Emblem 17 tells the familiar story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin (or Hamelle, as Hester Pulter and her contemporaries tended to say), in which a mysterious stranger lures away the town’s children in order to punish the townspeople for greedily withholding the payment they owe him for ridding the town of rats. In connecting the natural world – specifically vermin – with cosmic or divine justice, the poem recalls several other of Pulter’s emblem poems in which even the lowliest and most contemptible parts of Creation are given a providential purpose. The Bishop and the Rats (Emblem 46)111, for example, narrates how the Bishop of Mainz was consumed by rats as punishment for burning a group of starving peasants during a grain shortage, and gives numerous examples of how “each despiséd reptile or insect / He [i.e. God] can empower, when we his laws neglect.” Along similar lines, Emblem 17 opens with a series of generalization about how God “will not neglect,” or scorn, to use even “reptile[s] or insect[s] / Or basest animal[s]” to inflict total destruction on a disobedient people, and the examples that follow – all taken from a section of Pliny’s Natural History dealing with the “much hurt and dammage [that] hath ben known to come from small contemptible creatures, which otherwise are of no reckoning and account” – suggest that we are in for a lecture on how God uses base means to humble the proud.1
However, the poem does not make good on its initial promise. Unlike the “contemptible creatures” that bring proud civilizations and tyrannical rulers to their knees, the rats of Hamelle actually end up having nothing to do with divine punishment – or, if they do, the initial sin that incurred such punishment is never identified. The “vermin” are simply introduced as a “rout” afflicting the town, so that, like the townspeople, readers might well “stand in doubt” as to whether the infestation arose from supernatural or merely natural causes. Instead of providing a moral about God’s punishment through base means, the poem abruptly shifts in line 20 with the announcement of a new ostensible moral, for which nothing in the poem so far has prepared us: “The fruits of curséd avarice now see.” Ironically, within this new moralizing frame, the rats serve not as the punishment for sin but, rather, its occasion, when the stingy townspeople notoriously rip off the piper after he has lured the pests to their death in the river Weser. But even this new moral does not fully survive until the end of the poem. Omitting a detail from her source (Richard Verstegan’s A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence [1605]), in which the townspeople’s miserliness is foregrounded when they attempt to offer the piper “far less then hee lookt for,” the poem ends with yet another explicitly moralizing pronouncement – “Now see how breach of promise is accursed” – shifting the focus once again, this time away from the specific vice of avarice and toward the more general sin of bad faith.2 Having been lured into what initially seemed to be a story about divinely ordained plagues of vermin only to find a quite different moral lesson about avarice and then promise-breaking, readers might end up feeling faintly defrauded of their initial investment in the poem.
As it turns out, the shifting moral frames in Emblem 17 reflect an apparent uncertainty among other seventeenth-century tellers of the tale as to its significance. The version published in James Howell’s Epistolae Ho-Elianae (1645), which is framed by an account of “som odd fellows” who “went skulking up and down London-streets, and with Figs and Reasons [i.e. raisins] allur’d little children, and so pourloy’d them away from their parents,” probably comes the closest to the story’s modern associations with literal stranger danger (along with its homophobic undertones).3 Interestingly, Howell reprints a somewhat different version of the story in A German Diet (1653), where it appears in the context of an anti-German oration by one “John Gulielm of Retwitz” and identifies the piper with “the devill” himself.4 Similarly, Robert Burton mentions the Hamelle disappearance in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) in “A Digression of the Nature of Spirits, Bad Angels, or Devils, and how they cause Melancholy.”5 The piper’s association with diabolical powers pervades a number of seventeenth-century versions. An anonymous anti-Ranter pamphlet, The Black and Terrible Warning Piece (1653), writes the piper out of the story altogether, the children simply “being carried away by the Devil in a flame of fire” after the townspeople, “holding the same Tenents with the Ranters, Shakers, &c. Of our times,” set them upon a hill in a deliberate attempt “to dare and defie the Lord of all spirits.”6 While such retellings present the occurrence as a literal example of Satan’s power on earth, Thomas Hodges’s The Growth and Spreading of Hæresie (1647) allegorizes the tale in terms of the “pyde piper Haeresie” that might lead “those that are near and deare unto you, you know not whither.”7 Striking in all of these accounts is their attribution of the children’s disappearance to the piper’s (or devil’s) own sinister nature, rather than presenting it as retribution for the wrong the townspeople commit by not paying him. Indeed, John Gaule’s Pus-mantia the Mag-astro-mancer (1652) turns the story into a cautionary tale about “the danger, misery, and ruine of such as have affectedly favoured, or preferred, and superstitiously credited, or consulted Magicall and Astrologicall predictors.”8 If the townspeople’s sin in Pulter’s poem is their “breach of promise” to the piper, in Gaule’s account it is their foolish decision to employ such a “Magicall” charmer in the first place.
