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LELIA’S KISS
Imagining Gender, Sex, and Marriage
in Italian Renaissance Comedy
This page intentionally left blank
LAURA GIANNETTI

Lelia’s Kiss
Imagining Gender, Sex, and Marriage
in Italian Renaissance Comedy

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS

Toronto Buffalo London
© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2009
Toronto Buffalo London
www.utppublishing.com
Printed in Canada

ISBN 978-0-8020-9951-8

Printed on acid-free paper

Toronto Italian Studies

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Giannetti, Laura
Leila’s kiss : imagining gender, sex, and marriage in Italian
Renaissance comedy / Laura Giannetti.

(Toronto Italian studies)

Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8020-9951-8

1. Italian drama (Comedy) – History and criticism. 2. Italian drama –

To 1700 – History and criticism. 3. Sex role in literature. 4. Gender
identity in literature. 5. Sex in literature. 6. Marriage in literature.
7. Masculinity in literature. 8. Feminity in literature. 9. Theater –
Italy – History. I. Title. II. Series: Toronto Italian studies

PQ4149.G52 2009 852⬘.05230902 C2009-904137-5

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its

publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario
Arts Council.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its

publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book
Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).
per Guido
This page intentionally left blank
Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: Lelia’s Kiss and Renaissance Comedy 3

1 Women in Men’s Clothing: Female Cross-Dressing Plays and the
Construction of Feminine Identity 24
2 Woman with Woman: ‘Ma che potrà succedermi se io donna amo
una Donna?’ 76
3 Men in Women’s Clothing: Male Cross-Dressing Plays and the
Construction of Masculine Identity 113
4 Pedants, Candlemakers, and Boys: Sodomy and Comedy 153
5 The Playing of Matrimony 193

Notes 233
Bibliography 283
Index 305
This page intentionally left blank
Acknowledgments

With the usual scholarly serendipity, this book grew out of a paper writ-
ten for a graduate seminar at the University of Connecticut. My fascina-
tion with the comedy Gl’ingannati by the Accademici Intronati of Siena
and its protagonist, the young cross-dressed heroine Lelia, began there.
Since then, nourished by my interest in studies of gender and sexual-
ity combined with extensive readings of sixteenth-century Italian com-
edies outside the canon, it has grown into Lelia’s Kiss. At a deeper level,
however, this book is also a tribute to what I have learned about Italian
Renaissance literature and culture, studying and teaching in the United
States. My earlier studies at the University of Venice in history and phi-
losophy and my years working in Italy came to fruition in that univer-
sity system that was more open to innovative thinking, interdisciplinary
research, and collaborative work. In that context, I am especially grateful
to a group of friends and colleagues whose writings, methodologies, and
brilliant ideas have influenced me greatly: Albert Russell Ascoli, Konrad
Eisenbichler, Joanne Ferraro, Valeria Finucci, and Deanna Shemek. I am
also indebted to them for countless readings of my work, suggestions,
discussions, corrections, and, finally, for writing many much appreciated
letters of recommendation.
Lelia’s Kiss was written mainly during my tenure as an assistant profes-
sor of Italian at the University of Miami. I am grateful to the Department
of Modern Languages and Literatures there and in particular to three
colleagues who, as fellow early modernists, were particularly helpful and
supportive: Maria Galli Stampino, Anne Cruz, and Barbara Woshinsky.
They, along with many other colleagues and friends at the University of
Miami, especially Mary Lindemann and Mihoko Suzuki, made my life as
a scholar in Miami much more enjoyable and fruitful. I would also like
x Acknowledgments

to acknowledge the generous financial support I had from the univer-

sity in the form of two Orovitz Summer Research Awards and a General
Research Support Award.
In Italy I have benefited from the strong support and practical help
of many friends who ‘forgave’ me for immigrating to the States: but
especially Michela dal Borgo, senior archivist at the Archivio di Stato in
Venice, and her husband Sandro (‘Sandrino’) Bosato. From their dis-
covering documents and procuring articles hard to find in the States to
preparing fish dinners in the proper Venetian way, they are an example
of friendship that has greatly enriched my life and my career. Outside of
the academic world, a group of friends in Treviso have helped me over
the years much more than they could ever imagine: particularly, Virna
Pozzobon, Roberto Zambon, and Mauro Zilio. I owe them many debts
for countless dinner invitations, practical computer help, and hours of
patient listening to my tales regarding American life and this book’s
genesis.
Many other colleagues and friends have contributed to this work;
unfortunately, there are too many to thank them all here. Still I would
like to at least to single out Roland Anderson, Sophie de Schaepdrijver,
Julia Hairston, Ronnie Hsia, Ann Rosalind Jones, Robert Lima, Dennis
Looney, Michael Miller, Ed Muir, Claudio Povolo, Robert Proctor, Gregg
A. Roeber, Margaret Rosenthal, Don Spivey and Diane Spivey, Londa
Schiebinger, Peter Stallybrass, Jane Tylus, and Linda Woodbridge for
their friendship and support over the years. I was extremely lucky to find
on my way to this book the support and help of my editor at University of
Toronto Press, Ron Schoeffel, whose faith in it has made things smooth
and easy. And for the ‘Allegoria amorosa’ that appears on the cover of
this book, I am indebted to three friends who helped me find the pic-
ture and secure the permission to reproduce it: Aurora Di Maio, Paola
Marini, and Giovanni Pagliarulo.
I want to also thank my sister Rita Giannetti who always believed in
my scholarly career, my brother-in-law Valentino Gastini who provided
psychological reassurance, and my niece Alice for her good humour and
patience with her zia d’America. But my strongest supporter has always
been my mother Delma Peruch, a lover of art and literature, a cultured
woman and the person who had the greatest influence on my passion
for the study of the Italian Renaissance. Although she did not have the
opportunity to follow her own intellectual passions in the war-torn years
of her youth, she was a pillar of support and encouragement from my
first days in school through to my laurea and onward; I am very grateful
 Acknowledgments xi

for her unfailing faith in me. I also would like to remember here my
father Aulo; there have been too many years since he passed away, but
the inspiration that his education and enthusiasm for learning has had
on my life has been enormous.
Finally and without any rhetoric, this book would have never been con-
ceived and realized without the presence of the companion of my life,
Guido Ruggiero, with whom I share a passion for the Italian Renaissance
and to whom this book is dedicated with love. Since that hot June day
of many years ago when we first met in the Archivio di Stato in Venice,
Guido has been the guida of my life, my mentor, critic, supporter, and,
finally, lover and companion. Guido was the first to suggest several years
ago that I look with a little more attention at the comedy Gl’ingannati:
I did and I did not know at that time that the end result would be this
book. To Guido’s teaching, insights, critiques and suggestions, this book
owes much more than my words could ever convey. I am glad that on
that hot June day in Venice, I responded positively to his kind invitation
in Italian to start up a conversation that has since continued to enrich my
life and my work.

Lelia’s Kiss was originally written in Italian and then translated into Eng-
lish in an early phase of the editing process of the manuscript: I want to
thank Sarah Rolfe who showed patience and good skills with the trans-
lation of chapters 1 to 4, and Guido Ruggiero who generously helped
me with the translation of the introduction and chapter 5 and with
quotations from sixteenth-century books. A reduced version of chapter
2 appeared with the title ‘“Ma che potrà succedermi se io donna amo una
Donna”: Female-Female Desire in Italian Renaissance Comedy’ in Ren-
aissance Drama Journal, Special Issue, ‘Italy and the Drama of Europe,’
edited by Albert Russell Ascoli and William West, vol. 37 (2009). I would
like to thank both the editors and Renaissance Drama for permission to
publish this expanded version here.
This page intentionally left blank
LELIA’S KISS
Imagining Gender, Sex, and Marriage
in Italian Renaissance Comedy
This page intentionally left blank
Introduction: Lelia’s Kiss and Renaissance
Comedy

‘To seem to be a woman or to seem to be a man?’ is not quite as dramatic

as the later ‘To be or not to be?’ of Hamlet, but often it was the ques-
tion in Italian Renaissance comedy. Imagine on stage the following scene
between a young couple, who will remain anonymous for the moment,
and the comments of two servants who watch:

(In a doorway with the servants Crivello and Scatizza hiding nearby watch-
ing)
Young Man: Now what else do you want?
Young Woman: Listen a little.
Young Man: I’m listening.
Young Woman: Do you see anyone out on the street?
Young Man: Not a living soul.
Crivello: What the devil is she up to?
Scatizza: Let’s wait and see.
Young Woman: Listen, just a word.
Crivello: They’re very close together …1

The young couple continues their conversation with growing intensity

as the servants, looking on, become more and more excited. Then the
young woman puts her hands on the young man to keep him from leav-
ing, apparently (at least in the eyes of the watchers) intending more.
Scatizza queries his friend, ‘Where does she have her hands?’ and quick-
ly implores the young man, ‘Go ahead, kiss her.’ Then, as the servants
watch, things get a little more serious:

Young Woman: I want one favour from you.

4 Lelia’s Kiss

Young Man: What?

Young Woman: Come this way a little more into the doorway. (She tries to
kiss him.)
Scatizza: The deed is all but done!
Young Woman: (as the young man pulls away) Oh, you’re so difficult.
Young Man: We’ll be seen. (The young woman grabs the young man and
kisses him.)
Crivello: Oh my! Oh my! Why not me?
Scatizza: Didn’t I tell you he’d kiss her?
Crivello: I’ll tell you right out. I would have rather seen that kiss than earn
a hundred scudi. (II, vi, 164, 236–7)

The conversation continues until the young man explains that he has
to leave because his master is waiting for him. This makes the kiss in the
doorway even more transgressive and explains why the servant Crivello
wished that he was in the young boy’s place, for the kiss was not just
between a young man and a young woman, it was between a young male
servant like Crivello and a young gentlewoman. Crossing social divides,
it was no ordinary kiss. But as the youth starts to leave the young woman
kisses him again:

Young Woman: Wait a second. (She kisses him again.)

Crivello: Wow! And now it’s two! May he dry up and go limp!
Scatizza: My God, I’ve got a leg so hard it seems ready to explode!
Young Man: Close the door, now. Goodbye.
Young Woman: I’m totally yours.
Young Man: And I’m yours. (II, vi, 165, 237)

The kisses of this young couple might seem fairly innocuous, given the
bawdy and often erotically transgressive play of Italian Renaissance com-
edy, aside from the apparent social inequality of the two young lovers
which clearly added to the voyeuristic excitement of the watching serv-
ants. But the title of this famous comedy, written anonymously and first
performed in 1532 by the equally famous literary academy of the Intro-
nati of Siena, Gl’ingannati (The Deceived), tells the tale. For in the tissue
of deceptions that make up the action of the comedy, there were several
deceptions at play on the stage in those kisses. First, although the young
man appeared to be a page or servant, that was not the case. The young
couple was actually well-matched socially, a fact which the audience knew
and which made the kiss a little less troubling for them, along with mak-
 Introduction 5

ing the servants’ misplaced excitement a little less socially transgressive

and more laughable than reproachable.
But there were layers of more telling deceptions yet. Perhaps most
notably for the gendered and erotic texture of the kisses, the audience
was aware that the characters kissing were, in fact, two women. For the
young man was actually Lelia, a young woman who had disguised herself
as a man in order to serve and be close to the man she loved, Flamminio.
Her disguise was so successful that she had won instead the love of the
young woman, Isabella, who kissed her not once but twice and clearly
desired more. Those apparently innocent kisses were considerably less
innocent than they appeared to be, at least on the part of Lelia. Finally,
as if to stress that point for the audience, as she leaves Isabella, Lelia
comments on them and her courtship of the young woman:

On the one hand, I’m having the best time ever playing with this woman
who believes I’m a man. On the other, I want to get out of this muddle and
am not sure how. It’s clear that she’s already at the kissing stage, and who
knows what will happen next time we’re together? (II, vi, 165, 237)

Lelia’s kiss, then, was the kiss of a woman, who kissed another woman on
stage and told the audience that she was enjoying playing the role of a
man. And, of course, as the audience knew that both women characters
were actually being played by young male actors, they were also aware
that it was a kiss between two young men. Clearly, Lelia’s kiss was not just
a kiss: it implied same-sex sexual play (both between males and females),
illicit sexual desires, cross-class sexual contact, as well as the apparent
Renaissance ‘normative’ sex between the sexes.
But these kisses involved one last major deception: the fact that Lelia,
cross-dressed as a man, had been courting Isabella not just to play with
her as a man, but for a much more serious motive. The man she actually
does love and serve, Flamminio, is in love with Isabella. Actually, once
he had been in love with Lelia, but he forgot her when she was locked
up in a convent by her father while the latter left town for a time. Thus,
Lelia disguised herself as a young man to be near her Flamminio, to win
back his love and, ultimately, to win the happy ending of many comedies,
marriage with him. Unfortunately for Lelia, she succeeds too well in her
deception, for in her masculine role she quickly becomes so appreci-
ated and trusted by her master that he employs her as his go-between to
help him win Isabella. In this role, however, she does not serve him well
or loyally. Rather, when she realizes that Isabella is attracted to her, she
6 Lelia’s Kiss

encourages that attraction, with the goal of having Isabella reject her
master’s attentions and thus regain his love for herself. What tangled
webs, if not we mortals then at least Renaissance comedies wove. Decep-
tions on deceptions that ultimately turned on – in this case, as in many
Renaissance comedies – whether one was passing as a man or a woman,
and what that meant in terms of gender, sex, and marriage onstage and
off the stage as well. To seem to be a man or to seem to be a woman, with
apologies to Shakespeare, may have been the question for Italian Ren-
aissance theatre, but without claiming that much, it is one of the central
questions for Lelia’s kiss and for this book.
As the prologues of these comedies repeated over and over again, they
dealt with ‘private lives,’ and that meant that they were laced with the
dominant patriarchal vision of family, gender, sex, and marriage, but as
comedies, that vision was often imaginatively and playfully questioned
and mocked. Significantly, that private world was relentlessly youthful,
upper class, and clever, featuring as it did unhappily married young
women (malmaritate) and young girls cross-dressed as men, who fulfilled
their desires in the end; foolish old men in love and cruel and avari-
cious old fathers trying to arrange marriages against the wishes of their
children, who failed in the end; clever servants and faithful balie (nurses
usually playing a maternal role), who engineered their youthful master’s
triumphs in the end; along with foolish, arrogant, and sodomitical ped-
ants; clever and on-the-make parasites; corrupt and unholy friars; and
a background wash of perennially hungry, occasionally lusty, and often
helpful servants. But these comedies always featured the young them-
selves, usually caught up in the passion of love, dangerously skating on
the edge of disaster and breaking most of the rules of the society, only
to eventually settle down, marry, and apparently live happily ever after.
The repetition of these characters and themes has often been explained
in terms of borrowings from classical theatre and the Italian literary tra-
dition that included the Decameron of Boccaccio along with the rest of
the novella tradition, as well as earlier epic poetry. Such borrowings are
particularly significant when one looks at broad plot outlines, or even
whole lines occasionally lifted from novelle, and an impressive literature
has carefully traced these borrowings and classical antecedents. Yet how
these plots and phrases were adapted by clever Renaissance authors and
filled in with the details and concerns of everyday Renaissance life so
that they appealed not just to humanists and scholars, but also to the
upper-class audiences and patrons of their day, is certainly an equally
interesting question. In sum, as scholars study how these comedies actu-
 Introduction 7

