File:While maskinge in their folleis all doe passe, though all say nay yet all doe ride the asse (BM 1855,0114.189).jpg

Height: 290 millimetres

Width: 423 millimetres

(Text from Antony Griffiths, 'The Print in Stuart Britain', BM 1998, cat.90) Although this impression bears the address of the late seventeenth-century publisher John Garrett, Hind recognised that the plate was much earlier, and dated it on the grounds of costume c.1600/10. This can now be made more precise by the discovery of its entry in the Stationers' Register on 7 March 1607 by the printer Henry Robertes under the description 'A picture of the Ridinge of the Asse'.

    The text on and under the design, which is completely transcribed by Hind, makes it clear that the print is a general satire on human folly, and does not give it any specific contemporary application. The couplets by each figure are spoken by them, while the ass is left to speak in the four verses below. Dame Punke, Don Pandar, Don Gull the Gallant, Clown and Fool all try to mount the ass, while the beggar leading the ass invites the Judge to mount it, an offer which the Judge wisely declines. The ass complains at its burden, 'The world beneath such weight doth almost crack', and later 'But when you All will ride and each be first, Beware the Asses back you doe not burst'.
    John Garrett (active 1674-d.1718/20) was brother-in-law to John Overton, and bought Jenner's business at the Royal Exchange after Jenner's death in 1673. This print is listed in Jenner's catalogue for 1662 as 'The Ridinge of the Asse'. Since Jenner only set up in business c.1618, he cannot have been the first publisher. This could have been Henry Roberts, but he is unknown otherwise as a print publisher. STC records him as a publisher between the 1570s and 1616, but only lists four titles, mostly broadsides. Roberts could simply have been entering the print on behalf of someone else.
    This is the best designed and best engraved of the satires made in the reign of James. Although Hind catalogued it as anonymous, it is likely to be by Renold Elstrack, who had by far the greatest flair for design of the early engravers. By the time that Garrett reprinted this impression more than half a century later, the plate had been considerably reworked. That only two impressions survive (the second being in the Houghton Library, Harvard) of a print that remained in production for so long is entirely typical of early British printmaking.

(Text from Malcolm Jones, www.bpi1700.org.uk, "Print of the Month", October 2006) Perhaps not altogether surprisingly, given what little we know of Elstrack's family origins, his engraving derives quite closely from an early sixteenth-century German woodcut of which an impression survives in the Douce print collection at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, though not the speeches given to the various representatives of society who struggle to ride the ass. Evidently a fairly well-known motif in Germany, it is found, for example, on one of the biscuit-moulds (dated 1517) belonging to Claus Stalburg the Rich, Mayor of Frankfurt, who catalogued it thus: Der 16. stain ist das eselryten, und will eyn iglicher der allernest seyn [The 16th stone (biscuit-mould) is Riding the Ass, and everyone wants to be the very next].[1] The German woodcut print is untitled, but the full title of Elstrack's version - Whilst maskinge in their follies all doe passe/ Though all say nay yet all doe ride the asse - probably accurately reflects the intention of the original composition, i.e. it is a general, rather than a particular, satire, in which, with the exception of the judge (Mr Justice - though the verse explains that his motives for declining to ride are selfish), all social ranks and types of early Jacobean society (including the prostitute Dame Punke, Don Pandar, Don Gull and a Gallant) are associated with asinine folly (cf. the similar message of Doctor Panurgus, which will be discussed next month[BM Satires 82]). All 'ride the ass', that is, everyone is foolish, though they even squabble about this. With this usage, compare the title-page woodcut to The Fool's Complaint to Gotham College (1643) depicting a fool riding on an ass which says, The fool rides me. Though seemingly unrecorded elsewhere, Robert Burton appears to use the idiom in precisely the same sense and context in his vastly learned Anatomy of Melancholy (1621): that they may go 'ride the ass', and all sail along ... in the 'ship of fools'.[2] Burton shows an awareness of pictorial prints throughout his book, referring earlier in passing to the fact that 'all the world is mad... it is (which Epicthonius Cosmopolites expressed not many years since in a map) made like a fool's head (with that motto, Caput helleboro dignum)'.[3]

A late seventeenth- or perhaps early eighteenth-century engraver revived and revised Elstrack’s composition to illustrate another sheet entitled, The ass age, or the world in hieroglyphick. An amusement, agreeably resembling the humour of the present times. Interestingly an earlier state, which must have been pirated, is suggested by the words Beware of paultry wooden-cutts after the imprint, and, indeed, a woodcut-illustrated version survives in the Folger Shakespeare Library, entitled The ass age: or, the fools in fashion: being a comical description of the times, dated 1712.

[1]. Malcolm Jones, The Secret Middle Ages (Stroud, 2002), pp. 7-8. [2]. H. Jackson (ed.), Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (London, 1972), p. 72. [3]. Jackson, ed. cit., p. 39. This particular fool's head world-map is, in fact, extant, and was issued in Antwerp some thirty years before Burton wrote, c.1590; there is an impression in the Douce Collection in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford: Portfolio 142 (92). I reproduce it in M. Jones, 'The English Print, c.1550-c.1650', in M. Hattaway (ed.), A Companion to English Renaissance Literature (Oxford, 2000), pp. 352-66. The Dutch print is itself an elaboration of an earlier French woodcut version by Jean de Gourmont II (Paris, c.1575).