the friends and relations of those it sheltered could not pay
to feed and clothe them, they were released to wander abroad as beggars,
‘chanting wild ditties and wearing a fantastical dress to attract the notice of
the charitable.’ The
Acadamy of Armoury, compiled by Randal Holme prior to 1688, describes this
costume in more detail and with some scepticism:
The
Bedlam has a long staff, and a cow or ox-horn by his side; his clothing
fantastic and ridiculous; for being a madman, he is madly decked and dressed
all over with rubins [ribbons], feathers, cuttings of cloth and what not, to
make him seem a madman, or one distracted, when he is no other than a wandering
and dissembling knave.
Numbers of ordinary
rogues adopted this ploy. In a coney-catching* pamphlet, English Villanies (c. 1608), Thomas Dekker complains of those who pretended
madness to ‘work upon the sympathy … or terrify the easy fears of women,
children and domestics’ who ‘refused nothing to a being who was as terrific to
them as “Robin Goodfellow” or “Raw-head and Bloody-bones”’ that came ‘whooping,
leaping, gambolling, wildly dancing, with a fierce or distracted look.’ And he
records the canting patter of these real or pretended Tom-o’-Bedlams:
‘Now
dame, well and wisely, what will you give poor Tom? One pound of your sheep’s-feathers
to make poor Tom a blanket? or one cutting of your sow’s side, no bigger than
my arm; or one piece of your salt meat to make poor Tom a sharing horn; or one
cross of your small silver, towards a pair of shoes; well and wisely, give poor
Tom an old sheet to keep him from the cold; or an old doublet and jerkin of my
master’s; well and wisely, God save the king and his counsel.’
These beggars were also known as Abraham men. In a second pamphlet, The Belman of London, also 1608, Dekker has another shot at them: 'Of all the mad rascals (that are of this wing) the Abraham-man is the most fantastick: The fellow (quoth this old Ladye of the Lake unto me) that sat half naked at table today, is the best Abraham man that ever came to my house, and the notablest villaine: he sweares he hath beene in Bedlam, and will talk frantickly of purpose; you see pinnes stucke in sundry places of his naked flesh, especially in his armes, which paine he gladly puts himselfe to [...] he calls himself by the name of poore Tom, and comming nere any body, cries out Poore Tome is a colde...'
D’Israeli quotes
from ‘a manuscript note transcribed from some of [John] Aubrey’s papers’:
‘Till the
breaking out of the civil wars, Tom-o’-Bedlams
did travel about the country; they had been poor distracted men, that had been
put into Bedlam, where recovering some soberness [sanity], they were
licentiated to go a-begging; ie., they had on their left arm an armilla, an
iron ring for the arm, about four inches long… They could not get it off; they
wore about their necks a great horn of an ox in a string or bawdry, which, when
they came to a house, they did wind, and they put the drink given to them into
this horn, whereto they put a stopple. Since the wars I do not remember to have
seen any one of them.’
All this led me (and
D’Israeli) to consider the character of Edgar in King Lear, a play that first appeared in print in 1608 about the
same time as Thomas Dekker’s coney-catching pamphlet English Villanies. Edgar, the true son of the Duke of Gloucester,
accused by his illegitmate brother Edmund of contemplating parricide, disguises
himself as one of the Bedlam beggars:
… who, with roaring voices
Strike
in their numbed and mortified arms
Pins,
wooden pricks, nails, sprigs of rosemary
And
with this horrible object from low farms,
Poor
pelting villages, sheep-cotes and mills
Sometime
with lunatic bans, sometimes with prayers
Enforce
their charity. ‘Poor Turlygood, poor Tom.’
King
Lear, Act 2 Sc. 2
Appearing to
Lear in the storm, he goes into floods of lilting, frenzied, poetic prose:
‘Who
gives anything to poor Tom, whom the foul fiend hath led through fire and
through flame, through ford and whirlpool, o’er bog and quagmire; that hath
laid knives under his pillow and halters in his pew, set ratsbane by his
porridge, made him proud of heart to ride a bay trotting horse over four-inched
bridges, to course his own shadow for a traitor. Bless thy five wits, Tom’s
a-cold! Oh, do, de, do, de, do de. Do poor Tom some charity, whom the foul fiend
vexes. There could I have him now, and there, and there again, and there.’
