Friday, June 09, 2006

Subversive rhymes ...

... start early: Cockle shells.

1 comment:

  1. It's interesting to me to think of Mary Mary as subversive at the time of her reign. Or did the rhyme come afterward, as a reflection? I wonder.

    If you were in a Protestant family, why not just say the rhyme to each other? Being Protestant would be more apt to get one tortured by silver bells or cockle shells, and into the final garden than saying the rhyme.

    In fact, the predominant Catholics could have been saying the rhyme too, or even mostly and out of sympathy, in order to spread word that Mary wasn't such a good queen after all.

    But it gets curiouser--if it was a rhyme of subversion, during Bloody Mary's reign. The only ones who would not understand it, would be the youngest children. It would have been a reminder to everyone else to watch out, and a mere garden rhyme to anyone who didn't "get it." Why have the kids fret?

    Often, the double meanings in symbols are meant to throw the authorities. But in this case, it would be very clear to the authorities what the ditty meant. In this sense, it would be an assertion of strength or at least an assertion of being savvy in the face of another generation of tyrannical rule.

    On the other hand, Wikipedia has this to say:

    One popular tradition traces the nursery rhyme Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary to Mary's attempts to bring Roman Catholicism back to England, identifying the "cockle shells", for example, with the symbol of pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint James in Spain and the "pretty maids all in a row" with nuns.

    Another tradition has it that the rhyme was based on the life of Mary's cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots. There is however no proof that the rhyme was known before the 18th century: see its article for more information.


    So here is a completely different reading. Pretty maids are nuns, not guillotines, and cockle shells are not intruments of torture.

    But significantly, we have the rhyme appearing during the 18th century, not the 15th.

    On the one hand, I find compelling the idea that the bells and shells were intruments of torture, and the maids being guillotines. So maybe this is so. On the other hand, the wording of the rhyme sounds too current to have come in this form from Blood Mary's time.

    The subversion, then, seems to come as a slap at the royal family, who may have been glorying in their family tree, when some clever person who knew the history, came up with this snide rhyme.

    Thanks for linking in.

    Bud

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