| Dictionary: Mother Goose |
| Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Mother Goose |
For more information on Mother Goose, visit Britannica.com.
| Music Encyclopedia: Mother Goose. |
Suite by Ravel after fairy-tales by Péricault (1910); originally for two pianos, it was orchestrated in 1911.
| English Folklore: Mother Goose |
In mid-17th-century France, the phrase contes de ma mère l'oye meant ‘fairytales’, and in 1697 it appeared on the frontispiece of Charles Perrault's Contes du Temps Passé; when these were printed in English from 1729 onwards, they were entitled Mother Goose's Tales. Later (probably in 1765) the publisher John Newbery produced a collection of traditional nursery rhymes, Mother Goose's Melody, which became so popular that for the next two generations all such rhymes were called ‘Mother Goose songs’, as they still are in the USA.
A pantomime of 1806 created a tale in which Old Mother Goose is a kindly witch, owning a gander on which she can fly, and a goose that lays golden eggs; soon chapbooks elaborated the story, adding a stupid son named Jack, who unwittingly buys the magic goose. This became popular in Victorian children's books, especially in a rhymed version of 1820.
Bibliography
The full bibliography list is available here.
| Fairy Tale Companion: Mother Goose |
Mother Goose, legendary female figure often associated with fairy tales. Some scholars believe her origins may lie in the stories and representations of Queen Blanche (d. 783), the mother of Charlemagne, called ‘La Reine Pédauque’ for her large, flat, goose‐like foot. Others have connected her with the Queen of Sheba (also sometimes represented with a webbed foot or a mermaid's tail), or with the classical sibyls, or with St Anne, the good, wise grandmother of the child Jesus. All of these figures are ambiguously associated with story‐telling, spinning, and female, sometimes bawdy mystery.
Whatever her origins, Mother Goose was certainly linked with fairy tales in France. They were often referred to as ‘contes de ma Mère l'Oie’ (in a letter Mme de Sévigné wrote her daughter in 1674, for example); Charles Perrault used the phrase as the subtitle of his 1697 collection Histoires et contes du temps passé (Stories and Tales of Times Past). On the frontispiece three children, under a placard bearing the subtitle, listen to a nurse with a distaff—a representation of the motherly, lower‐class storytellers Mother Goose, Mother Bunch, Gammer Grethel, Fru Gosen, and all the other ‘old wives’ and gossips.
In England and America, however, Mother Goose became the icon of nursery rhymes during the 18th century, probably following John Newbery's publication of Mother Goose's Melody, or Sonnets for the Cradle (c.1765). (The old story that she was a Mrs Elizabeth Goose of Boston has been discredited; no copy of the collection of rhymes bearing her name supposedly published in 1719 has ever been found.) Mother Goose continues to be illustrated, usually as a large goose with an apron or bonnet and spectacles, in endless collections of verses for children and is also still a popular drag role in British pantomime.
Bibliography
— Elizabeth Wanning Harries
| Columbia Encyclopedia: Mother Goose |
Bibliography
See The Annotated Mother Goose, ed. by W. S. and C. Baring-Gould (1970); study by S. K. Abbey (1967).
| Quotes By: Mother Goose |
Quotes:
"For every ailment under the sun, There is a remedy, or there is none, If there be one, try to find it; If there be none, never mind it."
| Wikipedia: Mother Goose |
Mother Goose is a well-known character in the literature of fairy tales and nursery rhymes which are often published as Mother Goose Rhymes as if Mother Goose herself was the author or collector. As a character, she is prominent in several stories and "nursery rhymes" .[1] A Christmas pantomime called "Mother Goose" is often performed in the United Kingdom. The so-called "Mother Goose" rhymes and stories have formed the basis for many classic British pantomimes. Mother Goose is generally depicted in literature and book illustration as an elderly country woman in a tall hat and shawl, but is sometimes depicted as a goose.
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Mother Goose is the name given to an archetypical country woman,[2] who is supposedly the originator of the Mother Goose stories and rhymes. Yet no specific writer has ever been identified with such a name, of which the first known mention appears in an aside in a versified chronicle of weekly happenings that appeared regularly for several years, Jean Loret's La Muse Historique, collected in 1650.[3] His remark, ...comme un conte de la Mere Oye ("...like a Mother Goose story") shows that the term was already familiar.
