In this emblem, an old man, a young boy, and an ass perform various configurations of walking, riding, and carrying each other as an observing crowd mocks their progress. The crowd enacts judgment and attempts to influence the travelers’ behavior by deploying laughter to publicly shame them. In so doing, this laughing community, to use the term mobilized by Werner Röcke and Hans Rudolf Velten (2005), operates as a paradigm of inclusion and exclusion: a means by which to solidify the laughing group’s boundaries and norms by drawing attention to those deemed to have transgressed. At the same time, the poem also highlights how the notion of inclusivity itself is fickle, its boundary constantly redefined by the whims of the crowd, Pulter’s “Hydrian monstrosity” (25). (In Greek mythology, the Hydra was a many-headed monster whose heads reproduced each time one was cut off; Herakles had to kill it as one of his labors. See Victoria Burke’s curation The Many-Headed Hydra).
The old man is at pains to avoid public censure. He risks being perceived as too proud or merciless towards the child for making him walk beside the ass while he rides; too easily manipulated by the same child for letting the child ride the ass in his place; or too cruel towards his ass for forcing the animal to bear their dual weight. Even when neither ride the ass or when they both carry the animal, they still fail to appease the onlookers. The old man and his companions are caught in a net of shifting demands that reinforces the “giddy” (28) behavior of the crowd.
As such, while the crowd’s uproarious mirth at the sight of the travelers dramatizes Pulter’s critique of the old man and his companions (by contorting yourself to please others you end up pleasing no one), she also finds fault with the crowd itself. This roaring “Hydrian monstrosity” (25), as noted above, embodies the fickle instability of public opinion. In the face of relentless pressure, the old man abandons all hope of pleasing the onlooking crowd and sadly flings his ass into the sea. Following his spectacular failure to assert self-sovereignty, the old man’s killing of his ass offers an expedient if disappointing way out of his predicament.
It is at this point that Pulter shifts to a prophetic mode, making a series of allusions to deposed rulers from the Middle Ages and then antiquity to suggest that Oliver Cromwell’s reliance on populist support will lead to his downfall. Ultimately, this emblem suggests that those who rely on “Hydra’s love” (33)—popular opinion—to determine their actions will suffer an ignominious end.
While the precise source of Pulter’s emblem remains unclear, it is evident that the story of the old man, the boy, and the ass circulated across early modern Europe. Blague’s Schole of Wise Conceytes (London, 1572) includes a translation of Poggio Bracciolini’s (also known as Poggio Fiorentino) fable of this triumvirate (Christian 2012); a sixteenth-century, hand-colored, Dutch woodcut print by Cornelis Anthonisz (1509–1553) exists with this fable inscribed beneath associated images; and William Warner’s Albions England, first published in 1586, offers a verse form in rhyming couplets. It is this text’s 1612 edition that Alice Eardley (2014) points to as an alternative version of the emblem and which to us seems the likeliest candidate as Pulter’s source. Additionally, this fable has been mischaracterized as “Aesopian” or “pseudo-Aesopian” (Knight and Wall, Elemental Edition Headnote; Christian 385): this tale is not only absent from Aesop’s fables, but in those tales the animals are the main protagonists, and it is through their interaction with others (human or animal) that they teach a lesson to the reader. Here, the ass has no agency, it does not speak, and it possesses no character.
CitationsChristian, Stefan Graham. “The Poems of Lady Hester Pulter (1605?–1678): An Annotated Edition.” PhD diss., University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2012. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing (3545910).
Eardley, Alice. Poems, Emblems, and The Unfortunate Florinda. By Hester Pulter. Toronto: Iter and Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2014.
Knight, Leah and Wendy Wall, eds. “An Old Man, a Stripling, and an Ass,” by Hester Pulter. (Poem 119, Elemental Edition). In The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making, edited by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall, 2018.
Röcke, Werner and Hans Rudolf Velten. Lachgemeinschaften: Kulturelle Inszenierungen und soziale Wirkungen von Gelächter im Mittelalter und in der Frühen Neuzeit. De Gruyter, 2005.
