Everything (really) old is (somewhat) new again

Old and new. Worcester College, Oxford, 2016. My photo.

I’ve been emotionally middle-aged since I was about 8, and I spent a long time immersed in arcane English writing and culture. Nevertheless, as an elder Millennial, I’m still comprised of a mishmash of pre-internet and early 2000s cultural touchstones. My brain is constantly drawing unexpected connections between the two.

Here’s an example from Le Morte d’Arthur, Thomas Malory’s translation and reworking of the Arthurian legends. There’s some fascinating, fundamental stuff in there, as well as long stretches of various knights, each of whom is the most noble and hardiest knight of the world, taking up their helms and brasting their spears upon one another. This is less fascinating, in my opinion.

Anyway, in volume 2, book 17, chapter 10 Sir Galahad and his two knight companions are escorting a maiden near a castle. The castle’s inhabitants send ten knights to confront Galahad’s party and explain their “strange custom.” They demand a dish of blood from the maiden. I assume this is an allusion to Christ’s sacrifice or something because it’s meant to restore to health the lady of that castle. Galahad refuses and his three knights kill the ten knights. Fine.

Then the castle sends out 60 more knights and says they can overlook this violence, but they insist on the bloodletting custom. Galahad refuses again, saying that they ask this “for nought.”

“They,” the castle knights, say in a weird moment of plural speakership, “Well, will ye die?”

Galahad replies: “We be not yet come thereto.”

It’s hard to explain exactly why, but this is the association I have for that line—a clip from a show I know of but have only ever watched in clip form:

Anyway, then Galahad’s knights defeat the 60 and kill many of them, and then the castle inhabitants forgive them and put them up for the night, and the maiden they were protecting agrees to the bloodletting after all, and she gives so much blood she dies. If this kind of thing strikes you as tedious then you’ll have a hard go of it in Malory (or Edmund Spenser). But man, across the centuries, Galahad’s clapback still lands.

Here’s another example. There’s a famous English ballett “Now Is the Month of Maying” by Thomas Morley. Famous in the context of choral songs, I mean. I first heard it at an impressionable age (ahem, 22), sung from the Magdalen College tower at 6am on May Day. It was something like this, though I was down below and couldn’t see the choir so the effect was much more ethereal.

It’s a call to spring celebrations, and on a cold May Day morning a sleep-deprived American college student might look on it as a sort of silly cultural indulgence. Nope. Check out these lyrics:

Now is the month of maying,
When merry lads are playing
Each with his bonny lass
Upon the greeny grass.

[it continues]

Fie then! why sit we musing,
Youth's sweet delight refusing?
Say, dainty nymphs, and speak,
Shall we play barley-break?

It’s hard to tell because of the modern associations of choir singing with church music, and because there are some fillers that sound less than seductive to the modern ear (lots of “fa la la la la”s), but this is a deeply horny song. Merry lads, each with his lass, upon the grass? That’s how we get more lads and lasses. And the last stanza is a direct appeal: why refuse youth’s delights? This song isn’t about, like, Morris dancing. I didn’t know it at the time—despite being in exactly the right situation I hadn’t actually read Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling—but “barley break” was sort of a sixteenth-century key party. Even without knowing the specifics, the song always nagged at me.

A few years later I heard its modern analogue: Ray J’s 2008 single Sexy Can I (linked but not embedded):

Sexy, can I hit it from the front?
Can I hit it from the back? Know you like it like that
Then we take it to the bed, then we take it to the flo'
Then we chill for a second, then we back at it some mo'

I don’t think it’s utterly insane to say that these two songs are depicting the same urges and even the same sort of appeal: male interlocutor to unvoiced and overtly reluctant but presumably receptive female participant. Obviously it’s diffused through different cultural layers but to my mind there are more similarities here than differences.

This kind of old/new blurring is such a recurring problem for me that I was able to find two examples from two sources with 92% the same name: (Thomas Malory / Thomas Morley). Newness is relative of course; I had titled this post “Everything old is new again” before realizing that my newest reference is 16 years old.

Anyone else out there see these kinds of pairings? Let me know below.