Sir John Harington, William Teshe, and the Metamorphosis of Ajax

Abstract

IT has long been conceded that many—if not most—of the densely allusive and directly satirical meanings within Sir John Harington’s impudent, scatological, and constantly digressive tract titled the Metamorphosis of Ajax (1596) are now lost to posterity. Of course, even in saying so, we find ourselves implicated in Harington’s back-sided humour. Of this strange book, D. H. Craig cautioned, ‘To recover the proper context for the Metamorphosis now requires an effort of historical reconstruction, yet any solemnly academic treatment of Harington’s parody of a scholarly treatise may miss the point, or itself risk ludicrousness’.1 More recently, Jason Scott-Warren observes that ‘even the most explicit of the book’s controversial political references has not been fully understood’.2 Indeed, Harington was ludicrously cryptic throughout in his nomination and treatment of personalities, living, dead, and imagined. We argue that such cryptic nomination occurs also within a curiously reiterated rhetorical locution: ‘teshe’. Six times within Ajax, after lengthy digressions concerning classical learning, political history, court culture, or toilets and toileting, Harington returns to the ironic seriousness of his text, or—as he laughably puts it—his ‘teshe’. Having riffed through complications concerning the poet Martial, Sir Thomas More, Henry VIII’s Act of the Six Articles, and scatological epigrams generally, Harington tries in vain to get serious: ‘But to step backe to my teshe (though every place I step to, yeelds me sweeter discourse)’.3 A few pages later, nearing the end of this first section, he again gets self conscious as he insists, ‘I must still keepe me to my tesh’ (111). Then, having digressed a good deal more on the precedent nature of classical antiquity, costly privies, and the Goddess Cloacina, he attempts to get back to his main argument by declaring abruptly, ‘But to omit these trifles, and to returne to my tesh’ (118). However, he continues to range through the complicated historical actions of Roman antiquity, the medical efficacy of unsuppressed flatulence, Vespasian’s edict against reckless urination, and other measures reported by Suetonius about whom Harington feels he could say much more, but—as he affirms—‘I will keepe me very strictly to my tesh’ (131). Later in the third section, after lampooning the work of contemporary inventor and science writer Hugh Plat, Harington feels moved again: ‘But to leave M. Plats cole, which kindled this fantasie in me, and to turne to my tesh’ (172). Finally near the end, as he assembles a mock jury to judge his constantly self-referential work, he declares, ‘I hope they will not denie, but I have good authorities, for my teshe, and give a friendly verdict’ (235).