ally played out on stage and in the Renaissance imagination an impor-

tant new dimension is added to our appreciation of this rich literary
tradition.
Two Italian comedies, Li sei contenti by Galeotto del Carretto (written
in 1499 but never staged)2 and Il Formicone by the humanist Publio Philip-
po mantovano (performed in Mantua in 1503),3 slightly preceded the
writing and staging in Ferrara (1508) of the much better known comedy
Cassaria by Ludovico Ariosto. Given Ariosto’s fame and the greater suc-
cess of his comedy, critics usually label Cassaria as the first example of
‘erudite comedy’ (commedia erudita). This label is applied to comedies
written in Italian rather than Latin, with five acts that are set in one scene
(usually an urban square or street), modelled on the classic Greek and
Roman theatre by playwrights such as Menander, Plautus, and Terence.
As is well known, these erudite comedies of the Italian Renaissance were
an important part of the humanistic culture of the day that loved the
classics; thus, when ancient comedies were rediscovered, they were stud-
ied, translated into Italian, and reworked as models for creating a new
Italian comedy. Ariosto, as a translator and disseminator of ancient Latin
plays, in his comedies Cassaria, Suppositi, and Lena, set the precedent of
adapting the patrimony of classical theatre – which he used especially for
plot lines and the figures of the servants – to a Renaissance setting that
reflected the daily world of Ferrara for his Ferrarese audience.4 Still, the
influence of ancient theatre was very strong in Ariosto’s theatre, as seen
in his almost timid desire to excuse himself in the prologue to the Cas-
saria for not having written the work in Latin.
The five acts of Renaissance comedies were a convenient division that
did not come from classical precedents. In fact, Latin comedies were
performed without interruptions. As far as the Aristotelian requirements
for unity of time, space, and action are concerned, those for place and
time were at least formally observed, but the unity of action was regularly
ignored, often with several subplots moving ahead at the same time.5
Prologues, often separated from a discussion of the plot line (the argu-
ment), also moved rapidly away from the prologue forms used by Plautus
and Terence, and became an occasion for creating a playful and humor-
ous dialogue with the audience, frequently focused on women specta-
tors. In a few prologues, most notably those of Ariosto and Machiavelli,
the authors suggest to their audience and their readers that their com-
edies were created following the advice of Horace to amuse and teach,
but also to comfort audiences in the difficult times of the early sixteenth
century. Some authors also claimed that writing their comedy served to
8 Lelia’s Kiss

alleviate the melancholy of an unhappy love, much as Boccaccio and

Ariosto claimed for the writing of the Decameron and the Orlando furioso.
Machiavelli even proclaimed that the writing of his most famous comedy,
the Mandragola, was a way to raise his spirits in the difficult personal situ-
ation he found himself in at the time, having lost his position of power in
Florence with the return of the Medici. In other comedies, the prologue
became a performance in its own right, with the presenter taking on a
buffoon-like role and enlivening his presentation with a rich and playful
use of double meanings, usually obscene, as in the clever prologues of
the comedies produced by the academy of the Intronati in Siena; oth-
ers became a type of dialogue between the argument and the prologue,
turned into characters to debate the poetics and nature of the comedy
to be presented, as was the case in the comedies by Anton Francesco
Grazzini.6 In sum, the development of the prologue showed the creative
and playful turn erudite comedy quickly took and how easily and success-
fully authors moved beyond classical models.
Nino Borsellino was one of the first to argue for the need to take a
more global approach, historical and cultural, to the study of Renais-
sance comedy, underlining the fact that most comedies were created for
a specific ‘situation,’7 such as a performance during carnival, when the
everyday order of things was overturned and became open for playful
reversals and mocking humour. In that context, such humour found
inspiration beyond the classics in the humour of the novella tradition,
best represented by the Decameron and the profane and secular humour
that the medieval church had attempted to marginalize. Borsellino’s
invitation to consider the realism of Renaissance comedies was given
more focus and bite in a later study, where he defined the genre as ‘an
immediate social experience,’8 arguing that everyday events, cultural
presuppositions of the day, and the vision of authors, readers, and audi-
ences were all deeply interwoven into the imaginative fabric of these
texts. This invitation to look at the way comedies played in the contem-
porary imagination was taken up in the 1970s by Mario Baratto and a
group of critics who focused their attention on studying the connection
between Renaissance comedies and the specific historical moment when
they were written and performed.
Baratto asked that critics reconsider Renaissance comedies with great-
er attention to the relationship between the work and ‘the underlying
historical reality’ that enlivened their content for Renaissance audiences
and readers. Moving beyond a focus on classical traditions, he suggested
that it would be better to speak about the ‘reinvention’ of Cinquecento
 Introduction 9

comedies and the ‘personal work’ of Renaissance authors, who were as

capable of contradicting classical models as copying them.9 The studies
that followed by Giulio Ferroni, Giorgio Padoan, Roberto Alonge, Guido
Davico Bonino, and those on the later commedia dell’arte by Roberto Tes-
sari, Ferdinando Taviani, Ferruccio Marotti, and Cesare Molinari have
demonstrated the impressive potential of those suggestions. Using new
methods to study the relationship between theatre and history, between
the text of comedies and their performances, as well as the material con-
ditions of the theatre itself, they have greatly enriched our understand-
ing of Renaissance theatre as a literature and spectacle that had a strong
interrelationship with the culture and life of its times.
Over the last thirty years, a salutary interest in the performance and
reception of comedies has also put new emphasis on the way they related
to their contemporary social and cultural milieu. In response to this blos-
soming of scholarship, Roberto Alonge, in the introduction to his recent
Storia del teatro moderno e contemporaneo, suggested that it was time to find
a new balance in studies of the theatre so that no one area of inter-
est would dominate. Alonge emphasized that although it was an under-
standable reaction to the dominance of the literary tradition approach
to stress performance, it was unwise to consider theatrical texts merely
‘as subordinate to their staging.’10 In his programmatic introduction he
argued that, ideally, critical studies of the Renaissance theatre should
turn on three interrelated issues, the public for theatre, the actors and
acting, and the texts themselves, all viewed from a broader perspective
of the development of theatre in Europe across lingual and developing
national boundaries. Unfortunately, however, his analysis of the com-
edies of the first years of the sixteenth century remained traditionally
divided between great works, minor works, and others. Thus, although
he recognized the impressive number of comedies published in the first
fifty years of the century – approximately three hundred titles – he still
largely dismissed the great majority of these works that fell outside the
canon: ‘the large number of texts written and published are for the most
part pure forms of imitation, with a clear tendency to develop in a serial
fashion, vacillating between a penchant for the academic and bookish
and the influence of local traditions with various local orientations.’11 As
a result, in many ways the approach of his important and field-defining
Storia del teatro has remained rather traditional, focusing on a few authors
and a limited number of ‘major’ works considered in chronological
order, first for erudite comedies and then pastoral ones.
In this book, I take a slightly different approach to the texts of six-
10 Lelia’s Kiss

teenth-century comedies. Following in the tradition of the historical

and social approach of Borsellino and Baratto, my goal is to integrate
a historicist approach with the newer methodologies developed by the
‘new historicism in literary studies,’ and by the ‘new social and cultur-
al history.’ In this way, I want to focus my analysis on theatrical texts
of the Cinquecento not so much as texts in a theatrical literary tradi-
tion, but rather as cultural documents of great interest that enriched
and are enriched by their social and cultural moment. My premise is
that, rather than arguing about whether the text or its historical and
cultural context is what we should study, we should instead focus on the
way in which a text and its performances were moments of a broader
social and cultural world; special moments of play and comment from an
often youthful and irreverent perspective that imaginatively scripted that
world for audiences, readers, performers, and writers. Thus, my analysis
focuses on what might be labelled the social or cultural scripts to be found
in these comedies – the way they commented upon, laughed at, worried
over, mocked, complained about, imagined, and literally played on stage
the social and cultural world of which they were a part. Reproducing,
playing with, and testing over and over again social and cultural scripts,
Renaissance comedies created an often humorous dialogue with the pre-
suppositions of their day, with contemporary social norms, expectations
and desires, and when read from this perspective, Renaissance comedies
come alive anew.
It is that social and cultural scripting of the Renaissance world at the
heart of comedy that is most interesting, and it is often what critics have
really been talking about when they have attempted to understand Ren-
aissance comedies in Renaissance terms. In sum, the comedies studied
here are viewed both as products of a particular society, culture, and
time and as expressions that were at times assertive, conflictual, or imagi-
natively innovative; thus, in various ways, they also contributed actively
to the formation and reformulation of Renaissance culture and society.
From this perspective, I would suggest as well that a hierarchy of com-
edies is really not that useful. While from an aesthetic point of view such
hierarchies remain significant – and, as a critic, from time to time I will
not be able to resist making such judgments – for the sake of the analysis
undertaken here, all Renaissance comedies are equally worthy of atten-
tion, whether they are the canonical and critically acclaimed Mandragola
or Calandra or the less well known Cesarea Gonzaga or Veniexiana. In fact,
this approach will hopefully allow a much-needed rethinking and enlarg-
ing of the canon of Renaissance comedies, which has in the past been
 Introduction 11

so narrowly defined as to create significant misunderstandings about the

nature, significance, and richness of the genre.
For modern readers, plot lines that feature women who dressed and
passed as males for years without being discovered, male youths who
dressed as maids who attracted the love of their masters, or adulter-
ous wives who successfully satisfied their sexual desires under the eyes
of unsuspecting husbands may seem unlikely and repetitive and per-
haps may not promise very exciting theatre. The frequent accusations
that these comedies lacked originality, were too dependent on classical
models such as Plautus, made too much use of stereotypic characters,
or relied on plots that were improbable and unlikely may actually say
more about the anachronistic and narrow way that these comedies have
been studied and the limited canon considered than the comedies them-
selves. It needs to be remembered that these comedies were very popular
and successful at the time, with plots, scenes, and characters that turned
on issues that were of great interest in that period, even if they are often
seen as relatively distant from modern interests.
The simple fact that around three hundred comedies were published
in the first few decades of the sixteenth century, and many of these in two
or three editions, suggests that we need to think more carefully about
how and why this phenomenal success occurred rather than simply dis-
missing it. Many comedies were staged and then published, others were
first published and later staged, and still others were published without
ever being staged, which means that even our figure of three hundred
comedies published underestimates the extent of the popularity of this
genre. The audience for these comedies was not merely those who were
able to attend performances – usually during carnival, and often in pri-
vate, upper-class settings – but also an extensive reading public (includ-
ing people who were read to), attested to by the impressive number of
comedies published at the time.12 It is not by accident that many com-
edies were printed at the behest of their authors well after they were first
performed, with prologues that claimed that this was done to prevent
performing troupes from distorting their work.13 Be that as it may, the
reality was that although they were originally aimed at an upper-class
youthful audience, these comedies had much wider popularity in Italian
Renaissance society. Simply put, they participated in Renaissance culture
and society, imaginatively and humorously representing it to itself while
simultaneously contributing to both its stability and its changes.
Gender as a category of analysis is an essential element of this study,
which will look at gender roles especially in the context of characters
12 Lelia’s Kiss

who cross-dressed so they could pass as members of the opposite sex, the-
atrical moments when the Renaissance understanding of the construc-
tion of male and female often becomes particularly evident.14 Gender
roles will also be analysed in terms of their significance for sexual prac-
tices and desires, especially homoerotic practices, and finally in terms
of their role in the marital order of Italian Renaissance society. From
these perspectives, the comedies of the period presented another great
innovation with respect to the classic theatre, the much more regular
presentation of women characters in roles that were more varied and
significant; often, in fact, Renaissance comedies were built around the
adventures of female protagonists, something virtually unheard of in
classical theatre.15 In a pioneering feminist study, ‘The Doubled Vision of
Feminist Theory,’ Joan Kelly suggested that literary critics and historians
should not look at the condition of women in the past solely from within
the dominant patriarchal point of view, that did so much to create a uni-
tary and one-sided vision of the role of women in literature and society
in the past. She argued that scholars needed to step outside that point
of view to observe particular historical situations from other perspectives
that would provide a counterweight to that dominant vision – creating
a ‘doubled vision.’16 The same could be said for men. In this study, I will
attempt to follow Kelly’s suggestion in a general way by examining in
comedies (and in their regular return to certain themes and issues) not
just a patriarchal discourse – which critics of late have often discussed –
but also the ways in which these comedies revealed signs of anxiety,
preoccupation, and discussion of that discourse, and at times offered
glimpses of other possible and competing discourses.
My theoretical approach in this book turns on the no longer new
scholarly movement to place literary texts more firmly in their historical
setting, often labelled ‘new historicism in literary studies.’ Like many
‘new’ new historicists, I see my analysis less concerned with distinc-
tions between literature and ‘reality’ or social practice, and more con-
cerned with the ‘imaginary’ of the Renaissance – the way the audiences
and readers of these comedies imagined, thought about, enjoyed, and
understood their world and their lives using literature and, in this case,
comedies to do so. Underlying this approach is the key theoretical posi-
tion that literature (and its imaginary) is not a separate reality but a sig-
nificant part of the reality of an age, an important part of the way life was
lived, thought, and perceived. This approach makes the use of history
much more integral to analysis, because the central issue is how literary
texts ‘played,’ or were received and imagined by Renaissance audiences
 Introduction 13

and readers. As a result, Lelia’s Kiss explores the range of ways that the
Renaissance imagined and thought about the crucial issues of sex, gen-
der, and marriage, and how all three fit imaginatively with deeper con-
cerns about social order, hierarchy, and values.
One thing, however, that distinguishes my approach from more main-
stream new historicists, is my attempt to go beyond discussions of how
literature relates to and represents power, adding to the picture a wider
perspective that integrates pleasure, play, and humour. In part, this is
motivated by the nature of the literary genre that is at the heart of the
book, comedy, which requires giving these broader issues their due. But,
in part, it is also motivated by a theoretical concern that literature and
society themselves turn on more than issues of power. To understand
power itself at a deeper level in the Renaissance, we need to think more
carefully about how it interrelates with pleasure, play, and humour –
once again, Lelia’s Kiss in all its rich complexity.
In the end, this critical approach might seem eclectic, but what I
believe gives it focus and coherence is the fact that it privileges ‘close
readings’ of all the texts utilized (and a larger body of Renaissance lit-
erature as well), a careful attention to the place of those texts in their
historical moment, and the analysis of the linguistic and rhetorical strat-
egies found in those texts. As a result, Lelia’s Kiss makes use of a hope-
fully fruitful rethinking of the way the supposedly separate disciplines of
history and the study of literature intersect in the close reading of texts
to essay their meanings and their implications for the cultures and socie-
ties in which they were created and participated. Certainly, we need to
consider the literary qualities of Renaissance comedies, as well as their
playful humour and irreverent satire, but without a strong sense of the
society and cultures of the day, often we will miss the deeper meaning
and certainly much of the humour and play that they have to offer. Sim-
ply put, once we move beyond disciplinary divides, literature and history
combined have great power to bring fresh life and meaning to texts from
the past.
Significantly, given that historical ‘facts’ do not exist (except as imagi-
native reconstructions made by writers after events take place), a number
of historians, including Natalie Zemon Davis, Guido Ruggiero, and Hay-
den White have argued that history also has a strong element of ‘fiction,’
and needs to be considered and analysed from a literary perspective.17
At the same time, among literary scholars it is already widely accepted
that we cannot analyse literature solely as ‘fiction.’ Literary texts can
also be usefully analysed as a type of historical document, but this does
14 Lelia’s Kiss

