Three Merry Men
DESCRIPTION: "Three merry men and three merry men, And three merry men be we. I in the wood and thou on the ground, And Jack sleeps in the tree"
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1859 (Chappell-PopularMusicOfTheOldenTime); reputed to be from 1600 or earlier
KEYWORDS: nonballad
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (2 citations):
Chappell-PopularMusicOfTheOldenTime, p. 216, "Three Merry Men" (1 short text, 1 tune)
Chappell/Wooldridge-OldEnglishPopularMusic I, p. 197, "Three Merry Men" (1 short text, 1 tune)
Roud #23125
NOTES [1249 words]: This is a conundrum. The tune is from John Playford's commonplace book -- hardly evidence of the song being traditional. Yet there are numerous alleged citations. Chappell claims that the earliest is from Peele's "The Old Wives' Tale" of 1595. Chappell mentions four other obscure early plays that cite the play. And then there are the two big ones:
In Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, Act II, scene iii, Sir Toby Belch sings "Three merry men be we." (This is lines 76-77 in the Riverside and Signet Shakespeares, though because there is a lot of prose in this scene, it might be anywhere between about line 69 and line 85.)
And in The Knight of the Burning Pestle, by Francis Beaumont (possibly with John Fletcher), Old Merrythought, who is always singing snatches of traditional and popular songs, sings
I am three merry men, and three merry men.
(Act II, scene vii, line 8 in Wine, where it is on page 333; Act II, line 438 in KnightOfBurningPestle/Hattaway, where it is on p. 53; Act II, line 445 in KnightOfBurningPestle/Zitner, where it is on p. 100, with Chappell's text and tune on p. 177.)
The question, which we cannot answer, is whether all these fragments are indeed of this song. If they are, then the song was surely well enough known to belong in this Index. Since I can't say with certainty either way, I've indexed the song.
For me, the strongest evidence for the song is its inclusion in "The Knight of the Burning Pestle." This play should almost be indexed in itself, including as it does so many fragments of traditional songs, including what appear to be parts of:
* Fair Margaret and Sweet William [Child 74]
* Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard [Child 81]
* The Knight and the Shepherd's Daughter [Child 110]
* Go From My Window (I)
* Guy of Warwick
* Hey, Ho, Nobody Home
* Katie Cruel (The Leeboy's Lassie; I Know Where I'm Going)
* Of All the Birds
* Walsingham
There is also a reference to, although not a quotation of, John Dory [Child 284], a likely allusion to "The Romish Lady" [Laws Q32], and a mention of the word "Baloo" that editors believe is an allusion to "Lady Anne Bothwell's Lament." It has a performance of "Fortune My Foe" although it does not quote the text. Other songs in the play have been forgotten, or are preserved in collections such as Ravenscroft's but do not seem to have survived in tradition. It is hard to tell which of the songs the play quotes are traditional, and which merely "popular," but odds are that most of them are one or another.
Casual listings refer to the play as by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, because they did collaborate, and most of their works were eventually published together; most seventeenth century sources attribute it to both (this might have made the printed editions more salable. But most modern editors think that it is Beaumont's alone, or at least that he wrote the vast majority of it with Fletcher adding only a few touches (KnightOfBurningPestle/Hattaway, pp. vii-viii; KnightOfBurningPestle/Zitner, pp. 8-10).
The play was first printed, without attribution, in a quarto dated 1613 printed for Walter Burre -- which, interestingly, is not to be found in the Stationer's Register, implying that it is an illicit copy (KnightOfBurningPestle/Zitner, p. 1 -- though the text is not noticeably worse than authorized editions of other plays). There is a copy of this cover on p. 289 of Wine; it is a typical work of the period, with Roman and Italic type, with the play title at the top, followed by a Latin quotation from Horace, an elaborate printer's dingbat, and the statement that it was printed for Burre.
Although no printer is listed, bibliographic considerations indicate that it was printed by Nicholas Okes (KnightOfBurningPestle/Zitner, p. 3), who printed many dramas by famous authors but on at least two other occasions got in trouble for printing an illicit work (Plomer, pp. 167, 172). This is the only copy with any authority; all other printings are taken from it. It is thought to be an author's fair copy, not a stage prompt book or the like (KnightOfBurningPestle/Zitner, p. 1).