King Lear, Act 3, Sc. 4
‘An itinerant lunatic,’ says
D’Israeli, ‘chanting wild ditties, fancifully attired … a mixture of character
at once grotesque and plaintive …It is probable that the character of Edgar …
first introduced the conception into the poetical world,’ and he claims that the
composition of Tom-o’-Bedlam songs became for a while fashionable ‘among the
wits’ of the later 17th century. This one however, the subject of
his essay, is of more ancient date and ‘fraught with all the wild spirit of
this peculiar character’:
Tom-o’-Bedlam’s Song
From
the hag and hungry goblin
That
into rags would rend ye,
All the
spirits that stand by the naked man
In the
Book of Moons defend ye!
That of
your five sound senses
You
never be forsaken,
Nor
travel from yourselves with Tom
To
beg your bread and bacon.
Chorus:
Nor never sing any food any
feeding
Money, drink or clothing,
Come dame or maid,
Be not afraid,
For Tom will injure nothing.
Of
thirty bare years have I
Twice
twenty been enragèd;
And of
forty been
Three
times fifteen in durance soundly cagèd.
In the
lovely lofts of Bedlam
In
stubble soft and dainty,
Brave
bracelets strong, sweet whips, ding dong,
And
a wholesome hunger plenty.
And now I sing, etc
With a
thought I took for Maudlin
And a
cruse of cockle pottage,
And a
thing thus tall, sky bless you all,
I fell
into this dotage.
I slept
not till the Conquest,
Till
then I never wakèd,
Till
the roguish boy of love where I lay
Me
found, and stript me naked.
And now I sing, etc
When
short I have shorn my sow’s face
And
swigg’d my hornèd barrel,
In an
oaken inn do I pawn my skin
In a
suit of gilt apparel.
The
moon’s my constant mistress
And
the lovely owl my marrow
The flaming
drake and the night-crow make
Me
music to my sorrow.
While I do sing, etc
The
palsie plague my pulses
When I
prig your pigs or pullen [hens];
Your
culvers [doves] take, or matchless
make
Your
chanticleer and solan [gander];
When I
want provant, with Humphrey
I
sup, and when benighted
I
repose in Pauls with waking souls
And
never am affrighted.
But I do sing, etc
I know
more than Apollo,
For,
oft when he lies sleeping
I
behold the stars at mortal wars
And the
rounded* welkin weeping.
The
moon embraces her shepherd
And
the Queen of Love her warrior;
While
the first does horn the stars of the morn,
And
the next the heavenly farrier.
While I do sing, etc
With a
heart* of furious fancies
Whereof
I am commander,
With a
burning spear and a horse of air
To the
wilderness I wander,
With a
knight of ghosts and shadows
I
summoned am to tourney;
Ten
leagues beyond the wide world’s end;
Methinks
it is no journey!
So there it is!
There’s the song and there is the verse I read and loved as a child* in
Rosemary Sutcliff’s Brother Dusty-Feet:
proof that whoever wrote them, it wasn’t Robert Graves and the suggestion that
he might have passed off some of his own lines as Jacobean poetry can be
completely dismissed. (He did dive down a rabbit-warren of alternative versions
and speculative reconstructions in a 1927 essay, Loving Mad Tom, published in The
Crowning Privilege, 1955: but he was up-front about it.)
D’Israeli’s
source was ‘a very scarce collection entitled Wit and Drollery (1661). Graves attributes the title Loving Mad Tom to a 1683 edition of the
same collection – which I’m unable to verify. However, the version Graves published
in English and Scottish Ballads is
subtly different from D’Israeli’s. It contains two extra verses, sourced from
the earliest known version of Tom-o’-Bedlam:
a manuscript book belonging to Giles Earle, a friend of the musicianThomas
Campion, dating to 1615.
Nothing
much seems to be known about Earle other than that he was an enthusiast who
collected songs, music and lyrics in his commonplace book, Giles Earle His Booke, which was edited by the composer Peter
Warlock and post-humously published in 1932. Here indeed are the two verses
missing from D’Israeli’s version. They come directly before and after the verse
about the host of furious fancies.