not mean that they are necessarily ‘truthful,’ or reproduce in some self-
evident way the ‘reality’ of the past. In this, however, they are actually
not very different from supposedly ‘historical’ texts which often contain
some of the most creative and imaginative self-serving fictions that can
be found – the events described in criminal documents or ‘patriotic’
chronicles are two examples. In the text of our comedies, fiction and
history, along with imagination and contemporary practice, were mixed
in a creative re-elaboration, placing on stage (or on the imaginary stage
of a reader) dialogue and deeds based on the cultural assumptions and
values of a complex society strongly marked by hierarchical and patriar-
chal values which, however, did not go uncontested by the youthful and
often irreverent vision of those comedies.
In chapter 1, ‘Women in Men’s Clothing,’ I examine the role of the
positive scripting of women cross-dressed as males moving beyond the
standard scholarly vision of the ‘disorderly woman in pants,’ in order
to illuminate the complexity of Renaissance perceptions of gender.
The numerous comedies that present young women characters that
cross-dressed as men are a sign of how great the interest was in issues
of masculinity and femininity, and what we would call today gender, for
Renaissance authors and audiences. For unlikely as it may seem at first,
one of the most interesting aspects about the way cross-dressed charac-
ters were scripted in Renaissance comedies was the way that they allowed
audiences, readers, and authors to imaginatively play with the cultural
signs that were seen as denoting sexual difference. The primary texts
analysed include Calandra by Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena, Anconita-
na by Ruzante, Il marinaio by Girolamo Parabosco, Gl’ingannati by the
Accademia degli Intronati in Siena, La Cesarea Gonzaga by Luca Contile,
Gl’inganni by Nicolò Secchi, a second Gli inganni by Curtio Gonzaga,
Ortensio by the Accademia degli Intronati, and Cintia by Giambattista
Della Porta.
In the story-lines of these comedies where women protagonists pass as
men, one sees clearly that the Renaissance accepted that many signs of
sexual distinction were artificial and socially or culturally constructed:
in other words, gender roles worked on stage much as they worked in
everyday life, even if the imaginative play on stage at times outstripped
what was possible off stage. These comedies scripted a fascinating series
of young women who, dressed as men, successfully studied, travelled,
inherited wealth, and carried on business with actual men. Perhaps most
importantly, they picked their own husbands without interference from
their fathers or their families. Thus, intentionally or not, they called
 Introduction 15

attention to the ways in which the social and cultural constraints nor-
mally placed upon women limited their opportunities and, more impor-
tantly, contributed to the general perception of women as passive and
‘naturally’ belonging at home under the control of men. Education,
freedom of movement, and culture subtly triumphed over ‘nature’ in
the imaginative vision of these comedies.
The heroines who cross-dressed to pass as men were able to enjoy
the freedom of movement and autonomy of men, and often expressed
awareness that the different social roles assigned to men and women
were based on a patriarchal social order much more than on any nat-
ural differences. They were aware that their perceived sexual identity
determined their place in society, and that changing that perception, by
passing as a man, allowed them to escape that inferior status and func-
tion much more aggressively and successfully than otherwise would have
been possible. Several comedies even argued that women had the right
to an education, and refuted the contemporary claim that the educa-
tion of girls and women led to social or sexual misconduct. Other plays
criticized the dominant patriarchal order, especially the ways that it
tended to protect male dominance on the material and economic lev-
el, by securing the masculine line of the family and preventing women
from inheriting or marrying in accordance with their own preferences.
This imaginative presentation of a woman in male garb passing as a man
opened a rich and fascinating perspective on the way gender difference
was understood as a social and cultural construct, and at the same time
added an important imaginative dimension to the contemporary debates
on women, what we now call the querelle des femmes.
Women dressed as men in Renaissance comedy also provide an inter-
esting introduction to the theme of female homoerotic attraction, a top-
ic that has been largely dismissed by the critical literature as invisible or
nonexistent in the period. Chapter 2, ‘Woman with Woman,’ examines a
number of the comedies that are very revealing of this supposedly invisi-
ble theme, including the anonymous Veniexiana, Alessandro by Alessandro
Piccolomini, La Cesarea Gonzaga by Luca Contile, Gli inganni by Curtio
Gonzaga, and La Cintia by Giambattista Della Porta. These plays are ana-
lysed as part of a larger cultural process that began to make homoerotic
relationships more visible in the sixteenth century. The usual way of
presenting such issues in comedies was via a pair of characters, one
male, one female, each cross-dressing to pass as the opposite sex. This
allowed for an interesting range of misunderstandings, where characters
thought they were in love with or sexually attracted to a member of the
16 Lelia’s Kiss

same sex. But in a few comedies, and most notably, the Veniexiana, even
the misunderstandings of cross-dressing were dropped, and homoerotic
practices between women were openly presented. In the second chapter,
the scripting of sexual desire between women is analysed and fleshed
out with the broader cultural and social vision of such practices at the
time. For example, the two most important cultural preconceptions of
the day, often repeated by characters in these comedies, were as follows:
on the one hand, the ‘impossibility’ of homoerotic practices between
women, and on the other, the innocuousness of such practices. From the
patriarchal and phallocentric point of view, sexual relationships between
women were believed to be impossible and innocuous because there was
no risk of engendering illegitimate children. Even if such relationships
remained anathema by the church and were the occasional target of
moralists and prescriptive literature, this vision helped to render such
desires and deeds more visible, more imaginable, and ultimately perhaps
less troublesome in everyday culture on stage and off stage as well.
Significantly, however, comedies of the sixteenth century also reveal a
suggestively different discourse: sex and desire between young women
was presented positively from the point of view of heroic women charac-
ters attracted to other women in a manner totally dissociated from mar-
riage, duty, family, and reproduction, as well as from the negative vision
of female lust and disruptive passions. These heroines displayed an
active sexuality aimed at satisfying their own youthful desires and finding
personal pleasure, both of which they viewed as legitimate and unques-
tionable goals. This portrayal of female sexuality and love between
women, aimed at pleasure, has gone virtually unnoticed by scholars who
study this period. Yet it stands in sharp contrast to the traditional vision
of women in the Renaissance – found in much of the literature of the
period – that saw women as the passive objects of male desire, and por-
trayed women who did not fit this pattern as unchaste at best, and as
lustful temptresses and servants of the devil at worst. In fact, in the sexual
relationships presented in Renaissance comedies, sexual desire can be
seen as a continuum that swings from passive and female-like reception
(not limited to women) to active and masculine-like action (not limited
to men), rather than a simple binary division of sexual practices between
‘heterosexuals’ on the one hand, and ‘homosexuals’ on the other hand,
or between chaste good women and lustful evil ones.
This positive portrayal of female love for other women regularly
touched off a series of interesting and relatively novel reflections by the
characters involved about how it originated, whether it was licit, why it
 Introduction 17

was felt so strongly, why it was so difficult to live with and satisfy, and
above all, why it could not be resisted. A few heroines repeated the trope
of love between women as being ‘impossible’ but, that notwithstanding,
they expressed their readiness to pursue their desire and encounter their
loves in situations where that supposed impossibility would be put to the
test, hoping that love and desire would win out in the end. The dramatic
resolution of these loves, which usually involved the recognition that one
of the women involved was actually a man posing as a woman, while it
saved the comedy from being too transgressive, did not really undermine
the fact that for most of the comedy a heroine was presented positively
and sympathetically loving another woman, often imagining and discuss-
ing her desire for sexual pleasures that were distant from marriage, duty,
and reproduction. A ‘heterosexual’ marriage apparently returned life
to ‘normal’ at the end of most of these comedies, but that does not take
away the fact that for the space of the play, another discourse of sexual
desire and pleasure was presented as normal and possible, even as char-
acters were declaring it impossible.
Chapter 3, ‘Men in Women’s Clothing,’ reverses the first chapter to
look at the way masculine identity and gender roles were portrayed
via male characters cross-dressing as women. Their motives for doing
so were again diverse, but depended on Renaissance practical realities
once more: to enter as a maid or a servant the home of their beloved, to
disguise their identity from family enemies or from penalties inflicted by
governments, to escape slavery or at least mollify its demands, or to carry
off a trick or cruel joke (the famous beffa of the novella tradition, and
everyday life as well) at the expense of old patriarchs foolishly in love. In
contrast with the later tradition in English theatre, in Italian comedies
male characters who dressed as women were numerous and important.
Some of the best examples of these are to be found in the comedies that
will be discussed in this chapter: Alessandro by Alessandro Piccolomini, Il
ragazzo by Lodovico Dolce, La Cesarea Gonzaga by Luca Contile, La fante-
sca by Girolamo Parabosco, I trasformati by Scipione Ammirato, I paren-
tadi by Anton Francesco Grazzini, La camariera by Nicolò Secchi, Olivetta
and Pimpinella by Cornelio Lanci, La fantesca by Giambattista Della Por-
ta, Li vani amori by Giovan Francesco Loredan, and Fortunio by Vicenzo
Giusti.
Looking at the way male characters are presented when they cross-
dress for a time as women makes it possible to get a deeper understand-
ing of the way masculinity was imagined in the Renaissance, not as a
fixed essence, or even a fixed set of qualities and practices, but as an
18 Lelia’s Kiss

evolving complex of social, cultural, and physical signs that changed in

significant ways across the lifespan of a male from boyhood to adult-
hood. Thus, playful explorations of youthful male cross-dressing pro-
vide a rich perspective on the way male gender in Renaissance Italy was
understood as a series of possibilities and changes that did not exclude
an important ‘female’ phase and a potential range of feminine experi-
ences in the maturation process. As a result, in Italian theatre, gender
was neither exclusively nor ‘teleologically male,’ but rather a continuum
of possibilities from which it was assumed that an adult, active, phallic
masculinity would eventually be formed if all went well.
This chapter confirms and expands upon recent historical studies
which argue that in the Renaissance, as male youths reached their early
teens, they passed from an asexual status of childhood into a period of
life that lasted from about 12 to 18 when they were considered passive
socially and sexually, much like women, and thus it was assumed that
they could be the passive objects of sexual desire by older people, be
they women, men, or older youths. A second transition occurred in their
late teens when they began to develop beards, more muscular bodies, a
deeper voice, and displayed more active aggressive behaviour, when they
were assumed to become more active sexually and pursue younger males
or women as the objects of their sexual desire. This second period ended
when they reached full adult status and married; off stage for upper class
youths, this was delayed until their late twenties or early thirties, whereas
on stage it often arrived more quickly with the ‘happy’ ending for young
love that the comedic genre required, marriage.18 In the course of this
play of male cross-dressing on stage, the way masculinity was constructed,
negotiated, and confirmed socially through these periods of life for a
male youth – moving from a passive, feminine, androgynous period to
progressively more aggressive and dominant roles, until adulthood and
full patriarchal status was reached as the head of a family – was often at
the heart of the comedy. In fact, that centrality and the way it coloured
the development of Italian Renaissance comedies has often been over-
looked, because critics have not been aware of how this fluid sense of a
developing masculinity that so concerned the Renaissance was deeply
imbedded in these works.
In contrast to the scholarship on the later English theatre, this vision
of a youthful early phase of masculine development, when males were
positively considered both passive and feminine, meant that there was
little fear expressed that cross-dressed males would actually become
women or remain feminine. In the normal order of maturation, that
 Introduction 19

stage would be left behind. The question that concerned Italian com-
edies was more ‘when,’ rather than ‘if,’ one would become a fully active
and aggressive male. And that question led to a fascination with what I
have called scenes of ‘phallic revelation’ and their frequent concomi-
tant moments of ‘phallic celebration.’ Both are little-discussed critical
moments in many Renaissance comedies. Yet regularly after this ‘phal-
lic revelation’ was reported enthusiastically to the audience by another
character, the ground was prepared for the other revelations and recog-
nitions (more recognized and discussed by critics) that cleared up all the
confusions and misconceptions of the plot and led rapidly to the con-
cluding marriage or marriages – with males safely men, females safely
women, and desire safely channeled into marriage, reproduction, and
the ideal patriarchal order of society.
Ultimately, the comedies analysed in this chapter demonstrate that,
for Italy in the Cinquecento, it would be dangerous to assume a vision of
gender that saw masculinity as the measure; for, tellingly, masculinity was
in and of itself a concept that evolved across the span of a male’s life and,
in fact, had a significant passive and feminine phase during the early
teens – a period of life that was often featured in comedies and seemed
to fascinate the Renaissance. From this perspective, it is crucial to note
that most cross-dressed males in comedies fell into this age range, and
often at the very end of it when a transition to active sexuality was expect-
ed. This made passing as a female easy and understandable for Renais-
sance audiences, and also made the passive behaviour and homoerotic
innuendos that went with such cross-dressing much less threatening
and negative – in fact, such characters were virtually never presented
negatively – because they were relatively acceptable as a passing stage on
the way to ‘normal’ adult behaviour. This type of cross-dressing, playing
humorously as it did with the erotic tensions and the realities of what was
perceived as a difficult period of transition in the everyday life of young
men, reveals once again how deeply and intimately the theatre of the
time integrated the imagination and life of sixteenth-century Italy.
This discussion of male cross-dressing is followed by chapter 4, ‘Ped-
ants, Candlemakers and Boys: Sodomy and Comedy,’ which looks more
closely at the homoerotic play of Renaissance comedy. Most cross-
dressing comedies involving males, as noted above, portray young males
in a period of transition from passive to active youth; thus, while at times
they were seen as objects of desire when dressed as women, such com-
edies still focused on male/female desire. But a few comedies do not fit
this pattern, and interestingly, there are adult male characters in them
20 Lelia’s Kiss

(or at least characters clearly at an age where they should be anxious to

move on to adult status) who are still attracted to other males. Perhaps
the most notable examples are in Il marescalco by Pietro Aretino, Il can-
delaio by Giordano Bruno, and the less well-known but very interesting
anonymous fifteenth-century Latin farce Cavichiolo.
A much more negative perspective on such adult desire for male
youths is reserved for the pedant, a stock character who appears in many
comedies, who is invariably presented as foolish and a suitable butt for
cruel jokes and tricks by the youths who have suffered his tutelage and
sexual advances. These texts reveal that the final transition of male devel-
opment to full patriarchal status and responsibility was not considered as
automatic or assured as earlier stages, that there was a danger for some
that the pleasures of male/male sex could become more than a passing
phase on the way to adulthood and marriage. In this it seems that the
comedies were no longer talking simply about a sexual practice – male
sodomy – but instead were exploring the issue of a deeper and more per-
manent desire for male sexual partners; characters like Cavichiolo, the
Marescalco, the Candelaio, or pedants who were only interested in sex
with male youths, and were not enthusiastic about moving onto marriage
and sex with women, not even when they left their youth behind.
This chapter, then, is virtually forced to take up the current critical
debate about whether or not there existed in the Renaissance a sense
of sexual identity, and more specifically, a male ‘homosexual’ identity.
Looking closely at Renaissance comedies, in fact, reveals that the dis-
course on homoerotic desire and practice was complex and often con-
tradictory. It was certainly not reducible to either side of the celebrated
distinction made by Foucault between practice and identity, nor could
it be categorized simply as fitting a transgressive/normative dichotomy.
The majority of the comedies and other works discussed present the mas-
culine characters who exhibit such desires within the context of a Renais-
sance vision of sexual identity, and are better labelled with contemporary
terminology: ‘sodomite’ rather than ‘homosexual,’ based largely upon
exterior social evaluations of a person’s sexual desires, rather than on an
internal sense of self. But in Il candelaio by Giordano Bruno, for example,
we see a stronger sense of sexual identity that comes closer to the idea of
an internal or essential vision, even though social identification plays a
significant role in the same comedy.
Again, from the perspective of this complex vision of homoerotic
desire involving males, ironically, even the ‘crime’ of sodomy (as judged
by the legal, Christian, and civic culture of the day) was presented in a
 Introduction 21

