The Southwark Mysteries (Oberon Book) by John Constable

Author:John Constable [Constable, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781849438537
Publisher: Oberon Books
Published: 2007-05-30T22:00:00+00:00

In the ‘Wilkes fragments’, the old hypocrite is mocked and vilified, as in this variant on a well-known nursery rhyme:

As Lucy Locket I lost my pocket.

As Kitty Fisher I found it.

I cut and spread and buttered me Bread

And danced a jig around it.

So raise your Cocks to Lucy Locket

And all the Whores of London,

But happy the man who has in his pocket

A stout and sturdy condom.

Kitty Fisher was one of the great courtesans of Georgian London who, as the rhyme implies, became Sandwich’s mistress, stealing him from Lucy Locket. Kitty evidently delighted in cuckolding and humiliating her new master. In the Royal Exchange, she called for a £10 note to be placed between two slices of bread and proceeded to eat it. It has been suggested that Sandwich served as a model for The Goose’s Minister of Morals.

SATAN: The Hebrew-Christian devil. He makes fleeting appearances in the Bible, tormenting Job, and failing to tempt Christ in the wilderness. The legend of the fallen angels derives from three verses in Revelation 12: 7–9. The medieval church embellished the legend, conflating the horned god Pan and other pagan deities to create its supreme embodiment of evil. Satan features prominently in the medieval Mystery Plays, a bawdy, scatological, pantomime villain, delighting in his own wickedness. In the Southwark Cycle he is “the Accuser,” invoking the moral law to stake his claim to the souls of “sinners”.

SEACOLE, Mary: A nurse. (See Nightingale.)

SFC: The Sexual Freedom Coalition, a “pansexual” libertarian alliance, founded by porn star and sex therapist Dr Tuppy Owens following the banning of her ‘Sex Maniac’s Ball’. The SFC’s campaign to reform Britain’s sex laws was based on two principles: “Consenting Adults. No Coercion.” JC reportedly performed The Book of The Goose at the SFC’s 1998 symposium, where he met Jahnet de Light.

SHAKESPEARE, William: (1564–1616). Poet and playwright. Little is known of the man from Stratford-upon-Avon, whose supposed gravestone bears no name. It is generally accepted that a Will Shakespeare, or Shagspur, was one of the eight Lord Chamberlain’s Men who held shares in The Globe. The parish records of St Saviour’s show that his brother Edmund was buried in what is now Southwark Cathedral. It is said he was buried in the morning, so the actors could perform in the afternoon – an example of the time-honoured adage that “the show must go on”. Will had evidently made a big impression on London’s theatre world by 1592, prompting Robert Greene to parody a line from Henry VI Part Three in his vitriolic attack on the young playwright:

…there is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tyger’s hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and… is in his own conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey…

Some have developed Greene’s charge of literary plagiarism, asserting that a butcher’s son, a mere jobbing actor or “Spear Shaker,” could not have been the author of such sublime works.

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