Thursday, August 22, 2013

Rewriting a 100-year-old "gospel"!

We said Praesepe, in the constellation of Cancer, meant Manger. It also means Beehive, and thereon hangs the Cook's Tale. Chaucer knew all about bees--everybody did.
     We are about to challenge the proclamation of famed Chaucer scholar Bernhard ten Brink, who said the poet left the Cook's Tale of 47 lines unfinished because three vulgar stories in a row would be "too much for the reader." (The Miller and Reeve precede the Cook.) But ten Brink, in 1893, didn't see beneath the façade of the "licentious apprentice."
     The Cook's "litel jape (joke)" plays with similarities between animal and human behavior. Significantly, he tells of a victualler, a gatherer of foodstuffs, not of an apprentice cook as we might expect. No facial features, clothing, feet or hands are indicated, but signals of a hidden identity abound. The apprentice is "brown as a berry," "a proper short fellow," "like a hive full of honey," and "merry as a bird in the woods." This is an introduction to an English brown bee!
     Old riddles, where a bee is a "short little gentleman," a hive is a "convent of nuns" or a "mistress in a barn," and a swarm is a "heap of people on London Bridge" may have provided inspiration.
     The little fellow is called Perkyn Revelour because he dances "so wel and jolily." Perkyn revels with his kin. And Revelour, with velour being medieval French for velvet, touches upon his neatly combed lack hair. (A 19th-century beekeeper sees, not hair, but a "round velvet cap.") Daily activities characterize Perkyn. He hopped and sang at weddings, and played stringed instruments. And he preferred the tavern, with its mead and sweet wines, to the shop.
     Although proverbially hard-working, not all bees are industrious. Lazy drones and robber-bees consume disproportionate amounts of honey, spending carefree days in thievery. That's Perkyn--a good-for-nothing drone.
     He'd be sure to join a group that went riding out. Notice that the "riding" mentions no horses. These revels sometimes led to Newegate, assumed to mean Newgate Prison. Chaucer's "new gate," however, is much like the riddler's London "bridge."
     The revelers play at "dys." The surface intends men who love dice, but for bees, they love dyes--colorful flowers. The Middle Ages derived dyes (colors) only from plants and other natural substances.
     How can we understand that a bee--like Perkyn--is proficient in casting "dys"? A cast, in bee-terminology, is a disruptive after-swarm. Bees sometimes leave an established hive, fly off to engulf a blossoming branch, and never return to produce honey in their abandoned hive.
     For those who have never seen bees swarming, here's an old beekeeper's account of their flight:

The order comes. The captains echo it. With a furious roar the hordes are released, and a living stream of bees pours forth. Like flood water they emerge in a brown mass. The air becomes misty, then clouded with bees. A booming, organ-like note rises and swells over the fields.
     You may witness now for anything from five minutes to a quarter of an hour the complete abandon of an insect holiday. You may watch forty thousand bees indulging in ærial gymnastics and singing as they perform, but [soon] there is hardly a bee in the air, while from [a] branch hangs a great pear-shaped cluster.

When their outing ends, drones return to the hive and "gorge themselves" on honey. Compare Perkyn's action: following his meeting to "cast dys," he freely dispenses his master's  property and often leaves the box "bare." Though money is the assumed loss, the poet mentions no coins. Loss of honey is the bee-level intention.
     At the end of the honey-making season, misfits are driven from the hive and perish. Perkyn's master, the beekeeper, tires of the detrimental influence, and tells him to go--and good riddance! Some drones find temporary shelter in another hive. Perkyn is fortunate to join his "lowke," his accomplice in thefts. The two rascals "sowke" (suck) what they can steal or borrow. "Suck" is questionable to use in regard to men, but faultless when applied to bees.
     The story ends abruptly with the introduction of the companion's wife who "swyved for hir sustenance." "Swyving" identifies her as a prostitute--alternate 14th-century word, quene. Enter the "queen" bee. Though Chaucer's contemporaries did not understand the workings of the hive as we do, they did believe that royalty ruled.
     Entrance of a queen exposes the point of the joke. All we lack is another Pilgrim saying, "I get it now! You sure had me fooled."


    

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