The Barbers’ Music

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31215, 12 November 1966, Page 27

The Barbers’ Music

The People's Songbng

(Specially written for "The Press" by DERRICK ROONEY.) rpRUEWIT, a character in L Ben Jonson’s “Silent Women,” expresses the wish that the barber “may draw his own teeth, and add them to the lute-string”—senti-ment which, although it might have sent a sixteenthcentury audience into paroxysms, carries little impact today; for the duties of contemporary barbers are somewhat less arduous than those of their ancestors.

Hair-cutting played a relatively minor role among the barber’s duties 400 years ago. The others included binding wounds, letting blood, drawing teeth and—if business was slack—music.

The coloured pole, painted to represent a bandage, was his symbol then, and now: and beside it in his window hung the teeth he had drawn, threaded on lute strings. Around the walls hung stringed instruments—lutes, citterns and gitterns—and at the back of the shop were the virginals. The humorous possibilities of this situation did not escape Jonson; but at least one of his barber-shop jokes passed over the nead of many of his annotators. Morose in “Silent Woman,” who married the barber’s daughter, laments her faithlessness thus: “That cursed barber! I have married his cittern, which is common to all men.” The annotators, for reasons

best known to themselves, changed it to cistern. Of the early barbers’ musical instruments, the only one encountered with any frequency these days by music lovers is the lute. The cittern, a member of the guitar family with four courses of strings turned somewhat like a modern ukelele, its larger sister, the pandora, and the gittern (an early type of guitar) are rarely seen outside museums and the collections of antiquarians. But 400 years ago a writer could record that a cittern “is as natural to a barber as milk to a calf, or dancing bears to a bagpiper.” The virginal resembled in shape the piano, of which it was a forerunner; but there was an important difference —whereas the piano strings are activated by being struck with a hammer, the virginal had slender pieces of wood, with quills at the top, which activated the strings rather as a guitar plectrum does, by twitching them. These were called “jacks," and were the basis of many jokes, bawdy and otherwise. Ben Johnson wrote, in “Every Man In His Humour,” that “I can compare him to nothing more happily than a barber’s virginals; for every man may play upon him.” And in a play by Dekker a character complains that his wife is never at home; whereupon another remarks: “No, for she’s like a pair of virginals, always with jacks at her tail.”