8 Wine, Beere, 



and his manners are unquestionably bad. But he speaks effectively 

 in his own behalf and succeeds at length in winning recognition. In 

 one passage in the second edition the reviser seems to be making fun 

 of the late poet-prince and pretty clearly alludes to the passing away 

 of the royal ban on smoking.^' 



III. History of the Material 



The general theme of the present dialogue — a contention between 

 personified beverages — is a very old one in the literature of Europe. 

 The tradition reaches back at least as far as the Goliardic poetry of 

 the twelfth century. In the middle ages, however, the dispute usually 

 involved a comparison not of related liquors, as here, but of the 

 antagonistic and opposite beverages of wine and water. The contest 

 between these two irreconcilable enemies was waged in a hundred 

 forms in practically all the languages of western Europe, and it has 

 continued in French and German popular tradition to the present 

 day." An English nursery rhyme from Devonshire, adapted from a 

 German folksong, is clearly the descendant of the mediaeval disputa- 

 tion, but this, so far as I know, is the only appearance of the wine and 

 water material on English soil, though, of course, English versions, 

 particularly in ballad form, may have existed. 



Wine, Beere, and Ale bears little specific relation to the t3rpical 

 debate of wine and water; the arguments and motives which it has in 

 common with the continental versions are only such as would be 

 likely to develop independently, given the subject of a contention 

 among drinks. Still, considering the fact that both Wine and Water 

 appear as persons in the contention, it seems reasonable to count our 

 play as belonging to the common European tradition. 



The existence of certain variations in the material which more or 

 less closely approximate those of our debate makes this connection 

 more apparent; There are, for example, a number of poems in which 

 not Wine and Water but the different wines contend. And in one 

 instance,'* after the controversy of the wines, Water appears in order 



^ Lines 633 £F: "I am in fauour, and am growoe to be the delight of poets and princes." etc. 



" See Hanford, "The Mediaeval Debate between Wine and Water'' in Publications of the Modern 

 Language Association of America, XVIII, 3, (1913). 



^^ La Dispuloison da Vin el del'Iaue, JuhinaX, Nouveaurecueil, 11, 293\ Wright, Latin Poems attrib- 

 uted to Waiter Mafes, 299 ff. 