In spite of repeated facts,[4] there are doubtful reports, familiar to tourists to Boston, Massachusetts that the original Mother Goose was a Bostonian wife of an Isaac Goose, either named Elizabeth Foster Goose (1665-1758) or Mary Goose (d. 1690, age 42) who is interred at the Granary Burying Ground on Tremont Street.[5] According to Eleanor Early, a Boston travel and history writer of the 1930s and '40s, the original Mother Goose was a real person who lived in Boston in the 1660s.[6] She was reportedly the second wife of Isaac Goose (alternatively named Vergoose or Vertigoose), who brought to the marriage six children of her own to add to Isaac's ten.[7] After Isaac died, Elizabeth went to live with her eldest daughter, who had married Thomas Fleet, a publisher who lived on Pudding Lane (now Devonshire Street). According to Early, "Mother Goose" used to sing songs and ditties to her grandchildren all day, and other children swarmed to hear them. Finally, her son-in-law gathered her jingles together and printed them.[8]
In The Real Personages of Mother Goose (1930), Katherine Elwes Thomas submits that the image and name "Mother Goose", or "Mère l'Oye", may be based upon ancient legends of the wife of King Robert II of France, Berthe la fileuse ("Bertha the Spinner") or Berthe pied d'oie ("Goose-Foot Bertha" ), called in the Midi the reine Pedauque who, according to Thomas, is often referred in French legends as spinning incredible tales that enraptured children. The authority on the Mother Goose tradition, Iona Opie, does not give any credence to either the Elwes Thomas or the Boston suppositions.
The initiator of the literary fairy tale genre, Charles Perrault, published in 1695 under the name of his son a collection of fairy tales Histoires ou contes du temps passés, avec des moralités, which grew better known under its subtitle, "Contes de ma mère l'Oye" or "Tales of my Mother Goose". Perrault's publication marks the first authenticated starting-point for Mother Goose stories.
In 1729 there appeared an English translation of Perrault's collection, Robert Samber's Histories or Tales of Past Times, Told by Mother Goose, which introduced "Sleeping Beauty", "Little Red Riding-hood", "Puss in Boots", "Cinderella" and other Perrault tales to English-speaking audiences. These were fairy tales. John Newbery published a compilation of English rhymes, Mother Goose's Melody, or, Sonnets for the Cradle (London, undated, c.1765)[9], which switched the focus from fairy tales to nursery rhymes, and in English this was the prime connotation for Mother Goose until recently.
The first public appearance of the Mother Goose stories in the New World was in Worcester, Massachusetts, where printer Isaiah Thomas reprinted Samber's volume under the same title, in 1786.[10]
A book of poems for children entitled Mother Goose's Melody was published in England in 1781, and the name "Mother Goose" has been associated with children's poetry ever since.[11]
In 1837, John Bellenden Ker Gawler published a book (with a 2nd-volume sequel in 1840) deriving the origin of the Mother Goose rhymes from Flemish ('Low Dutch') puns.[12]
In music, Maurice Ravel wrote Ma Mère l'Oye, a suite for the piano, which he then orchestrated for a ballet. There is also a song called Mother Goose by progressive rock band Jethro Tull from their 1971 Aqualung album. The song seems to be unrelated to the figure of Mother Goose since she is only the first of many surreal images that the narrator encounters and describes through the lyrics.
In addition to being the purported authoress of nursery rhymes, Mother Goose is herself the title character of one such rhyme:
The transition from a shadowy generic figure to one with such concrete actions was effected at a pantomime Harlequin and Mother Goose: or, The Golden Egg in 1806-07, Ryoji Tsurumi has shown;[14] The pantomime was first performed at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, 29 December, and many times repeated in the new year. Harlequin and Mother Goose: or, The Golden Egg, starring the famous clown Joseph Grimaldi, was written by Thomas Dibdin, who invented the actions suitable for a Mother Goose brought to the stage, and recreated her as a witch-figure, Tsurumi notes: in the first scene the stage directions show her raising a storm and, for the very first time, flying a gander. The magical Mother Goose transformed the old miser into Pantaloon of the commedia dell'arte and the British pantomime tradition, and the young lovers Colin and Colinette, into Columbine and "Clown". Played en travesti by Samuel Simmons[15]— a pantomime tradition that survives today— she also raises a ghost in a macabre churchyard scene.
The classic Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes revamped with a distinct motif by modern authors.
Regionally flavored Mother Geese.
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