Chapter Five: Cracking the Nut? Mother Hubberds Tale's Attack on Traditional Notions of Poetic Value

Summary

As for Mother Hubberts tale,

Cracke the nut, and take the shale …

Nicholas Breton, from ‘An Epitaph upon Poet Spenser’ (1600)

Breton's couplet ambiguously aligns Mother Hubberds Tale in the mainstream of Western poetics by evoking what can be called the ‘poem as nut’ aesthetic. This tradition, which can be traced to Augustine, finds its classic expression in Fulgentius's commentary on The Thebaid. Fulgentius states that ‘poetic songs are seen to be comparable with nuts’: poetic fiction is like a nut, possessing an outer casing (the literal sense) and an inner ‘kernel’ (the mystical or allegorical sense). The reader must ‘Cracke the nut’ to obtain a ‘kernel’ of ‘doctrine wyse’ contained within the fiction. While this formula had been used as a defence against the accusation that poetic fiction is mendacious and morally dubious, by the sixteenth century it had become specifically associated with beast fable. Chaucer uses it in The Nun's Priest's Tale (ll. 3438–46); Henryson's Fables are prefaced with a comprehensive restatement of the commonplace. Breton's comment identifies the Tale as a beast fable that should be interpreted allegorically.

But what does Breton understand the poem's ‘shale’, or allegorical meaning, to be? The ‘Epitaph’ offers no further hints; the couplet shares the obscurity which characterizes the other contemporaneous allusions to the Tale's suppression. Like even the best reconstructions of the poem's history, Breton's comment is ambiguous and uncertain.