The polysemous nature of the Pied Piper story helps to account for its presence in some surprising places, such as William Ramesey’s discourse on parasitic worms, Helminthologia (1668), which explicitly cites Verstegan’s account as an example of the “wonderful permission of GOD to the Rage of the Devil,” who, like the vermicular pest Ramesey discusses, “destroys life and all, where he can.”9 Verstegan himself presents the Hamelle story not with any kind of moralizing import but, unexpectedly, as part of his discussion of the Saxon diaspora – specifically, as a fanciful explanation (which he ends up dismissing) for why “among the Saxons in Transilvnia” there are some “that have lyke surnames unto divers of the burgers of Hamel.”10 Appropriately enough, given its theme, Verstegan introduces the story as something that has lured him away from his main topic, “one digression [having] drawn on another.”11 It is with a similar apology that the tale is prefaced in another unlikely source, The Vanitie of the Eye, first begun for the comfort of a gentlewoman bereaved of her sight (1615), whose author, George Hakewell, “confess[es]” that he has included it “not so much for the fitnesse, as the strangeness of the story.”12 Relieved of the imperative to “fit” the story to any particular end (moralizing, geographical, mag-astro-mantical, or otherwise), perhaps the least surprising context in which the Pied Piper appears in the seventeenth century is in collections of miraculous occurrences such as The Wonders of the Little World (1673) or Extraordinary Adventures and Discoveries of Several Famous Men (1683), which simply introduce the event as a “strange Accident.”13
Read in the context of these various (and variously explicated) versions, Pulter’s transformation of the Pied Piper legend into an emblem with shifting significances also transforms the genre itself from one of static exposition of a calcified moral into a dynamic meditation on the complex relationships between divine and human justice, avarice and fair trade, labor and exploitation, promise and betrayal, as well as the human and the non-human. Working backwards from what may seem like its overly trite conclusion (“Then keep your word, for better or for worse”), the poem unravels into a promiscuous array of competing possibilities that intermingle and coalesce in unexpected ways, like the mythemes of the legend itself in its various guises. For instance, given early modern associations between avarice and sodomy, Pulter’s tale of a piper luring the “pretty boys” of the town away through the use of some kind of unmentionable means (“what he did, I think no man can say”) potentially emerges as a sublimated form of poetic justice.14 The poem’s odd (and oddly unnecessary) citation of 1 Samuel 6 as a possible explanation for “how ‘twas done” (along with the five golden mice the Philistines offered Jehovah to mitigate their rodent infestation, they also presented five golden “emerods” to alleviate the divine smiting that was afflicting them “in their secret parts”) probably raises more questions than it answers.15
Indeed, the ambiguous relationship between the rats and divine punishment in Emblem 17 suggests a type of pest that refuses to be controlled either by literal extermination or by providentialist narratives. As Lucinda Cole points out, “given their endless reproducibility and the unpredictable nature of their swarming motion,” rats, mice, and other vermin represented in early modern texts “may actually threaten the ideas of an orderly universe and the regeneration of Nature symbolized by Noah’s Ark,” often resisting neat ontological (and even taxonomic) categorization.16 Thus, in seventeenth-century depictions of the biblical plagues of Egypt, for example, it is unclear whether “lice, frogs, and swarming things [are] to be read allegorically or literally” and, indeed, whether the story is “about political sovereignty or natural populations.”17 Similarly, behind Pulter’s moralizing representation of rats in Emblem 17 may lurk concerns about the real historical presence of rodents in seventeenth-century England (and a future Amplified Edition might fruitfully connect the poem to such on-the-ground conditions).