number of comedies at the heart of apparently ‘heterosexual’ plots and

scenarios, or invoked as a practice that would restore balance and order
in marriages and society. Thus, in many cases, rather than being treated
as abnormal, deviant, or queer, male/male desire and sodomy were pre-
sented humorously as practices that actually fit within the ordering sys-
tems associated with patriarchy, gender categories, and social hierarchy.
Masculinity and male/male desire, then, provided social scripts of deep
ambiguity on the Renaissance stage and in life, with Renaissance audi-
ences able to laugh knowingly at the Marescalco’s happy marriage to
his boy bride which concluded Aretino’s irreverent comedy Il marescalco,
while they could also pass and implement laws that required active male
sodomites to be burned alive.
Chapter 5, ‘The Playing of Matrimony,’ pulls all these themes togeth-
er by finally discussing the way marriage was portrayed as a crucial but
conflicted base of social organization, and how it provided the correct
place and required discipline for sex and gender. In many comedies,
the conflicts and misunderstandings of the plot are successfully resolved
or at least appear to be resolved with a final marriage or series of mar-
riages. Looking at a larger sample of Renaissance comedies beyond the
current canon, however, it becomes clear that such marital resolutions
were not quite as ubiquitous or resolving as critics have assumed. In a
way, one might argue that marital endings, rather than returning things
to normal, were some of the queerest moments of these comedies. Actu-
ally, a number of comedies do not finish with a marriage, and others end
with celebrations of adultery, the promise of multiple partner relation-
ships, or, as in the case of Aretino’s Marescalco, an explicit rejection of
the traditional vision of Renaissance wedlock in favour of a male/male
marriage. Once again in this chapter, along with noted comedies, we will
consider virtually unknown but richly significant works such as Li sei con-
tenti by Galeotto del Carretto, Ramnusia by Aurelio Schioppi, and Betía by
Ruzante.
In line with the youthful vision and the theme of young love that was at
the heart of most comedies, however, the practice of arranged marriage,
and especially one of its most visible excesses – marriages with great age
disparities featuring old men and very young women – was regularly lam-
pooned, lamented, and thwarted. A frequent figure in such satire was
the woman malmaritata (badly married) who committed adultery and
was usually depicted as attractive and positive in doing so. Also popular
were plots that depicted young people working diligently and cleverly,
often with the help of sympathetic servants, to undermine the marriage
22 Lelia’s Kiss

plans of foolish old fathers, enabling the young people to marry for love.
Finally, there were a plethora of scenes where old foolish husbands were
tricked and made the victims of pratfall jokes by their young wives, the
lovers of these wives, or other clever characters whose humorous play at
their expense seemed to put them in their place and promise a laugh
from Renaissance audiences. With such scenes and plots, these comedies
demonstrated the tensions and failures of marriage and married fam-
ily life that were often exalted by humanists, moralists, and other social
commentators of the day in the name of Renaissance family values, as
the foundation of social order.
In this way, Renaissance comedies criticized imaginatively and play-
fully the social practice of arranged marriages which could seem unjust
at the time, especially from the perspective of the young. It is not surpris-
ing to find that testimony before ecclesiastical courts in this same period
requesting annulments of marriage featured many of the same themes
that are found humorously portrayed in comedy – so much so that the
historian Joanne Ferraro has recently compared those testimonies with
theatrical scripts and even suggested that comedies served as models at
times for such testimonies.19 At the least, it is clear that these comedic
texts should be seen as an important part of the late Renaissance debate
for and against marriage which was carried out in various contexts, both
serious and humorous. Comedies contributed to these discussions in
a highly articulated way: marriage desired or rejected for love, wealth,
power, status, or survival was regularly at their heart, and a happy, youth-
ful marriage usually provided the conclusion, even when, as we shall see,
it was hidden or between men.
This marital ending has often been viewed by critics as one of the
most important signs that at the end of these comedies, after all the
transgressions, questionable activity, and humour of the plot, life returns
to normal and the play is literally over. But tellingly, even these final
marriages are often not what they seem to be. From a patriarchal per-
spective they are seldom the marriages sensibly arranged by parents or
fathers undistorted by youthful passions – in fact, they are often just the
opposite. And, in fact, frequently they are neither sensibly arranged or
the result of passionate love rewarded, but rather suddenly tacked on in
a fashion that suggests that the young spouses will have little prospect of
living happily ever after. It seems almost as if marriage ends many com-
edies with a promise that all will return to normal and everyone will live
happily ever after, but the play ends there because a Renaissance audi-
ence might well suspect that continuing the drama beyond that moment
 Introduction 23

would destroy that illusion. If the patriarchal system was hegemonic, in

the way that Gramsci used the term, and thus a major determinant of the
Renaissance discourse on marriage and its scripting in comedies of the
period, the comedies studied in this chapter show that nonetheless, even
patriarchy could regularly be played with, tested, and even re-imagined
in ways which were quite radical.
In much the same way, it is hoped that after this book, it will be impos-
sible to return to the old dismissive view of Italian Renaissance comedy as
mere copies of ancient plays, featuring unlikely plots, repetitive charac-
ters, and little in the way of interest for modern critics or readers. Lelia’s
Kiss: Imagining Gender, Sex, and Marriage in Italian Renaissance Comedy
should open new perspectives on a vital, lively, humorous and revealing
genre, and on Italian Renaissance society and culture as well.

A Note on Translations

All translations in this volume are mine unless otherwise noted. For
quotes from comedies, the act, scene, and page number of the edition
cited in the notes appear in the text itself in parenthesis following the
quote; for example (I, vi, 45). When English translations are used that
are not mine or mine alone – usually drawn from the volume that I edit-
ed and co-translated, Five Comedies from the Italian Renaissance with Guido
Ruggiero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003) – after the
act, scene and page reference to the Italian edition, I have added the
page number of the English translation cited in italics; for example, (II,
iii, 62, 175).
1 Women in Men’s Clothing: Female Cross-
Dressing Plays and the Construction of
Feminine Identity

Introduction

In Cornelio Lanci’s comedy Pimpinella (1588), an adolescent boy, Aure-

lio, disguised as a young girl called Ginevra, arouses the suspicion of the
servant Pimpinella, who confesses to the audience her doubts regarding
the gender of her mistress:1

I have had many desires in my day: but never greater than to discover
whether my mistress Ginevra is a woman or a man. In needlework, and in many
other little things, she seems a woman, yet in many others a man. I have watched
to see if she developed as we women do, but I have never seen anything, even
though I think that she is at least thirteen years old. I have heard her change
her voice …; I have seen her often caress Livia … like a husband. And as
far as Livia is concerned, I have noted … that her belly is growing; so that I
suspect that she is more Ginevro than Ginevra. (I, v, c. 17; emphasis added)

Pimpinella’s words could well serve as an eloquent premodern introduc-

tion to the ‘modern’ meaning of gender as outlined by Joan Scott in
1988. Her well-known vision can be broadly sketched as arguing that the
apparent differences between men and women are not natural or fixed
but rather the product of ‘the social organization of sexual difference’;
thus, following Scott we might define gender as the culturally constructed
knowledge that regularly determines the social significance of physical difference.2
From this perspective, Pimpinella confesses to having spotted a physi-
cal characteristic in Ginevra – a lowered voice – that clashed with her
acquired cultural knowledge of what identified a woman. At the same
time, Ginevra’s everyday activities – sewing and ‘many other little things’
 Women in Men’s Clothing 25

particular to women – seemed to confirm her gender as female. In dis-

closing her doubts, Pimpinella reflects upon the discrepancies between
the acquired knowledge (sue conoscenze) that should have furnished
an unequivocal meaning for the physical and behavioural differences
between men and women and the inconsistencies that she observes in
the young Aurelio cross-dressed as Ginevra.
Moving beyond Pimpinella’s doubts, as a theatrical strategy, cross-
dressing had much to offer. In addition to adding lively twists and turns
to the plot and producing comic effects via the ambiguities which went
hand in hand inevitably with cross-dressing, its use in theatre was espe-
cially important for creating the possibility of ‘discussing’ gender roles
as they had been defined in a given tradition and culture. In this chap-
ter, I propose to examine a wide range of sixteenth-century Italian plays
where female protagonists donned men’s clothing, in order to analyse
the dynamics of the construction and the discussion of female gender
and sexual roles in late Renaissance Italy. From the texts studied, it
appears evident that many playwrights were quite aware that the female
characteristics the culture of their time deemed ‘natural’ or ‘normal’
were largely cultural constructions – a relative convention rather than an
absolute truth.
Gender identities significantly had to be constructed on stage. First
because male actors played virtually all the roles of women until after
mid-century, but also because in Italian comedies characters themselves
often cross-dressed to pass as the opposite sex. What happened when
characters playing one gender tried to pass as the other? Not surprisingly
the answer is that usually they did so in terms of contemporary social
and cultural assumptions about what signified masculinity or feminin-
ity: displaying signs that worked not just at the level of the physical and
the body but also in terms of behaviour and manners, signs carefully
mobilized to present credible characters to a Renaissance audience. In
Cornelio Lanci’s comedy Mestola, for example, a servant reprimands the
young Faustina, who is dressed as a man, for crying and complaining,
warning her that if such behaviour were observed, it would immediately
reveal that she was a woman.3 Simply, Faustina had to stay within her
adopted role and keep her signs clear; otherwise her masculine mas-
querade would fail. At moments such as this, it is obvious that the author
was playing with the cultural signs that identified a man as a man or a
woman as a woman; thus, comedies open crucial perspectives for under-
standing Renaissance conceptions of gender and sexual difference.
In many ways, Natalie Davis’s classic 1975 essay ‘Women on Top’4 set
26 Lelia’s Kiss

the stage for the critical discussion of cross-dressing as a social and cul-
tural practice. She argued that festive reversals of the sex/gender system
in dress or social behaviour, along with similar reversals linked to ritual-
ized moments of popular protest, served both to reinforce the estab-
lished political and social order and often at the same time to indicate
the possibility of change in the distribution of power within that order,
thus challenging its immutability. Following Davis the most important
critical discussions on cross-dressing in theatre to date have centred on
the English theatre and, more recently, on Spanish drama. With respect
to English theatre, scholarly attention has been virtually equally divided
between the analysis of female characters cross-dressing as a plot device,
and an analysis of the significance of male actors playing all the female
roles on stage. An important group of studies published at the end of
the eighties laid the foundation for the vast body of critical literature
on the sociological, metatheatrical, and cultural implications related
to ‘cross-dressing’ theatre that followed.5 Steven Orgel in a pioneering
work, ‘“Nobody’s Perfect”: Or Why Did the English Stage Take Boys for
Women?’ asked the question that for almost twenty years now has been a
focus of scholarly debate.6 In another fundamental article now seen as a
classic, Jean Howard analysed the part that English ‘cross-dressing’ thea-
tre played in the definition of gender roles. Using historical evidence
concerning the practice of cross-dressing by women of varied social
classes as a point of departure, Howard returned to Davis’s central ques-
tion about whether or not ‘cross-dressing’ theatre served to reinforce the
traditional gender hierarchy and in that contest, constituted a place of
incitement to transgression, or served as an agent in the cultural trans-
formation of gender relations between men and women.7
Scholarship on sixteenth-century Italian theatre to a great extent has
not followed their lead. When the practice has been considered, discus-
sions have focused on the dramatic and literary concerns related to vari-
ations in theatre technique and the way such plotting derived from the
Renaissance novella tradition or classic Greek and Latin theatre. Only
recently, have a few studies begun to explore Cinquecento theatre from
a broader perspective, moving beyond considering the issues of literary
tradition to considering it as a historical and cultural product of its time.
But even in these studies it is rare to find discussions of the relationship
between cross-dressing, gender, and sexual difference.8 Giulio Ferroni’s
pioneering study on ‘techniques of doubling’ deserves special mention,
as it analysed cross-dressing as a recurring modality in the comic struc-
ture of the text.9 For other scholars of Italian Cinquecento drama, cross-
 Women in Men’s Clothing 27

dressing was viewed as perhaps the most successful of a series of repeated

dramaturgical themes, including the surprise discovery of lost relatives,
children lost and found, young love rewarded, parental authority thwart-
ed, fools, jealous types, annoying pedants and sodomites mocked. A cru-
cial problem with this approach, though, is that in tracing traditions, it
tended to lose sight of the historical grounding of Renaissance texts. For
example, one noted critic lamented that Venetian theatre triumphed,
‘despite the monotony of the models, the improbability of the imaginary
events, and the abstraction of the play therein as an end in itself.’10 Per-
haps, however, following the lead of critics working on English and Span-
ish literature, we need to consider why Italian Renaissance comedy was
so popular at the time, given that the plots seem to some modern critical
eyes so monotonous and improbable. It seems clear that the ‘improb-
ability’ of the events and plans resonated with and was meaningful and
engaging to contemporary spectators and readers for reasons that are
not obvious to us today. Clearly, these texts are distant in time and often
do not fit modern expectations, but it is exactly that distance, that differ-
ence, and that apparent strangeness that should be analysed rather than
decried and dismissed.11
In Italian drama female characters and cross-dressing were closely
linked – most simply cross-dressing served as a useful way to script female
characters and get them on stage when the action of comedies was lim-
ited to the streets and squares of Renaissance cities; for ideally, women
were supposed to be confined to their homes where they were safe from
the masculine spaces of urban life. In fact, such ploys were necessary, as
one of the most significant innovations of Cinquecento theatre was the
new importance it gave to female protagonists who became visible on
stage in a way that playwrights and theatre-goers in classical and medi-
eval times would have never dreamed possible. Not all, however, have
been so sanguine about this expanded role for women characters in
sixteenth-century Italian theatre. Some have maintained that the same
prejudices that forbade women actors also prevented female characters
from being protagonists.12 And there is some justice to this view if one
considers only the dozen or so comedies that until recently made up
the traditional canon of texts studied for the period. But it is crucial to
note that works did not win canonical status randomly and that the many
comedies that featured more active, aggressive or even merely visible
women, although popular and often reprinted in the sixteenth century,
seem to have had trouble in later and more restrictive periods gaining or
maintaining canonical status.13
28 Lelia’s Kiss

An upper-class Renaissance woman on the streets alone was in eve-

ryday life and on the stage as well a character of dubious honour, but
dressed as a man her honour was protected by her disguise – for in the
Renaissance, honour was judged publicly, and thus unknown dishonour-
able acts could not be judged and were essentially not dishonourable. In
this way, upper-class female protagonists when cross-dressed could par-
ticipate in the action and move in theatrical space without compromis-
ing decorum or their honour as women. But significantly, at the same
time, cross-dressed female protagonists remained women and this made
it possible to use such characters both to question traditional patriarchal
assumptions and to play with the idea of sexual and social identity. More-
over, almost always, these characters were portrayed as positive, enter-
prising, and even heroic, thus offering an alternative to the traditional
passive and self-effacing ideal of female behaviour. It is significant also
that the authors of such plays were often noted cultural critics them-
selves in urban environments with a more open and innovative cultural
milieu, such as Siena and Venice.14
It seems evident from the dramatic prologues of many Renaissance
comedies that playwrights were aware their plays possessed a ‘pub-
lic’ function and that women constituted an important part of their
audience. Thus, in the present study, I would like to suggest that the
substantial attention Italian plays devoted to apparently ‘private’ themes –
love, marriage, family, generational conflict, and sex – was not merely
a facet of traditional genre requirements or a ‘minor’ form of litera-
ture reserved for treating insignificant ‘non-public’ and ‘non-political’
issues. Rather, the themes of female roles, sexuality, erotic desire, family
hierarchy and structure, and, most notably, matrimony were intensely
engaging and central topics that made Renaissance comedies important
moments in the imaginative work and play of understanding society for
contemporaries. The close interrelationship between these themes and
the political and social order in premodern Italy has been well demon-
strated by an important group of historical studies over the last thirty
years that have pointed out that the public/private distinction is a mod-
ern one and not particularly applicable to the Renaissance.15 In turn,
precisely because these topics were of interest to playwrights and their
real and potential public, the growing industry of popular print helped
diffuse many comedies, which were often printed concomitant with, or a
few years after, their first staging. Others were printed many times even
if they were apparently never staged, which suggests that this genre also
had a vital life as literary text. And the most popular plots, such as that of
 Women in Men’s Clothing 29

Gl’ingannati, were taken up again and again, to be reused by later authors

conscious that a certain ‘recipe’ – one that included female characters
dressed as men pursuing their loves – would enjoy a sure success.
In my analysis I privilege a close reading of the comedies themselves,
which again turns on the way in which they were part of a complex social-
cultural ‘fabric’ interwoven with a multiplicity of other Renaissance
‘discourses’ – artistic, moralistic, legal, medical, philosophical and, of
course, literary. From this perspective, the generally positive portrayal
of cross-dressed women characters seems to contrast suggestively with
the popular negative themes of the ‘disorderly woman’ who wore men’s
pants featured in ‘the world upside down’ of much popular literature.
Natalie Davis summed up this image of the dangerous woman, pointing
out that ‘the female sex was thought the disorderly one par excellence
in early modern Europe.’16 In this chapter, however, comedies take us
beyond the ‘disorderly women’ in pants, allowing an analysis of the often
positive scripting of women crossed-dressed in male garb in Renais-
sance comedies in order to understand more fully and deeply the issues
involved in both accepting and criticizing the ‘system of sex and gender’
distinctions in Renaissance Italy.

