Source.—The chap-book contained in Mr. Hazlitt’s Shaksperian Jest Book, vol. iii. I have selected the incidents and modernised the spelling; otherwise the droll remains as it was told in Elizabethan times.
Parallels.—Mr. Clouston’s Book of Noodles is little else than a series of parallels to our droll. See my List of Incidents under the titles, “One cheese after another,” “Hare postman,” “Not counting self,” “Drowning eels.” In most cases Mr. Clouston quotes Eastern analogies.
Remarks.—All countries have their special crop of fools, Boeotians among the Greeks, the people of Hums among the Persians (how appropriate!), the Schildburgers in Germany, and so on. Gotham is the English representative, and as witticisms call to mind well-known wits, so Gotham has had heaped on its head all the stupidities of the Indo-European world. For there can be little doubt that these drolls have spread from East to West. This “Not counting self” is in the Gooroo Paramastan, the cheeses “one after another” in M. Riviere’s collection of Kabyle tales, and so on. It is indeed curious how little originality there is among mankind in the matter of stupidity. Even such an inventive genius as the late Mr. Sothern had considerable difficulty in inventing a new “sell.”
LXXXVII. PRINCESS OF CANTERBURY
Source.—I have inserted into the old chap-book version of the Four Kings of Colchester, Canterbury, &c., an incident entitled by Halliwell “The Three Questions.”
Parallels.—The “riddle bride wager” is a frequent incident of folk-tales (see my List of Incidents); the sleeping tabu of the latter part is not so common, though it occurs, e.g., in the Grimms’ Twelve Princesses, who wear out their shoes with dancing.
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See 'The Science of Folk Tales and the Problem of Diffusion' in Transactions of the International Folk-Lore Congress, 1891. Mr. Lang has honoured me with a rejoinder, which I regard as a palinode, in his Preface to Miss Roalfe Cox's volume of variants of Cinderella (Folk- Lore Society, 1892).
Chamber's II. consists entirely and solely of these incidents.
Who knows the Buck of Beverland nowadays?
It is practically in Des Perier's Recreations, 1544.
