Mock Almanacs
The first English mock prognostication, A Mery Pronostication of 1544, closely follows the standard format for its satirical target, presenting humorous verse prognostications for eclipses, the four quarters of the year, and the twelve months, as well as a verse “Of diseases and syckenesses,” “Of kynges,” and others on the children of some of the planets. The satire operates partly through the ponderous elucidation of the obvious or
Related publications and controversies 89 ridiculous: “But I saye yf the nynth daye of Novembre I Had fallen upon tenth daye of Decembre / It had bene a mervaylous hote yere for bees / For then had the Moone ben lyke a grene chese” (A2r).
There are no surviving contributions to the mock almanac genre until 1591 and the publication of Adam Foulweather’s A Wonderfull Strange and Miraculous Astrologicall Prognostication. This work partially repeats the rhetorical maneuvers of its predecessor in grandiose statements of the factual or banal. Eclipses, for example, which happen every year, are predicted to happen this year “in one of the 12 moneths, Sc some of the foure quarters of the year” (A3r-A3v). Primarily, however, Foulweather uses the format of the annual prognostication in order to attack human sinfulness, rather than astrology itself. For example, Foulweather predicts that
Cancer being the sole house of the Moone, doth presage that this yeere fruits shalbe greatly eaten with Catterpillers: as Brokers, Farmers, and Flatterers, which feeding on the sweate of other mens browes, shall greatly hinder the beautye of the spring, and disparage the growth of all hottest hearbes, unless some northerly winde of Gods vengance cleere the trees of such Catterpillers, with a hotte plague and the pestilence.
(A3r-A3v)
Many of the elements here are familiar from annual prognostications: predictions on the year’s “fruits,” “hearbes,” and other crops, prognostications for the four quarters (here, the Spring), and a prophecy for plagues and pestilence, which can be understood as God’s punishment for wicked behavior. But they have been metaphorically twisted so that the passage becomes a critique of the rapacious behavior of men—“Brokers, Farmers, and Flatterers.” The work is not centrally focused on astrology, and so—like other mock almanacs—should perhaps not be seen in the same category as direct attacks on the art.30
In the Jacobean period, literary writers got into the business of satirizing almanacs. Thomas Dekker’s The Ravens Almanacke (1609) is in part a witty riff on calendars; for example, he personifies the months which he imagines to each “have his followers, some of them being thirtie in number, some 31, onely one (by falling into decay, or else because he keeps but a colde house[)], keeping but 28” (A2v). Mostly The Ravens Almanacke, like Foulweather’s Prognostication, uses the structure of the astrological prognostication as vehicle to deliver social satire. For this year, for example, the author predicts “certaine diseases that are likely to raigne amongst trades-men—as the lazie evill, the Lethargic...dizines of the head, (caused by the fumes of good drinke) and such like” (B2v). But most of The Ravens Almanacke has little connection to astrology or almanacs, digressing instead into stories and jests unrelated to the calendar, such as one concerning
“An excellent diet for an Usurer” (E8V), and another relating “How in a household of civill warre, a woman may be safe from a cruell husband,” (F8v). Mock almanacs which continue the use of the genre for social satire include two published in 1623: W.W.’s A New, and Merrie Prognostication, and (continuing the bird theme) Jack Daw’s Vox Graculi, or Jacke Dawes Prognostication.
Middleton’s The Owles Almanac (1619), as Neil Rhodes has noted, is without question “the most elaborate and also the cleverest parody of the early printed almanac.”31 Middleton was apparently intimately familiar with almanacs, which he also mocked in No Wit No Help Like a Woman’s. As David George has shown, Middleton clearly had Bretnor’s 1611 almanac in front of him while concocting Weatherwise’s comic obsession with almanacs in that play.32 The Owles Almanac shows the same detailed familiarity with both the genre as a whole and the Jacobean almanacs of Edmund Pond and Thomas Bretnor, as it “stitches together a ludicrous sampler” of the standard offerings of almanacs—the law terms, chronologies, tide tables, Zodiac Man, elections, lists of fairs, etc.33 This mock almanac is a true parody, and it participates in some of the same rhetorical gestures of the earlier mock almanacs when it bombastically states the obvious and turns the standard elements of almanacs to social parody. But The Owles Almanac is also much more: an exuberant comic “performance,” as Rhodes has suggested, that is firmly embedded in the urban and economic world of Jacobean London. Like the earlier mock almanacs, though much more extensively and effectively, The Owles Almanac makes fun of astrological belief without obviously or directly attacking the art’s underlying principles.34
