Scatology and Moral Meaning in Two English Renaissance Plays

A sufficiently generous response to the aesthetics of medieval drama may discern indirect and profound moral meaning in some of the scabrous language that has traditionally been regarded as crudity beneath serious literary interpretation.' The question of "naif" anachronism and anatopism can serve as an illustrative analogue. The generation of William Archer thought illogic about time and place an evasion of dramaturgical responsibility,2 but when Noah invokes the Trinity and the Shepherds in the Secunda Pastorum complain about English weather in Israel, the suggestion is implicit, we now see, that the nature of God is not bound by human measurement and that the Redemption knows no time or place. If we step away from our genteel sensibilities and from the assumption that in literary history later is always better,3 we may find that even base scatology has something sophisticated to say. It may, then, be a worthwhile venture to explore the almost forgotten meanings of turds and dunghills in medieval literature and art. Those meanings had not been forgotten in the Tudor period, as an analysis of Gammer Gurton's Needle can show; and Ben Jonson's sophisticated literary strategy in The Alchemist is evidence that the literary device retained its indirect expressiveness in Jacobean England, though the primary moral meaning of skatos had changed by Jonson's time.4