Female Cross-Dressing in Plays and the Construction of Identity

Women who dressed as men in a way fell mid-way between an imagina-

tive fantasy of what women in pants might be able to accomplish and a
scripting of real-life strategies that women adopted in order to escape
the restrictions on movement, decision-making, and matrimonial and
love plans that a patriarchal ideology imposed upon them. Thus, I would
like to begin my analysis of cross-dressing in Renaissance comedies with
two moments from Renaissance daily life in Italy where life seemed to
imitate art and theatrical narratives seemed to spill into the streets and
into the courts. During the carnival of 1525, the prolific Venetian dia-
rist Marin Sanudo recorded that the Doge of the city tried to limit the
violence and license of the season that year and make it more decorous,
a goal of government that would become more insistent with time. As
part of this attempt – ultimately unsuccessful, it should be noted – he
eliminated the traditionally bloody hunt that was held in Saint Mark’s
square where bulls and pigs were slaughtered by ‘hunters’ to the delight
of an audience of carnival revellers. Instead, three smaller and less san-
guinary hunts were substituted. In one held in the peripheral square
of San Basilio, he reported that a mad woman ‘dressed as a man killed
30 Lelia’s Kiss

a cat with her ass,’ apparently by sitting on it.17 Hardly cross-dressing

at its most impressive or humorous from a modern perspective, appar-
ently the crowd found it quite funny. Yet, this moment, for all its cru-
elty and apparent lack of meaning, was also a virtually perfect symbolic
reversal of the more bloody traditional hunt. In the end, the death of
bulls and pigs dispatched by the traditional weapons of real male hunt-
ers was reversed by a woman who donned male pants and killed with her
ass. Male weapons replaced by female ones, masculine victims replaced
by female ones, perhaps even male genitals symbolized by their cutting
weapons replaced by female ones – all these levels of gender and sexual
ideology were for a moment called into play simply by the spectacle of a
poor mad woman in pants, and a not so great ‘cat massacre.’
The second moment took place at the close of the century in July
1599, in Verona at the palace of the Venetian rector of the city. Three
people had come in, formally summoned by the rector: Carlo Beroldo, a
nobleman from the city of Verona, and Laura Gallicini and her mother
from campo San Vidal in Venice. Laura, who had fled Venice to be with
her lover Carlo, arrived ‘dressed as a man’ (vestita da huomo). In response
to the rector’s questions she answered that having been a ‘prostitute’
(donna da partito) for many months, ‘she felt that she could live her life as
she wished’ and therefore she declared that she did not want to return to
live with her mother, nor leave her lover. After hearing all the testimony
of those involved, the rector wrote to the heads of the Council of Ten
(Consiglio dei Dieci) – the most powerful policing magistracy in Venice
that had ordered him to collect evidence on Laura’s reported flight from
the city cross-dressed as a man – that he thought it unwise to oppose her
‘considered will’ (deliberata volontà) on the matter and thus had decided
to let all three go.18
This brief love story with its novel-like, or better yet, theatrical narra-
tive19 – the heroine in flight from Venice disguised as a man to live with
her lover in Verona – comes down to us thanks to the letter of a Venetian
rector written as part of a judicial investigation. Unfortunately, as it is the
only document that survives from the case, it is difficult to know what
role Laura’s cross-dressing played in the authority’s interest in her run-
ning off to Verona. The rector’s focus on Laura’s claim that it was her
decision and her argument that she had been supporting herself for a
time as a prostitute both suggest that the primary concern was whether
or not she had been carried off by Beroldo. Still, the emphasis on Lau-
ra’s masculine garb that apparently aided her flight and the fact that she
did not feel the need to take it off even when she appeared before the
 Women in Men’s Clothing 31

rector seem pregnant with meaning: it was almost as if that masculine

dress gave her the authority to assert before a Venetian official her will
and her desire to live as she pleased. And, in turn, by dressing as a man
and confirming that she did so before a governmental official, she had
sacrificed her traditional womanly honour and had claimed the right to
speak and act on her own in a way an honourable woman could not – a
claim apparently accepted in the end by the rector who made his ruling
based on her will (volontà).
The first theatre piece in which two female protagonists donned men’s
clothing was Calandra, the only – and very successful – play by Bernardo
Dovizi da Bibbiena,20 prelate and future cardinal of the Roman Church.
Calandra, written at the request of Francesco Maria della Rovere for the
1513 Carnival of Urbino, derived its plot from Plautus’s Menaechmi (The
Twin Brothers), a play that had already been performed many times with
great success in Latin as well as in the vernacular at the end of the Quat-
trocento and the beginning of the Cinquecento.21 Bibbiena followed the
classic plot adding, however, an innovation that would influence the sub-
sequent development of Italian drama: in his version, the protagonists,
male twins, became a male and a female, and each assumed the cloth-
ing and the identity of the other. Actually, however, Bibbiena’s imitation
of Plautus was more apparent than real. Giorgio Padoan, for example,
demonstrated that there was substantial borrowing both in language and
plot from the Decameron and from Ariosto’s first two plays, Cassaria and
Suppositi.22 But in many ways, as we shall see, this distance from the classi-
cal model turned also on the fact that Calandra was written in the context
of Renaissance courtly society and was aimed at a youthful, cultured elite
capable of identifying its learned references and appreciating the fact
that the play was composed in the vernacular and in prose.
Significantly, the female twin, Santilla, makes her first appearance in
male clothing in the second act (with the name Lidio femina [Female
Lidio] appearing in the credits) where she promptly reveals her true
gender to the audience and the reasons for her cross-dressing:

It’s very clear how much more fortunate men are than women. And I more
than others have found this to be true, because ever since that day when
our homeland of Modon was burned by the Turks, I’ve always gone about
dressed as a man called Lidio … and with everyone believing me to be a
man I’ve had enough good luck to make everything work out well for us.
On the other hand, if I’d dressed as and taken the name of a woman … the
Turk who held us slaves wouldn’t have sold us, and Perillo wouldn’t have
32 Lelia’s Kiss

bought our freedom either, so we would have been left in miserable slavery.
(II, i, 91, 17–18)

Lidio femina quickly names the adversities of the day – the ongoing con-
flicts with the Turks that so frequently appeared in the background of
plays – as a reason to justify her decision to appear in male clothing. In
fact, her explanation has the ring of truth as at the time young women
captured and made slaves ran a high risk of being sold for their sexual
attractiveness; in the face of that very real danger, Santilla’s otherwise
questionable cross-dressing would have appeared a defensible decision
to a Renaissance audience.23 By passing as a man she was able to save her
virginity and honour; and she was ransomed by the Roman merchant
Perillo.
Santilla then is a young girl, from a good family, whose cross-dressing
at the beginning of the play is not just some passing fancy or moment
of carnival masking; it is a necessary disguise that she had maintained
for years. When she arrives in Rome with the servant Fannio, she passes
not only as a man, she is perceived by all as a successful and trustworthy
one. In fact, she is so successful at handling her own affairs and those of
Perillo that he offers her the hand of his daughter, Virginia, in marriage.
This proposal sets the comedy’s plot in motion: the need to escape the
prospective matrimony convinces her to join in the scheme hatched by
the unhappily married (malmaritata) Fulvia and the magician Ruffo. Ful-
via, upset because her young lover, Lidio, seems to be ignoring her, pays
the magician to cast a spell that would force her lover to visit her. But to
make a good comedy and complicate things, this Lidio is actually none
other than Santilla’s long lost twin brother, now also in Rome.
Thus, there are two Lidios abroad in the streets of the city, one the
‘real’ male Lidio and one the ‘false’ Lidio femina. Fulvia in hatching her
magical scheme unwisely asks Ruffo to have her lover return to her ‘in
the form of a woman’ (II, iii, 97, 21), because in the past he had regu-
larly come to her cross-dressed as a woman in order to enter her house
without creating suspicion. Ruffo, a fraud, and in need of money agrees
to the plot because he is certain he can get his friend Lidio to help and
he assumes incorrectly that his Lidio, actually Santilla, is the real one.
Thus, when he approaches Lidio femina and explains the scheme, she
readily agrees to return to Fulvia ‘dressed as a woman,’ seeing it both as
an enjoyable game and an opportunity to escape at least for a moment
Perillo’s marriage plans that threatens to reveal that she is literally not
the man she seems to be.
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
that could have been invented. The fairies loved music and dancing
and frolic; and, above all things, to be let alone, and not to be
interfered with as regarded their peculiar fairy habits, customs, and
pastimes. They had also, like the Irish, a fine sense of the right and
just, and a warm love for the liberal hand and kindly word. All the
solitudes of the island were peopled by these bright, happy, beautiful
beings, and to the Irish nature, with its need of the spiritual, its love
of the vague, mystic, dreamy, and supernatural, there was
something irresistibly fascinating in the belief that gentle spirits were
around, filled with sympathy for the mortal who suffered wrong or
needed help. But the fairies were sometimes wilful and capricious as
children, and took dire revenge if any one built over their fairy
circles, or looked at them when combing their long yellow hair in the
sunshine, or dancing in the woods, or floating on the lakes. Death
was the penalty to all who approached too near, or pried too
curiously into the mysteries of nature.
To the Irish peasant earth and air were filled with these
mysterious beings, half-loved, half-feared by them; and therefore
they were propitiated by flattery, and called “the good people,” as
the Greeks call the dread goddesses “the Eumenides.” Their voices
were heard in the mountain echo, and their forms seen in the purple
and golden mountain mist; they whispered amidst the perfumed
hawthorn branches; the rush of the autumn leaves was the scamper
of little elves—red, yellow, and brown—wind-delven, and dancing in
their glee; and the bending of the waving barley was caused by the
flight of the Elf King and his Court across the fields. They danced
with soundless feet, and their step was so light that the drops of
dew they danced on only trembled, but did not break. The fairy
music was low and sweet, “blinding sweet,” like that of the great god
Pan by the river; they lived only on the nectar in the cups of the
flowers, though in their fairy palaces sumptuous banquets were
offered to the mortals they carried off—but woe to the mortal who
tasted of fairy food; to eat was fatal. All the evil in the world has
come by eating; if Eve had only resisted that apple our race might
still be in Paradise. The Sidhe look with envy on the beautiful young
human children, and steal them when they can; and the children of
a Sidhe and a mortal mother are reputed to grow up strong and
powerful, but with evil and dangerous natures. There is also a belief
that every seven years the fairies are obliged to deliver up a victim
to the Evil One, and to save their own people they try to abduct
some beautiful young mortal girl, and her they hand over to the
Prince of Darkness.
Dogmatic religion and science have long since killed the
mythopoetic faculty in cultured Europe. It only exists now, naturally
and instinctively, in children, poets, and the childlike races, like the
Irish—simple, joyous, reverent, and unlettered, and who have
remained unchanged for centuries, walled round by their language
from the rest of Europe, through which separating veil science,
culture, and the cold mockery of the sceptic have never yet
penetrated.
Christianity was readily accepted by the Irish. The pathetic tale of
the beautiful young Virgin-Mother and the Child-God, for central
objects, touched all the deepest chords of feeling in the tender,
loving, and sympathetic Irish heart. The legends of ancient times
were not overthrown by it, however, but taken up and incorporated
with the new Christian faith. The holy wells and the sacred trees
remained, and were even made holier by association with a saint’s
name. And to this day the old mythology holds its ground with a
force and vitality untouched by any symptoms of weakness or decay.
The Greeks, who are of the same original race as our people, rose
through the influence of the highest culture to the fulness and
perfectness of eternal youth; but the Irish, without culture, are
eternal children, with all the childlike instincts of superstition still
strong in them, and capable of believing all things, because to doubt
requires knowledge. They never, like the Greeks, attained to the
conception of a race of beings nobler than themselves—men
stronger and more gifted, with the immortal fire of a god in their
veins; women divinely beautiful, or divinely inspired; but, also, the
Irish never defaced the image of God in their hearts by infidelity or
irreligion. One of the most beautiful and sublimely touching records
in all human history is that of the unswerving devotion of the Irish
people to their ancient faith, through persecutions and penal
enactments more insulting and degrading than were ever inflicted in
any other land by one Christian sect upon another.
With this peculiarly reverential nature it would be impossible to
make the Irish a nation of sceptics, even if a whole legion of German
Rationalists came amongst them to preach a crusade against all
belief in the spiritual and the unseen. And the old traditions of their
race have likewise taken firm hold in their hearts, because they are
an artistic people, and require objects for their adoration and love,
not mere abstractions to be accepted by their reason. And they are
also a nation of poets; the presence of God is ever near them, and
the saints and angels, and the shadowy beings of earth and air are
perpetually drawing their minds, through mingled love and fear, to
the infinite and invisible world. Probably not one tradition or custom
that had its origin in a religious belief has been lost in Ireland during
the long course of ages since the first people from Eastern lands
arrived and settled on our shores. The Baal fires are still lit at
Midsummer, though no longer in honour of the sun, but of St. John;
and the peasants still make their cattle pass between two fires—not,
indeed, as of old, in the name of Moloch, but of some patron saint.
That all Irish legends point to the East for their origin, not to the
North, is certain; to a warm land, not one of icebergs, and thunder
crashes of the rending of ice-bound rivers, but to a region where the
shadow of trees, and a cool draught from the sparkling well were
life-giving blessings. Well-worship could not have originated in a
humid country like Ireland, where wells can be found at every step,
and sky and land are ever heavy and saturated with moisture. It
must have come from an Eastern people, wanderers in a dry and
thirsty land, where the discovery of a well seemed like the
interposition of an angel in man’s behalf.
We are told also by the ancient chroniclers that serpent-worship
once prevailed in Ireland, and that St. Patrick hewed down the
serpent idol Crom-Cruadh (the great worm) and cast it into the
Boyne (from whence arose the legend that St. Patrick banished all
venomous things from the island). Now as the Irish never could have
seen a serpent, none existing in Ireland, this worship must have
come from the far East, where this beautiful and deadly creature is
looked upon as the symbol of the Evil One, and worshipped and
propitiated by votive offerings, as all evil things were in the early
world, in the hope of turning away their evil hatred from man, and
to induce them to show mercy and pity; just as the Egyptians
propitiated the sacred crocodile by subtle flatteries and hung costly
jewels in its ears. The Irish, indeed, do not seem to have originated
any peculiar or national cultus. Their funeral ceremonies recall those
of Egypt and Greece and other ancient Eastern climes, from whence
they brought their customs of the Wake, the death chant, the
mourning women, and the funeral games. In Sparta, on the death of
a king or great chief, they had a wake and “keen” not common to
the rest of Greece, but which they said they learned from the
Phœnicians; and this peculiar usage bears a striking resemblance to
the Irish practice. All the virtues of the dead were recited, and the
Greek “Eleleu,” the same cry as the “Ul-lu-lu” of the Irish, was
keened over the corpse by the chorus of hired mourning women.
The custom of selecting women in place of men for the chorus of
lamentation prevailed throughout all the ancient world, as if an open
display of grief was thought beneath the dignity of man. It was
Cassandra gave the keynote for the wail over Hector, and Helen took
the lead in reciting praises to his honour. The death chants in Egypt,
Arabia, and Abyssinia all bear a marked resemblance to the Irish;
indeed the mourning cry is the same in all, and the Egyptian
lamentation “Hi-loo-loo! Hi-loo-loo!” cried over the dead, was
probably the original form of the Irish wail.
The Greeks always endeavoured to lessen the terrors of death,
and for this reason they established funeral games, and the funeral
ceremonies took the form of a festival, where they ate and drank
and poured libations of wine in honour of the dead. The Irish had
also their funeral games and peculiar dances, when they threw off
their upper garments, and holding hands in a circle, moved in a slow
measure round a woman crouched in the centre, with her hands
covering her face. Another singular part of the ceremony was the
entrance of a woman wearing a cow’s head and horns, as Io appears
upon the scene in the Prometheus of Æschylus. This woman was
probably meant to represent the horned or crescented moon, the
antique Diana, the Goddess of Death. The custom of throwing off
the garments no doubt originally signified the casting off the
garment of the flesh. We brought nothing into this world, and it is
certain we carry nothing out. The soul must stand unveiled before
God.
In the islands off the West Coast of Ireland, where the most
ancient superstitions still exist, they have a strange custom. No
funeral wail is allowed to be raised until three hours have elapsed
from the moment of death, because, they say, the sound of the cries
would hinder the soul from speaking to God when it stands before
Him, and waken up the two great dogs that are watching for the
souls of the dead in order that they may devour them—and the Lord
of Heaven Himself cannot hinder them if once they waken. This
tradition of watching by the dead in silence, while the soul stands
before God, is a fine and solemn superstition, which must have had
its origin amongst a people of intense faith in the invisible world, and
is probably of great antiquity.
The sound of the Irish keen is wonderfully pathetic. No one could
listen to the long-sustained minor wail of the “Ul-lu-lu” without
strong emotion and even tears; and once heard it can never be
forgotten. Nor is there anything derogatory to grief in the idea of
hired mourners; on the contrary, it is a splendid tribute to the dead
to order their praises to be recited publicly before the assembled
friends; while there is something indescribably impressive in the
aspect of the mourning women crouched around the bier with
shrouded heads, as they rock themselves to and fro and intone the
solemn, ancient death-song with a measured cadence, sometimes
rising to a piercing wail. They seem like weird and shadowy outlines
of an old-world vision, and at once the imagination is carried back to
the far-distant East, and the time when all these funeral symbols had
a mysterious and awful meaning. Sometimes a wail of genuine and
bitter grief interrupts the chant of the hired mourners. An Irish keen
which was taken down from the lips of a bereaved mother some
years ago, runs thus in the literal English version—
“O women, look on me! Look on me, women! Have you ever seen
any sorrow like mine? Have you ever seen the like of me in my
sorrow? Arrah, then, my darling, my darling, ’tis your mother that
calls you. How long you are sleeping. Do you see all the people
round you, my darling, and I sorely weeping? Arrah, what is this
paleness on your face? Sure there was no equal to it in Erin for
beauty and fairness, and your hair was heavy as the wing of a
raven, and your skin was whiter than the hand of a lady. Is it the
stranger must carry me to my grave, and my son lying here?”
This touching lament is so thoroughly Greek in form and
sentiment that it might be taken for part of a chorus from the
Hecuba of Euripides. Even the “Arrah” reminds one of a Greek word
used frequently by the Greeks when commencing a sentence or
asking a question, although the resemblance may be only superficial.
The tales and legends told by the peasants in the Irish vernacular
are much more weird and strange, and have much more of the old-
world colouring than the ordinary fairy tales narrated in English by
the people, as may be seen by the following mythical story,
translated from the Irish, and which is said to be a thousand years
old:—