The
gipsies Snap and Pedro
Are
none of Tom’s comradoes,
The
punk I scorn and the cut-purse sworn
And the
roaring boy’s bravadoes.
The
meek, the white, the gentle
Me
handle, touch and spare not
But
those that cross Tom Rhinoceros
Do
what the panther dare not.
***
I’ll
bark against the Dog-Star,
I’ll
crow away the morning,
I’ll
chase the moon till it be noon
And
make her leave her horning,
But
I’ll find merry mad Maudline,
And
seek whate’er betides her,
And I
will love beneath or above
The
dirty earth that hides her.
Stepping back a
little – and taking into account the role of Tom-o’-Bedlams in King Lear – it’s worth wondering who
wrote this song; or possibly touched it up. Robert Graves believed it had
‘obviously been rewritten by an educated person: hence the references to
Venus’s love affair with Mars, when she was unfaithful to her husband Vulcan,
“the Heavenly Farrier”, and to the Moon-goddess Selene’s love affair with
Endymion, the shepherd of Mount Latmos … though already married to Phosphoros,
the Morning Star.’ More intriguingly, Graves suggests that the ballad ‘was
probably sung in a Bankside theatre, because “Sky bless you all” is substituted for “God bless you all”; the Lord Chamberlain having forbidden God’s
name to be taken in vain on the stage.’
I checked: and this statute ‘for the
preventing and avoiding of the great abuse of the Holy Name of God in Stage
plays’ dates from 1606 but was not strictly enforced until Sir George Buck became
Master of the Revels in 1610 – a period which neatly brackets the 1608 date of
the first printed ‘Quarto’ edition of King
Lear.
Graves comments
further that ‘No other play of that period, except King Lear, is known into which Loving
Mad Tom could have been introduced’ – and speculating that it may have been
sung by Edgar after his decision to disguise himself as ‘Poor Tom’, he adds
that ‘if it does indeed come from King
Lear (though not necessarily written by Shakespeare), it will have given
the scene-shifters time to prepare the stage for:“Before Gloucester’s castle: Kent in the stocks.”’ But this cannot
be the case; Kent is put in the stocks well before Edgar makes his entrance. A
more likely moment for it to be sung would be in Act 3, between scenes 3 and 4.
Scene 3 is a brief exchange between Gloucester and his wicked son Edmond, indoors in Regan’s castle. In contrast, Scene 4
is set outside in the storm on the blasted heath, as Lear, Kent and the Fool
seek shelter in a hovel – likely placed at the back of the deep Jacobean stage.
In his Tom-o’-Bedlam guise, Edgar is already concealed in the hovel and
frightens the Fool, who cries: ‘Come not in here, nuncle! Here’s a spirit. Help
me, help me!’
But
this is Edgar’s first appearance as
Poor Tom; wouldn’t it be more effective to have him come on to the empty stage
in his mad rags, and sing Tom-o’-Bedlam’s song before disappearing into the
hovel as Lear and his companions arrive? It would give the audience a good
sight of him in this guise, and then – knowing where he’s hidden – they could anticipate
the shock of his discovery.
Impossible to say it ever happened.
Still, no less a personage than the American professor and literary critic Harold
Bloom believed that this hauntingly strange ballad has something of
Shakespeare’s touch. In his book How to
Read and Why (2000), he called Loving
Mad Tom ‘the greatest anonymous lyric in the language’, and of the verse
which begins, ‘I know more than Apollo’ he writes:-
To know
more than the sleeping sun god, Apollo, is also to know more than the rational.
Tom looks up at the night sky of falling stars … and contrasts these battles to
the embrace of the moon, Diana, with her shepherd-lover Endymion, and of the
planet Venus with her warrior, Mars. A mythological poet, Mad Tom is also a
master of intricate images: the crescent moon enfolds the morning star within
the crescent horns, while the Farrier, Vulcan, husband of Venus, is horned in
quite another sense, being cuckolded by the lustful Mars. …The stanza is
magical in its effect, adding strangeness to beauty…
Bloom adds, ‘I
think I hear Shakespeare himself in the extraordinary transitions of the next
stanza, in the sudden tonal drop into tenderness of the fifth and sixth lines, followed
by the defiant roar of lines seven and eight’
The gipsies,
Snap and Pedro
Are
none of Tom’s comradoes,
The
punk I scorn and the cutpurse sworn
And the
roaring boy’s bravadoes
The
meek, the white, the gentle
Me
handle, touch and spare not;
But
those who cross Tom Rhinoceros
Do
what the panther dare not…’
Who could this poet
be, he wondered, but Shakespeare? (Here is Harold Bloom talking about the poem in an interview on Youtube.)
