Abstract
sir nathaniel — the curate in Love’s Labour’s Lost — recites the equivalent of some 60 lines. From the moment of his first appearance — which occurs rather late in the play (IV, ii) — he serves as a foil for Holofernes, the pedantic schoolmaster. If unlike the prelates and friars Sir Nathaniel speaks prose instead of poetry (thus perhaps showing his lower social status) he also differs from them in that he more readily consents to “wear his clerical collar.” He praises the Lord, and “so may my parishioners” for Holofernes’s teaching ability. He commends him (IV, ii, 154–156):
Sir, you have done this in the fear of God, very religiously; and, as a certain Father saith —
Holofernes in turn invites him to say grace at table (IV, ii, 161–165):
I do dine today at the father’s of a certain pupil of mine; where, if before repast it shall please you to gratify the table with a grace, I will, on my privilege I have with the parents of the foresaid child or pupil, undertake your ben venuto.
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Notes
Ben Jonson’s Conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden,ed. by R. F. Patterson (Glasgow, 1923), p. 33. Jonson’s pejorative references to the Anglican clergy in his A Tale of A Tub, The New Inn, The Magnetic Lady,and Epicoene are conveniently assembled in Bertil Johansson’s Religion and Superstition in the Plays of Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton (Uppsala, 1950), pp. 80, 82, 86, and 88–90. His satirical hits at the Puritan wing in The Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair are tallied at pp. 109–116 and 116–126.
J. Dover Wilson in his “The Schoolmaster in Shakespeare’s Plays,” Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature,new series, IX (London, 1930), p. 29, called Sir Nathaniel “sycophantic” because he too volubly praised Holofernes. Haselton Spencer follows suit in his The Art and Life of William Shakespeare (New York, 1940), p. 150, when he types Nathaniel as a “parasite or affamato.” These judgments, however, reflect more on the pedant than they do on the curate. Holofernes, for instance, did not misquote Mantuan’s opening line, in the judgment of the 1632 Folio editor (Love’s Labour’s Lost,IV, ii, 96–97). Nor does the schoolmaster betray his ignorance when he sings Ut,re, sol, la, mi, fa (IV, ii, 103–504). He instead shows his knowledge of hexachord-mutation: these Guidonian syllables being the proper ones for solfaing such a series of letter-named notes as C-D-G-A-B-c in Holofernes’s period.
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Stevenson, R. (1958). Parsons. In: Shakespeare’s Religious Frontier. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-3851-0_3
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