User:Beyond My Ken/Merry Andrew (clown)
A Merry Andrew is a clown, a buffoon[1] or a mountebank's assistant.[2] The OED also mentions that Merryandrew can also be used as a verb—meaning to play like a clown.
Usage
[edit]- The following passage from Isaac D'Israeli (1766–1848), describing the period around 1230 CE, illustrates its use:
In the church of Paris, and in several other cathedrals of the kingdom, was held the Feast of Fools or madmen... The priests and clerks assembled elected a pope, an archbishop, or a bishop, conducted them in great pomp to the church, which they entered dancing, masked, and dressed in the apparel of women, animals, and merry-Andrews; sung infamous songs, and converted the altar into a beaufet, where they ate and drank during the celebration of the holy mysteries; played with dice; burned, instead of incense, the leather of their old sandals; ran about, and leaped from seat to seat, with all the indecent postures with which the merry-Andrews know how to amuse the populace.
- In the Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, E. Cobham Brewer states that the term Merry Andrew was
"So called from Andrew Borde, physician to and Henry VIII, etc. To vast learning he added great eccentricity, and in order to instruct the people used to address them at fairs and other crowded places in a very ad captandum way. Those who imitated his wit and drollery, though they possessed not his genius, were called Merry Andrews, a term now signifying a clown or buffoon. Andrew Borde Latinised his name into Andreas Perfora’tus. (1500–1549) Prior has a poem on Merry Andrew."[3]
- In an early passage of A Journal of the Plague Year Daniel Defoe mentions "merry andrews" while describing the effects of the plague on London society:
All the plays and interludes which, after the manner of the French Court, had been set up, and began to increase among us, were forbid to act; the gaming-tables, public dancing-rooms, and music-houses, which multiplied and began to debauch the manners of the people, were shut up and suppressed; and the jack-puddings, merry-andrews, puppet-shows, rope-dancers, and such-like doings, which had bewitched the poor common people, shut up their shops, finding indeed no trade; for the minds of the people were agitated with other things, and a kind of sadness and horror at these things sat upon the countenances even of the common people.
- Erasmus (1466-1536) uses the term in his essay In Praise of Folly (1509):
The reason why I appear in this odd kind of garb, you shall soon be informed of, if for so short a while you will have but the patience to lend me an ear; yet not such a one as you are wont to hearken with to your reverend preachers, but as you listen withal to mountebanks, buffoons and merry-andrews; in short, such as formerly were fastened to Midas, as a punishment for his affront to the god Pan.
- George Eliot in chapter 12 of Middlemarch (1871) excludes people from the Featherstone family by saying "..they are no more Featherstones than the Merry-Andrew at the fair."
- In the musical comedy film Merry Andrew, Danny Kaye not only has the name of Andrew, but he acts as a clown in a circus.
- In the romantic comedy film Kate & Leopold, Leopold tells Charlie that he is a merry andrew.
- There is a music-based Internet radio program called The Merry Andrews Show.[4]
- Merry Andrew is the name of one of Crazy Jane's alternate personalities in Doom Patrol.
References
[edit]Notes
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