THE HORNED WOMEN.

A rich woman sat up late one night carding and preparing wool,
while all the family and servants were asleep. Suddenly a knock was
given at the door, and a voice called—“Open! open!”
“Who is there?” said the woman of the house.
 “I am the Witch of the One Horn,” was answered.
The mistress, supposing that one of her neighbours had called and
required assistance, opened the door, and a woman entered, having
in her hand a pair of wool carders, and bearing a horn on her
forehead, as if growing there. She sat down by the fire in silence,
and began to card the wool with violent haste. Suddenly she paused
and said aloud: “Where are the women? They delay too long.”
Then a second knock came to the door, and a voice called as
before—“Open! open!”
The mistress felt herself constrained to rise and open to the call,
and immediately a second witch entered, having two horns on her
forehead, and in her hand a wheel for spinning the wool.
“Give me place,” she said; “I am the Witch of the Two Horns,” and
she began to spin as quick as lightning.
And so the knocks went on, and the call was heard, and the
witches entered, until at last twelve women sat round the fire—the
first with one horn, the last with twelve horns. And they carded the
thread, and turned their spinning wheels, and wound and wove, all
singing together an ancient rhyme, but no word did they speak to
the mistress of the house. Strange to hear, and frightful to look upon
were these twelve women, with their horns and their wheels; and
the mistress felt near to death, and she tried to rise that she might
call for help, but she could not move, nor could she utter a word or
a cry, for the spell of the witches was upon her.
Then one of them called to her in Irish and said—
“Rise, woman, and make us a cake.”
Then the mistress searched for a vessel to bring water from the
well that she might mix the meal and make the cake, but she could
find none. And they said to her—
“Take a sieve and bring water in it.”
 And she took the sieve and went to the well; but the water poured
from it, and she could fetch none for the cake, and she sat down by
the well and wept. Then a voice came by her and said—
“Take yellow clay and moss and bind them together and plaster
the sieve so that it will hold.”
This she did, and the sieve held the water for the cake. And the
voice said again—
“Return, and when thou comest to the north angle of the house,
cry aloud three times and say, ‘The mountain of the Fenian women
and the sky over it is all on fire.’”
And she did so.
When the witches inside heard the call, a great and terrible cry
broke from their lips and they rushed forth with wild lamentations
and shrieks, and fled away to Slieve-namon, where was their chief
abode. But the Spirit of the Well bade the mistress of the house to
enter and prepare her home against the enchantments of the
witches if they returned again.
And first, to break their spells, she sprinkled the water in which
she had washed her child’s feet (the feet-water) outside the door on
the threshold; secondly, she took the cake which the witches had
made in her absence, of meal mixed with the blood drawn from the
sleeping family. And she broke the cake in bits, and placed a bit in
the mouth of each sleeper, and they were restored; and she took the
cloth they had woven and placed it half in and half out of the chest
with the padlock; and lastly, she secured the door with a great cross-
beam fastened in the jambs, so that they could not enter. And
having done these things she waited.
Not long were the witches in coming back, and they raged and
called for vengeance.
“Open! Open!” they screamed. “Open, feet-water!”
 “I cannot,” said the feet-water, “I am scattered on the ground and
my path is down to the Lough.”
“Open, open, wood and tree and beam!” they cried to the door.
“I cannot,” said the door; “for the beam is fixed in the jambs and I
have no power to move.”
“Open, open, cake that we have made and mingled with blood,”
they cried again.
“I cannot,” said the cake, “for I am broken and bruised, and my
blood is on the lips of the sleeping children.”
Then the witches rushed through the air with great cries, and fled
back to Slieve-namon, uttering strange curses on the Spirit of the
Well, who had wished their ruin; but the woman and the house were
left in peace, and a mantle dropped by one of the witches in her
flight was kept hung up by the mistress as a sign of the night’s awful
contest; and this mantle was in possession of the same family from
generation to generation for five hundred years after.

THE LEGEND OF BALLYTOWTAS CASTLE.

The next tale I shall select is composed in a lighter and more
modern spirit. All the usual elements of a fairy tale are to be found
in it, but the story is new to the nursery folk, and, if well illustrated,
would make a pleasant and novel addition to the rather worn-out
legends on which the children of many generations have been
hitherto subsisting.
In old times there lived where Ballytowtas Castle now stands a
poor man named Towtas. It was in the time when manna fell to the
earth with the dew of evening, and Towtas lived by gathering the
manna, and thus supported himself, for he was a poor man, and had
nothing else.
One day a pedlar came by that way with a fair young daughter.
“Give us a night’s lodging,” he said to Towtas, “for we are weary.”
And Towtas did so.
Next morning, when they were going away, his heart longed for
the young girl, and he said to the pedlar, “Give me your daughter for
my wife.”
“How will you support her?” asked the pedlar.
“Better than you can,” answered Towtas, “for she can never want.”
Then he told him all about the manna; how he went out every
morning when it was lying on the ground with the dew, and
gathered it, as his father and forefathers had done before him, and
lived on it all their lives, so that he had never known want nor any of
his people.
Then the girl showed she would like to stay with the young man,
and the pedlar consented, and they were married, Towtas and the
fair young maiden; and the pedlar left them and went his way. So
years went on, and they were very happy and never wanted; and
they had one son, a bright, handsome youth, and as clever as he
was comely.
But in due time old Towtas died, and after her husband was
buried, the woman went out to gather the manna as she had seen
him do, when the dew lay on the ground; but she soon grew tired
and said to herself, “Why should I do this thing every day? I’ll just
gather now enough to do the week and then I can have rest.”
So she gathered up great heaps of it greedily, and went her way
into the house. But the sin of greediness lay on her evermore; and
not a bit of manna fell with the dew that evening, nor ever again.
And she was poor, and faint with hunger, and had to go out and
work in the fields to earn the morsel that kept her and her son alive;
and she begged pence from the people as they went into chapel,
and this paid for her son’s schooling; so he went on with his
learning, and no one in the county was like him for beauty and
knowledge.
One day he heard the people talking of a great lord that lived up
in Dublin, who had a daughter so handsome that her like was never
seen; and all the fine young gentlemen were dying about her, but
she would take none of them. And he came home to his mother and
said, “I shall go see this great lord’s daughter. Maybe the luck will be
mine above all the fine young gentlemen that love her.”
“Go along, poor fool,” said the mother, “how can the poor stand
before the rich?”
But he persisted. “If I die on the road,” he said, “I’ll try it.”
“Wait, then,” she answered, “till Sunday, and whatever I get I’ll
give you half of it.” So she gave him half of the pence she gathered
at the chapel door, and bid him go in the name of God.
He hadn’t gone far when he met a poor man who asked him for a
trifle for God’s sake. So he gave him something out of his mother’s
money and went on. Again, another met him, and begged for a trifle
to buy food, for the sake of God, and he gave him something also,
and then went on.
“Give me a trifle for God’s sake,” cried a voice, and he saw a third
poor man before him.
“I have nothing left,” said Towtas, “but a few pence; if I give
them, I shall have nothing for food and must die of hunger. But
come with me, and whatever I can buy for this I shall share with
you.” And as they were going on to the inn he told all his story to
the beggar man, and how he wanted to go to Dublin, but had now
no money. So they came to the inn, and he called for a loaf and a
drink of milk. “Cut the loaf,” he said to the beggar. “You are the
oldest.”
“I won’t,” said the other, for he was ashamed, but Towtas made
him.
And so the beggar cut the loaf, but though they ate, it never grew
smaller, and though they drank as they liked of the milk, it never
grew less. Then Towtas rose up to pay, but when the landlady came
and looked, “How is this?” she said. “You have eaten nothing. I’ll not
take your money, poor boy,” but he made her take some; and they
left the place, and went on their way together.
“Now,” said the beggar man, “you have been three times good to
me to-day, for thrice I have met you, and you gave me help for the
sake of God each time. See, now, I can help also,” and he reached a
gold ring to the handsome youth. “Wherever you place that ring,
and wish for it, gold will come—bright gold, so that you can never
want while you have it.”
Then Towtas put the ring first in one pocket and then in another,
until all his pockets were so heavy with gold that he could scarcely
walk; but when he turned to thank the friendly beggar man, he had
disappeared.
So, wondering to himself at all his adventures, he went on, until
he came at last in sight of the lord’s palace, which was beautiful to
see; but he would not enter in until he went and bought fine clothes,
and made himself as grand as any prince; and then he went boldly
up, and they invited him in, for they said, “Surely he is a king’s son.”
And when dinner-hour came the lord’s daughter linked her arm with
Towtas, and smiled on him. And he drank of the rich wine, and was
mad with love; but at last the wine overcame him, and the servants
had to carry him to his bed; and in going into his room he dropped
the ring from his finger, but knew it not.
Now, in the morning, the lord’s daughter came by, and cast her
eyes upon the door of his chamber, and there close by it was the
ring she had seen him wear.
“Ah,” she said, “I’ll tease him now about his ring.” And she put it in
her box, and wished that she were as rich as a king’s daughter, that
so the king’s son might marry her; and, behold, the box filled up
with gold, so that she could not shut it; and she put it from her into
another box, and that filled also; and then she was frightened at the
ring, and put it at last in her pocket as the safest place.
But when Towtas awoke and missed the ring, his heart was
grieved.
“Now, indeed,” he said, “my luck is gone.”
And he inquired of all the servants, and then of the lord’s
daughter, and she laughed, by which he knew she had it; but no
coaxing would get it from her, so when all was useless he went
away, and set out again to reach his old home.
And he was very mournful and threw himself down on the ferns
near an old fort, waiting till night came on, for he feared to go home
in the daylight lest the people should laugh at him for his folly. And
about dusk three cats came out of the fort talking to each other.
“How long our cook is away,” said one.
“What can have happened to him?” said another.
And as they were grumbling a fourth cat came up.
“What delayed you?” they all asked angrily.
Then he told his story—how he had met Towtas and given him the
ring. “And I just went,” he said, “to the lord’s palace to see how the
young man behaved; and I was leaping over the dinner-table when
the lord’s knife struck my tail and three drops of blood fell upon his
plate, but he never saw it and swallowed them with his meat. So
now he has three kittens inside him and is dying of agony, and can
never be cured until he drinks three draughts of the water of the
well of Ballytowtas.”
So when young Towtas heard the cats talk he sprang up and went
and told his mother to give him three bottles full of the water of the
Towtas well, and he would go to the lord disguised as a doctor and
cure him.
So off he went to Dublin. And all the doctors in Ireland were
round the lord, but none of them could tell what ailed him, or how to
cure him. Then Towtas came in and said, “I will cure him.” So they
gave him entertainment and lodging, and when he was refreshed he
gave of the well water three draughts to his lordship, when out
jumped the three kittens. And there was great rejoicing, and they
treated Towtas like a prince. But all the same he could not get the
ring from the lord’s daughter, so he set off home again quite
disheartened, and thought to himself, “If I could only meet the man
again that gave me the ring who knows what luck I might have?”
And he sat down to rest in a wood, and saw there not far off three
boys fighting under an oak-tree.
“Shame on ye to fight so,” he said to them. “What is the fight
about?”
Then they told him. “Our father,” they said, “before he died, buried
under this oak-tree a ring by which you can be in any place in two
minutes if you only wish it; a goblet that is always full when
standing, and empty only when on its side; and a harp that plays
any tune of itself that you name or wish for.”
“I want to divide the things,” said the youngest boy, “and let us all
go and seek our fortunes as we can.”
“But I have a right to the whole,” said the eldest.
And they went on fighting, till at length Towtas said—
“I’ll tell you how to settle the matter. All of you be here to-morrow,
and I’ll think over the matter to-night, and I engage you will have
nothing more to quarrel about when you come in the morning.”
So the boys promised to keep good friends till they met in the
morning, and went away.
When Towtas saw them clear off, he dug up the ring, the goblet,
and the harp, and now said he, “I’m all right, and they won’t have
anything to fight about in the morning.”
Off he set back again to the lord’s castle with the ring, the goblet,
and the harp; but he soon bethought himself of the powers of the
ring, and in two minutes he was in the great hall where all the lords
and ladies were just sitting down to dinner; and the harp played the
sweetest music, and they all listened in delight; and he drank out of
the goblet which was never empty, and then, when his head began
to grow a little light, “It is enough,” he said; and putting his arm
round the waist of the lord’s daughter, he took his harp and goblet in
the other hand, and murmuring—“I wish we were at the old fort by
the side of the wood”—in two minutes they were both at the desired
spot. But his head was heavy with the wine, and he laid down the
harp beside him and fell asleep. And when she saw him asleep she
took the ring off his finger, and the harp and the goblet from the
ground and was back home in her father’s castle before two minutes
had passed by.
When Towtas awoke and found his prize gone, and all his
treasures beside, he was like one mad; and roamed about the
country till he came by an orchard, where he saw a tree covered
with bright, rosy apples. Being hungry and thirsty, he plucked one
and ate it, but no sooner had he done so than horns began to sprout
from his forehead, and grew larger and longer till he knew he looked
like a goat, and all he could do, they would not come off. Now,
indeed, he was driven out of his mind, and thought how all the
neighbours would laugh at him; and as he raged and roared with
shame, he spied another tree with apples, still brighter, of ruddy
gold.
 “If I were to have fifty pairs of horns I must have one of those,”
he said; and seizing one, he had no sooner tasted it than the horns
fell off, and he felt that he was looking stronger and handsomer than
ever.
“Now, I have her at last,” he exclaimed. “I’ll put horns on them all,
and will never take them off until they give her to me as my bride
before the whole Court.”
Without further delay he set off to the lord’s palace, carrying with
him as many of the apples as he could bring off the two trees. And
when they saw the beauty of the fruit they longed for it; and he
gave to them all, so that at last there was not a head to be seen
without horns in the whole dining-hall. Then they cried out and
prayed to have the horns taken off, but Towtas said—
“No; there they shall be till I have the lord’s daughter given to me
for my bride, and my two rings, my goblet, and my harp all restored
to me.”
And this was done before the face of all the lords and ladies; and
his treasures were restored to him; and the lord placed his
daughter’s hand in the hand of Towtas, saying—
“Take her; she is your wife; only free me from the horns.”
Then Towtas brought forth the golden apples; and they all ate,
and the horns fell off; and he took his bride and his treasures, and
carried them off home, where he built the Castle of Ballytowtas, in
the place where stood his father’s hut, and enclosed the well within
the walls. And when he had filled his treasure-room with gold, so
that no man could count his riches, he buried his fairy treasures
deep in the ground, where no man knew, and no man has ever yet
been able to find them until this day.