For after all, so much of King Lear is
about madness and sadness, and poverty and beggars and fools, and the companies
of ‘poor naked wretches’ who, in Lear’s self-accusatory words, must ‘bide the pelting
of this pitiless storm’ –
How
shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your
looped and windowed raggedness, defend you
From
seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en
Too
little care of this.Take physic, pomp,
Expose
thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That
thou mayst shake the superflux to them
And
show the heavens more just.
The persistent
relevance of these words should give us all pause… Anyhow, I too like to think it’s
at least possible that Shakespeare touched up – transformed – a street ballad about Tom-o’-Bedlams for a
performance of King Lear.
But what about the Steeleye Span
song, to which they gave the title Bedlam
Boys? Well, it turns out not to be the same song at all. Remember Isaac
D’Israeli’s claim that Shakespeare’s Edgar/Poor Tom prompted a whole fashion
for songs written in his mad character? If true, it only adds to the likelihood
of Tom-o’-Bedlam’s Song having been sung
in the play; why should so many people imitate the ballad otherwise? For imitate it
they did.
Many more can be visited at this link. Isaak Walton mentions William Basse (c.1583-1653), a minor poet known
chiefly for an elegy on Shakespeare, as having written a ‘Tom o’ Bedlam’ song; this
one, published by Bishop Percy in his influential Reliques of English Poetry (1765), may be his. It begins:
Forth from my sad and darksome cell,
Or from the deepe abysse of hell,
Mad Tom is come into the world againe
To see if he can cure his distempered braine.
Feares and cares oppresse my soule;
Harke, howe the angrye Fureys houle!
Pluto laughes, and Proserpine is gladd
To see poore naked Tom of Bedlam madd.
Through the world I wander night and day,
To seeke my straggling senses,
In an angrye moode I mett old Time,
With his pentarchye of tenses;
When me he spyed, away he hyed,
For time will stay for no man:
In vaine with cryes I rent the skyes,
For pity is not common.
This is pretty
bad verse, but you can see how in the second stanza the poet has reverted to
the swinging rhythm and internal rhyme-scheme of the older poem. The same is
true of a deliberately satirical version written by the ‘witty
Bishop Corbet’ (1582-1635) which is called The
Distracted Puritan:
Am I mad, O noble Festus,
When zeal and godly knowledge
Have put me in hope to deal with the pope,
As well as the best in the college?
Boldly I preach, hate a cross, hate a surplice,
Mitres, copes, and rochets;
Come hear me pray nine times a day,
And fill your heads with crochets.
In the house of pure Emanuel
I had my education,
Where my friends surmise I dazel'd my eyes
With the sight of revelation.
Boldly I
preach, &c.
They bound me like a bedlam,
They lash'd my four poor quarters;
Whilst this I endure, faith makes me sure
To be one of Foxes martyrs.
Boldly I preach, &c.
And so on. Both
these ballads are clearly modelled on the original Tom-o’-Bedlam’s Song: evidence that it was well known enough to act
as the template and reference for other versions. Basse’s ballad (if it’s his)
is a poor imitation, while Bishop Corbet means merely to amuse his audience by
likening a Puritan to a madman. There are so many other derivative versions
that something must have set it all
going! Let one final anonymous example stand for all. It can be found in Wit and Drollery; joviall poems: a collection compiled by one John
Phillips between 1631-1706 and it too approximates the original scansion.
From forth the Elizian fields
A place of restlesse soules,
Mad Maudlin is come, to seek her naked Tom,
Hells fury she controules:
The damned laugh to see her,
Grim Pluto scolds and frets,
Caron is glad to see poor Maudlin mad,
And away his boat he gets:
Through the Earth, through the Sea, through unknown
iles
Through the lofty skies
Have I sought with sobs and cryes
For my hungry mad Tom, and my naked sad Tom,
Yet I know not whether he lives or dies.
