Singing Psalms to Horn-pipes: Festivity, Iconoclasm, and Catholicism in The Winter's Tale

She hath made me four-and-twenty nosegays for the shearers, three-man song-men all, and very good ones; but they are most of them means and basses but one puritan amongst them, and he sings psalms to horn-pipes.

The Winter's Tale, 4.3.41-45¹

When perdita's "brother" describes this singing Puritan in Act 4 of The Winter's Tale, it seems that the play is bringing a traditional Jacobean enemy of rural pastimes back into the festive fold. Of course the passage also mocks and punishes the godly shearer, unflatteringly referring to the high-pitched, nasal singing of the psalms much derided in anti-Puritan satire; forcing a hornpipe—an instrument used primarily for country dancing—into his hands;² and imaginatively festooning him with a nosegay. In nonsensically using "puritan" where the word tenor ought to be, the passage also belittles the shearer's reforming zeal by equating it with merely vocal attributes. But this Puritan is still mocked much more gently than Malvolio is for objecting to "cakes and ale" (Twelfth Night, 2.3.114), and rather than being cast out of the festivities, he remains one of the "four-and-twenty" singing at the sheepshearing.

This microcosmic reconciliation of the critics and proponents of festivity, like so many other aspects of the apparent concord in Act 4 of The Winter's Tale, turns out to be premature. Neither the disembodied "puritan" nor his opposite number, Autolycus, will be symbolically reconciled with the societies of Bohemia and Sicilia until the play's final scene. But these lines do serve to introduce into the play contemporary disputes about rural pastimes. These disputes surface again when Autolycus calls his wares "trumpery" that bewitches potential customers "as if [his] trinkets had been hallowed and brought a benediction to the buyer" (4.4.599, 603-4), a phrase that apparently substantiates the Puritan association of festivity with popish idolatry.³ The disputes are, finally, more complexly encapsulated in Perdita's diffidence about festive play, when, after her elaborate rhetorical welcome to the guests at the sheepshearing, she says: "Methinks I play as I have seen them do/ In Whitsun pastorals" (ll. 133-34). By distancing herself from such shows, Perdita internalizes Reformation debates about the morality of festivity, introducing a more conflicted attitude to the topic than her "brother's" satirical image of the singing Puritan or Autolycus's apparent embodiment of puritanical objections to fairs.

Though Michael D. Bristol and François Laroque have demonstrated festivity's centrality to The Winter's Tale, neither they nor other critics who have explored this theme have fully investigated the religious significance of the play's representation of traditional English pastimes.⁴ Because what Ronald Hutton has termed "the battle for Merry England" was one species of a larger genus of Reformation debates about iconoclasm and idolatry, contextualizing the play's representation of festivity can ultimately provide a new way of thinking about an old topic: the Catholicism of The Winter's Tale.⁵ In the early Jacobean period, reformers argued that festivity promoted a religiously conservative agenda. Whitsuntide celebrations, church ales, wakes, May games, and even bearbaitings and morris dances were, according to the reformers, vestiges of popish idolatry and superstition which encouraged religious backwardness.⁶ Historians have, with good reason, been reluctant to accept the reformers' association of festivity with contemporary popishness.⁷ But now that recent scholarship has demonstrated that Roman Catholicism continued to play a vital part in the culture of early-seventeenth-century England, it has become possible to see a Catholic role in the defense of traditional pastimes.⁸ Even paranoiacs have enemies, and the godly's most outrageous rants against rural pastimes were occasionally accurate: traditional festivity could be used to promote English Catholicism in defiance of the established church.⁹

In this context The Winter's...