A WOLF STORY.
 Transformation into wolves is a favourite subject of Irish legend,
and many a wild tale is told by the peasants round the turf fire in the
winter nights of strange adventures with wolves. Stories that had
come down to them from their forefathers in the old times long ago;
for there are no wolves existing now in Ireland.
A young farmer, named Connor, once missed two fine cows from
his herd, and no tale or tidings could be heard of them anywhere. So
he thought he would set out on a search throughout the country;
and he took a stout blackthorn stick in his hand, and went his way.
All day he travelled miles and miles, but never a sign of the cattle.
And the evening began to grow very dark, and he was wearied and
hungry, and no place near to rest in; for he was in the midst of a
bleak, desolate heath, with never a habitation at all in sight, except
a long, low, rude shieling, like the den of a robber or a wild beast.
But a gleam of light came from a chink between the boards, and
Connor took heart and went up and knocked at the door. It was
opened at once by a tall, thin, grey-haired old man, with keen, dark
eyes.
“Come in,” he said, “you are welcome. We have been waiting for
you. This is my wife,” and he brought him over to the hearth, where
was seated an old, thin, grey woman, with long, sharp teeth and
terrible glittering eyes.
“You are welcome,” she said. “We have been waiting for you—it is
time for supper. Sit down and eat with us.”
Now Connor was a brave fellow, but he was a little dazed at first
at the sight of this strange creature. However, as he had his stout
stick with him, he thought he could make a fight for his life any way,
and, meantime, he would rest and eat, for he was both hungry and
weary, and it was now black night, and he would never find his way
home even if he tried. So he sat down by the hearth, while the old
grey woman stirred the pot on the fire. But Connor felt that she was
watching him all the time with her keen, sharp eyes.
 Then a knock came to the door. And the old man rose up and
opened it. When in walked a slender, young black wolf, who
immediately went straight across the floor to an inner room, from
which in a few moments came forth a dark, slender, handsome
youth, who took his place at the table and looked hard at Connor
with his glittering eyes.
“You are welcome,” he said, “we have waited for you.”
Before Connor could answer another knock was heard, and in
came a second wolf, who passed on to the inner room like the first,
and soon after, another dark, handsome youth came out and sat
down to supper with them, glaring at Connor with his keen eyes, but
said no word.
“These are our sons,” said the old man, “tell them what you want,
and what brought you here amongst us, for we live alone and don’t
care to have spies and strangers coming to our place.”
Then Connor told his story, how he had lost his two fine cows, and
had searched all day and found no trace of them; and he knew
nothing of the place he was in, nor of the kindly gentleman who
asked him to supper; but if they just told him where to find his cows
he would thank them, and make the best of his way home at once.
Then they all laughed and looked at each other, and the old hag
looked more frightful than ever when she showed her long, sharp
teeth.
On this, Connor grew angry, for he was hot tempered; and he
grasped his blackthorn stick firmly in his hand and stood up, and
bade them open the door for him; for he would go his way, since
they would give no heed and only mocked him.
Then the eldest of the young men stood up. “Wait,” he said, “we
are fierce and evil, but we never forget a kindness. Do you
remember, one day down in the glen you found a poor little wolf in
great agony and like to die, because a sharp thorn had pierced his
side? And you gently extracted the thorn and gave him a drink, and
went your way leaving him in peace and rest?”
“Aye, well do I remember it,” said Connor, “and how the poor little
beast licked my hand in gratitude.”
“Well,” said the young man, “I am that wolf, and I shall help you if
I can, but stay with us to-night and have no fear.”
So they sat down again to supper and feasted merrily, and then all
fell fast asleep, and Connor knew nothing more till he awoke in the
morning and found himself by a large hay-rick in his own field.
“Now surely,” thought he, “the adventure of last night was not all
a dream, and I shall certainly find my cows when I go home; for that
excellent, good young wolf promised his help, and I feel certain he
would not deceive me.”
But when he arrived home and looked over the yard and the
stable and the field, there was no sign nor sight of the cows. So he
grew very sad and dispirited. But just then he espied in the field
close by three of the most beautiful strange cows he had ever set
eyes on. “These must have strayed in,” he said, “from some
neighbour’s ground;” and he took his big stick to drive them out of
the gate off the field. But when he reached the gate, there stood a
young black wolf watching; and when the cows tried to pass out at
the gate he bit at them, and drove them back. Then Connor knew
that his friend the wolf had kept his word. So he let the cows go
quietly back to the field; and there they remained, and grew to be
the finest in the whole country, and their descendants are flourishing
to this day, and Connor grew rich and prospered; for a kind deed is
never lost, but brings good luck to the doer for evermore, as the old
proverb says:

“Blessings are won,

By a good deed done.”
 But never again did Connor find that desolate heath or that lone
shieling, though he sought far and wide, to return his thanks, as was
due to the friendly wolves; nor did he ever again meet any of the
family, though he mourned much whenever a slaughtered wolf was
brought into the town for the sake of the reward, fearing his
excellent friend might be the victim. At that time the wolves in
Ireland had increased to such an extent, owing to the desolation of
the country by constant wars, that a reward was offered and a high
price paid for every wolf’s skin brought into the court of the
justiciary; and this was in the time of Queen Elizabeth, when the
English troops made ceaseless war against the Irish people, and
there were more wolves in Ireland than men; and the dead lay
unburied in hundreds on the highways, for there were no hands left
to dig them graves.

THE EVIL EYE.

There is nothing more dreaded by the people, nor considered
more deadly in its effects, than the Evil Eye.
It may strike at any moment unless the greatest precautions are
taken, and even then there is no true help possible unless the fairy
doctor is at once summoned to pronounce the mystic charm that can
alone destroy the evil and fatal influence.
There are several modes in which the Evil Eye can act, some much
more deadly than others. If certain persons are met the first thing in
the morning, you will be unlucky for the whole of that day in all you
do. If the evil-eyed comes in to rest, and looks fixedly on anything,
on cattle or on a child, there is doom in the glance; a fatality which
cannot be evaded except by a powerful counter-charm. But if the
evil-eyed mutters a verse over a sleeping child, that child will
assuredly die, for the incantation is of the devil, and no charm has
power to resist it or turn away the evil. Sometimes the process of
bewitching is effected by looking fixedly at the object, through nine
fingers; especially is the magic fatal if the victim is seated by the fire
in the evening when the moon is full. Therefore, to avoid being
suspected of having the Evil Eye, it is necessary at once, when
looking at a child, to say “God bless it.” And when passing a
farmyard where the cows are collected for milking, to say, “The
blessing of God be on you and on all your labours.” If this form is
omitted, the worst results may be apprehended, and the people
would be filled with terror and alarm, unless a counter-charm were
not instantly employed.
The singular malific influence of a glance has been felt by most
persons in life; an influence that seems to paralyze intellect and
speech, simply by the mere presence in the room of some one who
is mystically antipathetic to our nature. For the soul is like a fine-
toned harp that vibrates to the slightest external force or movement,
and the presence and glance of some persons can radiate around us
a divine joy, while others may kill the soul with a sneer or a frown.
We call these subtle influences mysteries, but the early races
believed them to be produced by spirits, good or evil, as they acted
on the nerves or the intellect.
Some years ago an old woman was living in Kerry, and it was
thought so unlucky to meet her in the morning, that all the girls
used to go out after sunset to bring in water for the following day,
that so they might avoid her evil glance; for whatever she looked on
came to loss and grief.
There was a man, also, equally dreaded on account of the
strange, fatal power of his glance; and so many accidents and
misfortunes were traced to his presence that finally the neighbours
insisted that he should wear a black patch over the Evil Eye, not to
be removed unless by request; for learned gentlemen, curious in
such things, sometimes came to him to ask for a proof of his power,
and he would try it for a wager while drinking with his friends.
 One day, near an old ruin of a castle, he met a boy weeping in
great grief for his pet pigeon, which had got up to the very top of
the ruin, and could not be coaxed down.
“What will you give me,” asked the man, “if I bring it down for
you?”
“I have nothing to give,” said the boy, “but I will pray to God for
you. Only get me back my pigeon, and I shall be happy.”
Then the man took off the black patch and looked up steadfastly
at the bird; when all of a sudden it fell to the ground and lay
motionless, as if stunned; but there was no harm done to it, and the
boy took it up and went his way, rejoicing.

A woman in the County Galway had a beautiful child, so

handsome, that all the neighbours were very careful to say “God
bless it” when they saw him, for they knew the fairies would desire
to steal the child, and carry it off to the hills.
But one day it chanced that an old woman, a stranger, came in.
“Let me rest,” she said, “for I am weary.” And she sat down and
looked at the child, but never said “God bless it.” And when she had
rested, she rose up, looked again at the child fixedly, in silence, and
then went her way.
All that night the child cried and would not sleep. And all next day
it moaned as if in pain. So the mother told the priest, but he would
do nothing for fear of the fairies. And just as the poor mother was in
despair, she saw a strange woman going by the door. “Who knows,”
she said to her husband, “but this woman would help us.” So they
asked her to come in and rest. And when she looked at the child she
said “God bless it,” instantly, and spat three times at it, and then sat
down.
 “Now, what will you give me,” she said, “if I tell you what ails the
child?”
“I will cross your hand with silver,” said the mother, “as much as
you want, only speak,” and she laid the money on the woman’s
hand. “Now tell me the truth, for the sake and in the name of Mary,
and the good Angels.”
“Well,” said the stranger, “the fairies have had your child these two
days in the hills, and this is a changeling they have left in its place.
But so many blessings were said on your child that the fairies can do
it no harm. For there was only one blessing wanting, and only one
person gave the Evil Eye. Now, you must watch for this woman,
carry her into the house and secretly cut off a piece of her cloak.
Then burn the piece close to the child, till the smoke as it rises
makes him sneeze; and when this happens the spell is broken, and
your own child will come back to you safe and sound, in place of the
changeling.”
Then the stranger rose up and went her way.
All that evening the mother watched for the old woman, and at
last she spied her on the road.
“Come in,” she cried, “come in, good woman, and rest, for the
cakes are hot on the griddle, and supper is ready.”
So the woman came in, but never said “God bless you kindly,” to
man or mortal, only scowled at the child, who cried worse than ever.
Now the mother had told her eldest girl to cut off a piece of the
old woman’s cloak, secretly, when she sat down to eat. And the girl
did as she was desired, and handed the piece to her mother,
unknown to any one. But, to their surprise, this was no sooner done
than the woman rose up and went out without uttering a word; and
they saw her no more.
Then the father carried the child outside, and burned the piece of
cloth before the door, and held the boy over the smoke till he
sneezed three times violently: after which he gave the child back to
the mother, who laid him in his bed, where he slept peacefully, with
a smile on his face, and cried no more with the cry of pain. And
when he woke up the mother knew that she had got her own darling
child back from the fairies, and no evil thing happened to him any
more.

The influence of the mysterious and malign power of the Evil Eye
has at all times been as much dreaded in Ireland as it is in Egypt,
Greece, or Italy at the present day. Everything young, beautiful, or
perfect after its kind, and which naturally attracts attention and
admiration, is peculiarly liable to the fatal blight that follows the
glance of the Evil Eye. It is therefore an invariable habit amongst the
peasantry never to praise anything without instantly adding, “God
bless it;” for were this formula omitted, the worst consequences
would befall the object praised.
The superstition must be of great antiquity in Ireland, for Balor,
the Fomorian giant and hero, is spoken of in an ancient manuscript
as able to petrify his enemies by a glance; and how he became
possessed of the power is thus narrated:—
One day as the Druids were busy at their incantations, while
boiling a magical spell or charm, young Balor passed by, and curious
to see their work, looked in at an open window. At that moment the
Druids happened to raise the lid of the caldron, and the vapour,
escaping, passed under one of Balor’s eyes, carrying with it all the
venom of the incantation. This caused his brow to grow to such a
size that it required four men to raise it whenever he wanted to
exert the power of his venomed glance over his enemies. He was
slain at last in single combat, according to the ancient legend, at the
great battle of Magh-Tura2 (the plain of the towers), fought between
the Firbolgs and the Tuatha-de-Dananns for the possession of
Ireland several centuries before the Christian era; for before Balor’s
brow could be lifted so that he could transfix his enemy and strike
him dead with the terrible power of his glance, his adversary flung a
stone with such violence that it went right through the Evil Eye, and
pierced the skull, and the mighty magician fell to rise no more.
An interesting account of this battle, with a remarkable
confirmation of the legends respecting it still current in the district, is
given by Sir William Wilde, in his work, “Lough Corrib; its Shores and
Islands.” In the ancient manuscript, it is recorded that a young hero
having been slain while bravely defending his king, the Firbolg army
erected a mound over him, each man carrying a stone, and the
monument was henceforth known as the Carn-in-en-Fhir (the cairn
of the one man). Having examined the locality with a transcript of
this manuscript in his hand, Sir William fixed on the particular
mound, amongst the many stone tumuli scattered over the plain,
which seemed to agree best with the description, and had it opened
carefully under his own superintendence.
A large flag-stone was first discovered, laid horizontally; then
another beneath it, covering a small square chamber formed of
stones, within which was a single urn of baked clay, graceful and
delicate in form and ornamentation, containing incinerated human
bones, the remains, there can be no reason to doubt, of the Firbolg
youth who was honoured for his loyalty by the erection over him of
the Carn-in-en-Fhir on the historic plains of Mayo.
After Balor, the only other ancient instance of the fatal effects of
the malific Eye is narrated of St. Silan, who had a poisonous hair in
his eyebrow that killed whoever looked first on him in the morning.
All persons, therefore, who from long sickness, or sorrow, or the
weariness that comes with years, were tired of life, used to try and
come in the saint’s way, that so their sufferings might be ended by a
quick and easy death. But another saint, the holy Molaise, hearing
that St. Silan was coming to visit his church, resolved that no more
deaths should happen by means of the poisoned hair. So he arose
early in the morning, before any one was up, and went forth alone
to meet St. Silan, and when he saw him coming along the path, he
went boldly up and plucked out the fatal hair from his eyebrow, but
in doing so he himself was struck by the venom, and immediately
after fell down dead.
The power of the Evil Eye was recognized by the Brehon laws, and
severe measures were ordained against the users of the malign
influence. “If a person is in the habit of injuring things through
neglect, or of will, whether he has blessed, or whether he has not
blessed, full penalty be upon him, or restitution in kind.” So ran the
ancient law.
The gift comes by nature and is born with one, though it may not
be called into exercise unless circumstances arise to excite the
power. Then it seems to act like a spirit of bitter and malicious envy
that radiates a poisonous atmosphere which chills and blights
everything within its reach. Without being superstitious every one
has felt that there is such a power and succumbed to its influence in
a helpless, passive way, as if all self-trust and self-reliant energy
were utterly paralyzed by its influence.
Suspected persons are held in great dread by the peasantry, and
they recognize them at once by certain signs. Men and women with
dark lowering eyebrows are especially feared, and the handsome
children are kept out of their path lest they might be overlooked by
them.
Red hair is supposed to have a most malign influence, and it has
even passed into a proverb: “Let not the eye of a red-haired woman
rest on you.”
Many persons are quite unconscious that their glance or frown has
this evil power until some calamity results, and then they strive not
to look at any one full in the face, but to avert their eyes when
speaking, lest misfortune might fall upon the person addressed.3
The saving invocation, “God bless it!” is universally used when
praise is bestowed, to prevent danger, and should a child fall sick
some one is immediately suspected of having omitted the usual
phrase out of malice and ill-will. Nothing is more dreaded by the
peasantry than the full, fixed, direct glance of one suspected of the
Evil Eye, and should it fall upon them, or on any of their household,
a terrible fear and trembling of heart takes possession of them,
which often ends in sickness or sometimes even in death.