My plaints makes Satyrs civil,
The Nimphs forget their singing;
The
Fairies have left their gambal and their theft
The
plants and the trees their springing.
It goes on (and
on, dragging in most of the Olympian pantheon) and concludes:
Stormy clouds and weather,
Shall call all souls together.
Against I find my Tomkin Ile provide a Pumkin,
And we will both be blithe together.
The voice in this
rather lame attempt is that of Tom’s lover Mad Maudlin, but a much
better version was chosen by Steeleye Span. It is Mad Maudlin, to find out Tom of Bedlam and was written by the
playwright Thomas D’Urfey for his collection of songs and ballads Wit and Mirth, or Pills to Purge Melancholy,
published in various volumes between 1698 and 1720. D’Urfey, too, closely follows
the rhythm and rhyme-scheme of the earlier ballad. I imagine that the song’s
female perspective must have increased its appeal for Steeleye Span’s vocalist
Maddy Prior, and I’m rather sorry they decided to rename it.
So at last I know
why there’s no knight of ghosts and shadows, no burning spear and no horse of
air in the Steeleye Span song. Mad
Maudlin is not an imitation but a response to the older ballad. There’d
been a fashion for poets to write responses to other poet’s songs. The best
known is Walter Raleigh’s The Nymph’s
Reply to the Shepherd (1600) which answers Kit Marlowe’s The Passionate Shepherd to His Love (1599).
Marlowe’s poem received other replies too, right down to John Donne’s The Bait (1633). D’Urfey may even have been mocking the tradition with this exchange
between two mad beggars; the point would have been entirely lost, however, if
the original were not still well known.
D’Urfey’s ballad is vigorous and
imaginative. It rivals some of the grotesqueries of the original – ‘To cut
mince pies from children’s thighs/With which to feed the fairies’ is
particularly striking. And it scans, which is more than some of the others quite
manage. But the overall tone is rough and scurrilous: it doesn’t begin to
attempt the lyric tenderness and heights of fantasy to which Tom-o’-Bedlam’s Song so effortlessly soars.
With a
host of furious fancies
Whereof
I am commander,
With a
burning spear and a horse of air
To the
wilderness I wander,
With a
knight of ghosts and shadows
I
summoned am to tourney;
Ten
leagues beyond the wide world’s end;
Methinks
it is no journey.
For Rudyard
Kipling these lines breathed ‘incommunicable splendour, opening doors into
inexplicable worlds.’ Harold Bloom spoke of their astonishing power. Robert
Graves did not commit to the ballad being ‘necessarily the work of
Shakespeare’, but pointed to evidence suggesting it may have been sung during
performances of King Lear in
Shakespeare’s own lifetime. And for Isaac D’Israeli it was ‘delirious and
fantastic; strokes of sublime imagination … mixed with familiar comic humour.’
He added, ‘The last stanza of this Bedlam song contains the seeds of exquisite
romance; a stanza worth many an admired poem.’
I
wholeheartedly agree. If ever a poem opened a magic casement on to the foam of
perilous seas in faery lands forlorn, Tom-o’-Bedlam’s
Song does it for me. And thankyou to Rosemary Sutcliff for introducing me to it, in a book which as the best children's books often do, has stayed with me for life.
*Coney-catching was a cant term used by the
Elizabethan underworld. Petty thieves, card-sharps, pick-pockets and confidence
tricksters were the ‘catchers’; their victims were the ‘coneys’ – which means
rabbits.
*Not quite. In D’Israeli’s version, ‘heart’ may be a
misprint for ‘host’, and ‘the rounded welkin’, though it makes sense, is more vividly ‘the wounded
welkin’ in the earliest known version of Giles Earle.
Picture credits:
Beggar Looking Through his Hat, attributed to Jacques Bellange, Walters Art Museum Baltimore wiki
Bedlam Beggar: detail, woodcut, British Library
Abraham Man, Thomas Dekker, British Library
Tom o' Bedlam, by Norman Lindsay
Street Ballad: The New Tom o' Bedlam: British Library
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