Nursery Rhymes
"AND THEY SPOKE DIRECTLY"
Rehearsing Eskil Hemberg's Nursery Rhymes pleased but often baffled us. While Goosey Goosey Gander and Three Little Mice conjured pleasant childhood memories, others were, to say the least, weird. Why was Hemberg inspired by the wire-line drawings of Alexander Calder, an avant garde artist still renowned for his raw and often witty minimalism? And how do nursery rhymes align with Calder's aesthetics? One of Calder's classmates recalled:
He was one of the "real" characters-very humorous, very funny-always joking and kidding around, never seeming to take anything seriously. He was always drawing pictures of circus animals-little crude drawings of elephants, etc.. I do remember one or two occasions when I saw him attempting to be serious in working from the model. But after a few minutes of this he would be drawing cosmic things on his sheet of paper, making cartoons with one character saying something humorous to another character."
Perhaps 'weird' art and personalities deserved a closer look. To our surprise, we learnt that there are English scholars who find it important to analyse nursery rhymes. In 1849, Shakespearian scholar James Halliwell compiled the first anthology of nursery rhymes, an anthology recently edited by Iona and Peter Opie. According to these scholars, nursery rhymes are found everywhere in different versions. For example, the old rhyme Solomon Grundy was made famous in England after the Second World War. This was because it was parodied by the country's National Savings Committee. In fact, the rhyme was so famous that during train journeys, parents kept children quiet by making them recite the 'distorted' version: "Soloman (sic) Grundy / Rich on Monday / Spent on Tuesday / More on Wednesday / Poor on Thursday / Worse on Friday / Broke on Saturday / Where will he end / Old Solomon Grundy?"
According to the Opies' and James Sweeney's (yet another scholar!) research, the study of nursery rhymes reveals important changes in the history of England. In the rhymes which Hemberg selected, there are many ideas which seem strange to us today, but they were really not so strange back in 17th century England. Imagine twenty-four manly tailors running after a snail, and the jolly red nose of someone being drunk on gin (a very strong, burning alcoholic drink)! Imagine a mad person whose 'tickled' mind makes him laugh helplessly! And would you teach a child to throw an old man down the stairs, and anyway, what is this old man doing in a lady's chamber? For us, it is difficult to imagine how a mother can sooth her child to sleep with these weird rhymes. Yet years ago, children were familiar with bawdy jokes, strong language and drinking songs. Why? Because parents treated their children as miniature adults!
These days, we all know that rhyme recitation and singing help school children learn the alphabet, numbers and days of the week. Also, along with stories like Three Little Pigs and Little Red Riding Hood, rhymes teach proper behaviour to obedient children. However, during the 19th century, a novelist named Sir Walter Scott criticised such 'good-boy' stories and rhymes which he thought were cold and unnatural. Scott was not alone in thinking this. There were many other people who thought children should grow up in a carefree manner. After all, kids are by nature noisy, naughty, messy and restless. Why should anyone stop them from being so?
In 1930, a philosopher Bertrand Russell suggested that, compared to us now, people in the past had fun and leisure in a more robust way. He said, "Men and women appear to have become incapable of enjoying the more intellectual pleasures. The art of general conversation, for example, brought to perfection in the French salons of the 18th century, was still a living tradition forty years ago." Indeed, in the age where television, movies, radio and cheap books did not exist, human beings sought amusement by simply speaking creatively with one another!
Back in 17th century England, taverns (and possibly codpieces!) held a special place in British society. These were popular houses where people gathered after work to enjoy a bevy of beers, stouts or ales along with some mincemeat, pork or steak-and-kidney pie. In this rough but merry atmosphere, a kind of wordplay made up of violence, nonsense and endless crude jokes developed.
Unlike the Victorian child who read, "Who fed me from her gentle breast, / And hush'd me in her arms to rest, / And on my cheek sweet kisses press'd/ My Mother" in Sunday school, the Elizabethan child would have learnt from beer-flushed adults the direct version-"My mother has killed me, / My father is eating me, / My brothers and sisters sit under the table / Picking up my bones, /And they bury them under the cold marble stones."
- Jeremy Lim
References:
Opie, Iona and Peter, The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (2nd edition), Oxford University Press, 1998.
Calder, Alexander-drawings by, Three Young Rats and Other Rhymes, edited and with introduction by James Johnson Sweeney, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1946.
Marter, Joan M., Alexander Calder, Cambridge University Press, 1997.