Some years ago a woman living in Kerry declared that she was
“overlooked” by the Evil Eye. She had no pleasure in her life and no
comfort, and she wasted away because of the fear that was on her,
caused by the following singular circumstance:—
Every time that she happened to leave home alone, and that no
one was within call, she was met by a woman totally unknown to
her, who, fixing her eyes on her in silence, with a terrible expression,
cast her to the ground and proceeded to beat and pinch her till she
was nearly senseless; after which her tormentor disappeared.
Having experienced this treatment several times, the poor woman
finally abstained altogether from leaving the house, unless protected
by a servant or companion; and this precaution she observed for
several years, during which time she never was molested. So at last
she began to believe that the spell was broken, and that her strange
enemy had departed for ever.
In consequence she grew less careful about the usual precaution,
and one day stepped down alone to a little stream that ran by the
house to wash some clothes.
Stooping down over her work, she never thought of any danger,
and began to sing as she used to do in the light-hearted days before
the spell was on her, when suddenly a dark shadow fell across the
water, and looking up, she beheld to her horror the strange woman
on the opposite side of the little stream, with her terrible eyes
intently fixed on her, as hard and still as if she were of stone.
 Springing up with a scream of terror, she flung down her work,
and ran towards the house; but soon she heard footsteps behind
her, and in an instant she was seized, thrown down to the ground,
and her tormentor began to beat her even worse than before, till
she lost all consciousness; and in this state she was found by her
husband, lying on her face and speechless. She was at once carried
to the house, and all the care that affection and rural skill could
bestow were lavished on her, but in vain. She, however, regained
sufficient consciousness to tell them of the terrible encounter she
had gone through, but died before the night had passed away.
It was believed that the power of fascination by the glance, which
is not necessarily an evil power like the Evil Eye, was possessed in a
remarkable degree by learned and wise people, especially poets, so
that they could make themselves loved and followed by any girl they
liked, simply by the influence of the glance. About the year 1790, a
young man resided in the County Limerick, who had this power in a
singular and unusual degree. He was a clever, witty rhymer in the
Irish language; and, probably, had the deep poet eyes that
characterize warm and passionate poet-natures—eyes that even
without necromancy have been known to exercise a powerful
magnetic influence over female minds.
One day, while travelling far from home, he came upon a bright,
pleasant-looking farmhouse, and feeling weary, he stopped and
requested a drink of milk and leave to rest. The farmer’s daughter, a
young, handsome girl, not liking to admit a stranger, as all the maids
were churning, and she was alone in the house, refused him
admittance.
The young poet fixed his eyes earnestly on her face for some time
in silence, then slowly turning round left the house, and walked
towards a small grove of trees just opposite. There he stood for a
few moments resting against a tree, and facing the house as if to
take one last vengeful or admiring glance, then went his way
without once turning round.
 The young girl had been watching him from the windows, and the
moment he moved she passed out of the door like one in a dream,
and followed him slowly, step by step, down the avenue. The maids
grew alarmed, and called to her father, who ran out and shouted
loudly for her to stop, but she never turned or seemed to heed. The
young man, however, looked round, and seeing the whole family in
pursuit, quickened his pace, first glancing fixedly at the girl for a
moment. Immediately she sprang towards him, and they were both
almost out of sight, when one of the maids espied a piece of paper
tied to a branch of the tree where the poet had rested. From
curiosity she took it down, and the moment the knot was untied, the
farmer’s daughter suddenly stopped, became quite still, and when
her father came up she allowed him to lead her back to the house
without resistance.
When questioned, she said that she felt herself drawn by an
invisible force to follow the young stranger wherever he might lead,
and that she would have followed him through the world, for her life
seemed to be bound up in his; she had no will to resist, and was
conscious of nothing else but his presence. Suddenly, however, the
spell was broken, and then she heard her father’s voice, and knew
how strangely she had acted. At the same time the power of the
young man over her vanished, and the impulse to follow him was no
longer in her heart.
The paper, on being opened, was found to contain five mysterious
words written in blood, and in this order—

Sator.
Arepo.
Tenet.
Opera.
Rotas.

These letters are so arranged that read in any way, right to left,
left to right, up or down, the same words are produced; and when
written in blood with a pen made of an eagle’s feather, they form a
charm which no woman (it is said) can resist; but the incredulous
reader can easily test the truth of this assertion for himself.

These popular stories are provokingly incomplete, and one cannot

help regretting that the romance of “The Poet and the Farmer’s
Daughter” was not brought to a happy termination; but the Irish
tales are in general rather incoherent, more like remembered
fragments of ancient stories than a complete, well-organized
dramatic composition, with lights well placed, and a striking
catastrophe. The opening is usually attractive, with the exciting
formula, “Once upon a time,” from which one always expects so
much; and there is sure to be an old woman, weird and witch-like,
capable of the most demoniacal actions, and a mysterious man who
promises to be the unredeemed evil spirit of the tale; but in the end
they both turn out childishly harmless, and their evil actions seldom
go beyond stealing their neighbours’ butter, or abducting a pretty
girl, which sins mere mortals would be quite equal to, even without
the aid of “the gods of the earth” and their renowned leader,
Finvarra, the King of the Fairies. The following tale, however, of a
case of abduction by fairy power, is well constructed. The hero of the
narrative has our sympathy and interest, and it ends happily, which
is considered a great merit by the Irish, as they dislike a tale to
which they cannot append, as an epilogue, the hearty and
outspoken “Thank God.”

THE STOLEN BRIDE.

About the year 1670 there was a fine young fellow living at a
place called Querin, in the County Clare. He was brave and strong
and rich, for he had his own land and his own house, and not one to
lord it over him. He was called the Kern of Querin. And many a time
he would go out alone to shoot the wild fowl at night along the
lonely strand and sometimes cross over northward to the broad east
strand, about two miles away, to find the wild geese.
One cold frosty November Eve he was watching for them,
crouched down behind the ruins of an old hut, when a loud
splashing noise attracted his attention. “It is the wild geese,” he
thought, and raising his gun, waited in death-like silence the
approach of his victim.
But presently he saw a dark mass moving along the edge of the
strand. And he knew there were no wild geese near him. So he
watched and waited till the black mass came closer, and then he
distinctly perceived four stout men carrying a bier on their shoulders,
on which lay a corpse covered with a white cloth. For a few
moments they laid it down, apparently to rest themselves, and the
Kern instantly fired; on which the four men ran away shrieking, and
the corpse was left alone on the bier. Kern of Querin immediately
sprang to the place, and lifting the cloth from the face of the corpse,
beheld by the freezing starlight, the form of a beautiful young girl,
apparently not dead but in a deep sleep.
Gently he passed his hand over her face and raised her up, when
she opened her eyes and looked around with wild wonder, but spake
never a word, though he tried to soothe and encourage her. Then,
thinking it was dangerous for them to remain in that place, he raised
her from the bier, and taking her hand led her away to his own
house. They arrived safely, but in silence. And for twelve months did
she remain with the Kern, never tasting food or speaking word for all
that time.
When the next November Eve came round, he resolved to visit the
east strand again, and watch from the same place, in the hope of
meeting with some adventure that might throw light on the history
of the beautiful girl. His way lay beside the old ruined fort called
Lios-na-fallainge (the Fort of the Mantle), and as he passed, the
sound of music and mirth fell on his ear. He stopped to catch the
words of the voices, and had not waited long when he heard a man
say in a low whisper—
“Where shall we go to-night to carry off a bride?”
And a second voice answered—
“Wherever we go I hope better luck will be ours than we had this
day twelvemonths.”
“Yes,” said a third; “on that night we carried off a rich prize, the
fair daughter of O’Connor; but that clown, the Kern of Querin, broke
our spell and took her from us. Yet little pleasure has he had of his
bride, for she has neither eaten nor drank nor uttered a word since
she entered his house.”
“And so she will remain,” said a fourth, “until he makes her eat off
her father’s table-cloth, which covered her as she lay on the bier,
and which is now thrown up over the top of her bed.”
On hearing all this, the Kern rushed home, and without waiting
even for the morning, entered the young girl’s room, took down the
table-cloth, spread it on the table, laid meat and drink thereon, and
led her to it. “Drink,” he said, “that speech may come to you.” And
she drank, and ate of the food, and then speech came. And she told
the Kern her story—how she was to have been married to a young
lord of her own country, and the wedding guests had all assembled,
when she felt herself suddenly ill and swooned away, and never
knew more of what had happened to her until the Kern had passed
his hand over her face, by which she recovered consciousness, but
could neither eat nor speak, for a spell was on her, and she was
helpless.
Then the Kern prepared a chariot, and carried home the young girl
to her father, who was like to die for joy when he beheld her. And
the Kern grew mightily in O’Connor’s favour, so that at last he gave
him his fair young daughter to wife; and the wedded pair lived
together happily for many long years after, and no evil befell them,
but good followed all the work of their hands.
This story of Kern of Querin still lingers in the faithful, vivid Irish
memory, and is often told by the peasants of Clare when they gather
round the fire on the awful festival of Samhain, or November Eve,
when the dead walk, and the spirits of earth and air have power
over mortals, whether for good or evil.

FAIRY MUSIC.
The evil influence of the fairy glance does not kill, but it throws
the object into a death-like trance, in which the real body is carried
off to some fairy mansion, while a log of wood, or some ugly,
deformed creature is left in its place, clothed with the shadow of the
stolen form. Young women, remarkable for beauty, young men, and
handsome children, are the chief victims of the fairy stroke. The girls
are wedded to fairy chiefs, and the young men to fairy queens; and
if the mortal children do not turn out well, they are sent back, and
others carried off in their place. It is sometimes possible, by the
spells of a powerful fairy-man, to bring back a living being from
Fairy-land. But they are never quite the same after. They have
always a spirit-look, especially if they have listened to the fairy
music. For the fairy music is soft and low and plaintive, with a fatal
charm for mortal ears.
One day a gentleman entered a cabin in the County Clare, and
saw a young girl about twenty seated by the fire, chanting a
melancholy song, without settled words or music. On inquiry he was
told she had once heard the fairy harp, and those who hear it lose
all memory of love or hate, and forget all things, and never more
have any other sound in their ears save the soft music of the fairy
harp, and when the spell is broken, they die.
 It is remarkable that the Irish national airs—plaintive, beautiful,
and unutterably pathetic—should so perfectly express the spirit of
the Céol-Sidhe (the fairy music), as it haunts the fancy of the people
and mingles with all their traditions of the spirit world. Wild and
capricious as the fairy nature, these delicate harmonies, with their
mystic, mournful rhythm, seem to touch the deepest chords of
feeling, or to fill the sunshine with laughter, according to the mood
of the players; but, above all things, Irish music is the utterance of a
Divine sorrow; not stormy or passionate, but like that of an exiled
spirit, yearning and wistful, vague and unresting; ever seeking the
unattainable, ever shadowed, as it were, with memories of some lost
good, or some dim foreboding of a coming fate—emotions that seem
to find their truest expression in the sweet, sad, lingering wail of the
pathetic minor in a genuine Irish air. There is a beautiful phrase in
one of the ancient manuscripts descriptive of the wonderful power of
Irish music over the sensitive human organization: “Wounded men
were soothed when they heard it, and slept; and women in travail
forgot their pains.” There are legends concerning the subtle charm of
the fairy music and dance, when the mortal under their influence
seems to move through the air with “the naked, fleshless feet of the
spirit,” and is lulled by the ecstasy of the cadence into forgetfulness
of all things, and sometimes into the sleep of death.

THE FAIRY DANCE.

The following story is from the Irish, as told by a native of one of
the Western Isles, where the primitive superstitions have still all the
freshness of young life.
One evening late in November, which is the month when spirits
have most power over all things, as the prettiest girl in all the island
was going to the well for water, her foot slipped and she fell. It was
an unlucky omen, and when she got up and looked round it seemed
to her as if she were in a strange place, and all around her was
changed as if by enchantment. But at some distance she saw a great
crowd gathered round a blazing fire, and she was drawn slowly on
towards them, till at last she stood in the very midst of the people;
but they kept silence, looking fixedly at her; and she was afraid, and
tried to turn and leave them, but she could not. Then a beautiful
youth, like a prince, with a red sash, and a golden band on his long
yellow hair, came up and asked her to dance.
“It is a foolish thing of you, sir, to ask me to dance,” she said,
“when there is no music.”
Then he lifted his hand and made a sign to the people, and
instantly the sweetest music sounded near her and around her, and
the young man took her hand, and they danced and danced till the
moon and the stars went down, but she seemed like one floating on
the air, and she forgot everything in the world except the dancing,
and the sweet low music, and her beautiful partner.
At last the dancing ceased, and her partner thanked her, and
invited her to supper with the company. Then she saw an opening in
the ground, and a flight of steps, and the young man, who seemed
to be the king amongst them all, led her down, followed by the
whole company. At the end of the stairs they came upon a large hall,
all bright and beautiful with gold and silver and lights; and the table
was covered with everything good to eat, and wine was poured out
in golden cups for them to drink. When she sat down they all
pressed her to eat the food and to drink the wine; and as she was
weary after the dancing, she took the golden cup the prince handed
to her, and raised it to her lips to drink. Just then, a man passed
close to her, and whispered—
“Eat no food, and drink no wine, or you will never reach your
home again.”
So she laid down the cup, and refused to drink. On this they were
angry, and a great noise arose, and a fierce, dark man stood up, and
said—
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