Ultimately, the poem’s shifting moral framework can have the effect of making Emblem 17 feel like two poems: one about Old-Testament-style divine retribution involving plagues of locusts, frogs, serpents – and, of course, rats – and the other about the all-too-human world of greed, bad faith, and revenge, in which such pests are simply the given facts of life, part of the meaningless chaos of existence. In fact, this doubleness is arguably reflected in a scribal error in Pulter’s manuscript: a neatly-written “18” at the top of folio 102, after the page-break, indicates what its writer evidently mistook for the beginning of a new poem: Emblem 18. Realizing her mistake, the scribe crossed it out; however, by then it was too late: having already continued numbering the next poem (The Elephant (Emblem 19)84) as number 19, making the correction would necessarily mean leaving out a number from the total sequence. Like the missing children of Hamelle, Emblem 18 ends up being an absent presence in Pulter’s manuscript: itself an emblem, perhaps, for the material vicissitudes of textual production and circulation that strain against the text’s own pursuit of a world whose meanings are legible in the form of emblems – a world (“Though some may think’t a fiction or a dream”) where betrayal, destruction, and loss are more easily attributable to divine ordination, rather than to the unaccountable and stupid realm of the “strange Accident.”
- C. Plinius Secundus, The Historie of the World. Trans. Philemon Holland (London, 1601), p. 212.
- Richard Verstegan, A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence (London, 1605), p. 85.
- James Howell, Epistolae Ho-elianae (London, 1645), p. 71. For the modern association between child kidnapping and homophobia, see Paul M. Renfro, Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the American Carceral State (Oxford University Press, 2020), esp. Chapter 1. Robert Dixon’s Canidia, or, The witches (London, 1683) notably associates the Pied Piper with sexual deviance, listing the “Roguish Clown” who “lo[st] all the Boys in Hammel Town” alongside “Eels and Frogs” that “have no sex” and “Others” who “from between their Legs did speak, / And act many a Haggish feat” (p. 60).
- James Howell, A German Diet (London, 1653), pp. 34-35.
- Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (London, 1621), p. 68.
- The Black and Terrible Warning Piece (London, 1653), pp. 3-4.
- Thomas Hodges, The Growth and Spreading of Hæresie (London, 1647), pp. 36-37.
- John Gaule, Pus-mantia the Mag-astro-mancer (London, 1652), pp. 364, 366.
- William Ramesey, Helminthologia (London, 1668), p. 66.
- Verstegan, A Restitution, p. 87.
- Verstegan, A Restitution, p. 85.
- George Hakewell, The Vanitie of the Eye, first begun for the comfort of a gentlewoman bereaved of her sight (London, 1615), p. 61.
- Extraordinary Adventures and Discoveries of Several Famous Men (London, 1683), p. 188.
- The piper’s queerness is emphasized in several of the early modern versions, which, in addition to emphasizing his flamboyant dress, often describe him with the epithet “odd,” as in Verstegan’s characterization of him as “an od kynd of compagnion” (p. 85). For the connection between avarice and sodomy, see, for example, John Harris, The destruction of sodome (London, 1625), p. 35: “And had couetousnesse a habitation in Sodome? and was filthy auarice a cause of her desolation? then Lord bee mercifull vnto our Land, that hath many a member in it, who out of a couetous desire, haue made a marriage with siluer, and giuen a bill of diuorce to Iesus Christ!” For a larger discussion connecting sodomy more broadly to the misuse of money, particularly through usury and counterfeiting, see Will Fisher, “Queer Money” ELH 66 (1999): 1-23.
- Even more suggestively, the Latin Vulgate describes the Philistines’ offering as “quinque anos aureos” (“five golden anuses”). For the premodern interpretation of the plagues of 1 Samuel 5-6 specifically in relation to both avarice and “sodomitirie,” see Robert Mills, “Seeing Sodomy in the Bibles moralisées” Speculum 87 (2012): 413-468.
- Lucinda Cole, Imperfect Creatures: Vermin, Literature, and the Sciences of Life, 1600-1740 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016), 17.
- Cole, Imperfect Creatures, 19.