Nonetheless the play can be shown to be somewhat older than 1613. Burre himself said that he had had the manuscript for two years before printing it (KnightOfBurningPestle/Zitner, p. 1). And there is good reason to think that it was acted before that -- and did not succeed. (It would do much better in a revival in the 1630s, which caused Okes to reprint the text, and it has been popular ever since; (KnightOfBurningPestle/Zitner, p. 5.) It is generally thought that it was first presented in 1607, or perhaps 1608, by a children's company at the Second Blackfriars Theatre (KnightOfBurningPestle/Zitner, p. 6; on p. 12 he says that the company was likely the Children of the Queen's Revels, also known as the Children of Blackfriars, adding that all the major playwrights except Shakespeare wrote for the children's companies).
I rather suspect this explains its initial failure, because the Blackfriars drew a highbrow audience that wouldn't have much sympathy with the ordinary folk of the play.
The 1607 date fits with a statement early in the play that the theatre had been presenting plays for seven years; the Blackfriars ran its first childrens' show in 1600 (KnightOfBurningPestle/Zitner, p. 11). A few allusions to other plays make it unlikely that it was earlier than 1607 (KnightOfBurningPestle/Hattaway, p. viii).There are other reasons for the 1607 date, but they are probably too subtle to be worth trying to explain here. There are a few scholars who prefer a date of 1610.
The drama goes the "play within a play" of Shakespeare's "The Taming of the Shrew" one better. Not only do we see an audience watching a play, the claimed "audience members" take over the play and demand it be made to conform more closely to their desires: Instead of some fusty old drama, they want a play about their own grocer lad, Rafe, who becomes the "Knight of the Burning Pestle." Or, as Drabble/Stringer put it in their entry on the play,
"It takes the form of a play-within-a-play: a grocer and his wife, members of an audience about to watch a drama called 'The London Merchant,' interrupt the prologue to insist that their apprentice, Rafe, have a part. He therefore becomes a Grocer Errant, with a burning pestle portrayed on his shield, and undertakes various absurd adventures. These are interspersed with the real real plot, in which Jasper, a merchant's apprentice, woos, and after much opposition wins, his master's daughter Luce."
It is Jasper's father, Old Merrythought, who sings most of the songs in the play.
Francis Beaumont (1584-March 6, 1616) "was born in Grace-Dieu, his ancestral estate in Leistershire, the third son of Francis Beaumont, a judge of common pleas, and Anne Pierrepoint." He was sent to what later became Pembroke College in Oxford at the age of twelve, but probably left two years later when his father died. He drifted to London, and knew Shakespeare, and was friends with Ben Jonson. He probably met John Fletcher, with whom his name has always been associated, around 1605. He married Ursula Isley in 1613; they had two daughters (the second one posthumous) before he died suddenly of some sort of fever (Kunitz/Haycraft, pp. 32-33). The most noteworthy works in their joint canon -- the only two I have ever seen printed outside their collected works -- are the "Knight" (which, to repeat, is probably Beaumont's alone) and the tragicomedy "Philaster."- RBW
Bibliography- Drabble/Stringer: Margaret Drabble and Jenny Stringer, The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature, Oxford University Press, 1996
- KnightOfBurningPestle/Hattaway: Francis Beaumont, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, edited by Michael Hattaway, New Mermaids, 1969; second edition, 2002 (I use the 2013 paperback edition)
- KnightOfBurningPestle/Zitner: Francis Beaumont, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, edited by Sheldon P. Zitner, The Revels Plays, 1984 (I use the 2004 Manchester University Press edition)
- Kunitz/Haycraft: Stanley J. Kunitz and Howard Haycraft, Editors, British Authors Before 1800: A Biographical Dictionary, H. W. Wilson, 1952 (I use the fourth printing of 1965)
- Plomer: Henry R. Plomer, A Short History of English Printing: 1476-1898, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Company, 1900
- Wine: M. L. Wine, editor, Drama of the English Renaissance, Modern Library, 1969
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