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                                   The Token
                                   ---------
                                 by Iain Grant

                       http://thefictionshelf.com/work/30

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                               © 2011 Iain Grant

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It has been announced this week that Ellen Shipton’s grisly fairy tale for
children, The Token, is to be adapted for the screen by Tim Selleck, acclaimed
director of juvenile stop‐motion nasties such as Halloween Dreams and Mr
Rumbleshanks. It has sparked renewed interest in Shipton’s 1968 book and
reinvigorated the debate on what children’s fiction should do. Children’s
literature, more so than its adult counterparts, continues to generate outrage,
denunciations and calls for certain titles to be suppressed. From JK Rowling’s
perceived celebration of witchcraft and Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy’s
anti‐Catholicism to the debatable racism of Enid Blyton’s Toy Town stories,
modern children’s literature stirs up strong feelings in those who would seek to
protect the vulnerable minds of the young.

That Shipton’s story of forced marriage and body parts should be targeted by
such vitriolists is farcical for any number of reasons but foremost should be
the fact that the central story of The Token is not original to her. Ellen
Shipton borrows her plot from a play by the dramatist and the original
bowdleriser, Nahum Tate. Tate, poet Laureate to King William III, is most famous
to us as the man who rewrote much of Shakespeare and gave tritely happy endings
to the likes of King Lear and Romeo and Juliet. Most of his works survive but
are rarely performed. The only significant production of his works in recent
years was the Farshore Theatre production of King Lear in 1997 but even then the
players felt the need to insulate themselves from Tate’s work by presenting the
piece as an ironic play within a play.

Tate’s, The Token of Love Eternal, is a one‐act comedy, a morality play of sorts
written long after the genre had ceased to be popular. In it, Gisbert, a wealthy
merchant, marries Sybillia, a woman whose beauty is only matched by her avarice.
There are various shenanigans involving pirates, a scotophobic clown, a court
physician with three unmarried daughters and a heroic soldier masquerading as a
shepherd but the nub of the story is the business with the eponymous token. On
the day of their marriage, Sybillia enquires of Gisbert what gift he has for
her. Gisbert, either effecting ignorance or perhaps genuinely so, asks her what
she means. Sybillia puts it to him that, on such a momentous day there must be a
gift, a token of love, to celebrate their union. Gisbert then launches into a
long and tedious speech, delivered partly to Sybillia and partly as a clumsy
aside to the audience, explaining that by giving her his hand in marriage he has
also given to her his heart, his soul, his very being. Rings and necklaces and
jewels, he argues, are nothing in comparison to the gift of love itself.
Sybillia scoffs at his words and jokingly asks if he could cut out his heart and
present it to her there and then. She demands a token of his affections, that
she might hold, that might offer her comfort in times of loneliness, a thing
whose value demonstrates the esteem in which Gisbert holds their love. Gisbert
goes off, in search of a suitable token.

In the final scene (after the pirates have been hung, the clown entombed alive
and the soldier revealed and married off to the doctor’s youngest daughter),
Gisbert returns to his wife, hunched over and pale, with a box containing the
token of his love. Apparently weak and on the verge of collapse, he gives the
gift to Sybillia. She opens it and discovers a severed hand. It is, Gisbert
points out, something that she might hold and seek comfort from in times of
loneliness and that its value to Gisbert was without measure. Sybillia screams
and faints away. Only then it is revealed that Gisbert has tricked her and that
the hand is, in fact, that of the pirate chief, taken from his body by the court
physician. In the closing lines, as the good folk of the tale crowd the stage,
the physician assures Gisbert that his wife will recover from her swoon having
found a humility more befitting of a woman.

As with his edited Shakespeares, Nahum Tate’s Token is a sanitised version of
earlier works, in this instance taking its central idea from Robert Daborne’s
The Fair Maid Lost to Lust (c.1608). Daborne’s play received a recent reading at
the Shakespeare Institute, Warwick, as part of a season of ‘Turk Plays’ that
also included George Peele’s Soliman and Perside and Thomas Goffe’s The
Courageous Turk. These overtly racist and anti‐Turkish pieces are being
subjected to renewed interest as Anglo‐Islamic relations rise once again in the
public consciousness.

In The Fair Maid Lost to Lust, a Christian woman, Beaumelle, is betrothed to the
sinister and alien, Abdelazar, a Turkish merchant. The tale that follows could
be mistaken for a strange inversion of the Bluebeard story. The newlyweds live
in a many‐roomed mansion and there are hints of a dark secret from Abdelazar’s
past hidden away in the house. When the secret is uncovered, Abdelazar offers to
make amends to Beaumelle by offering her a valuable token of his love for her
and cuts off his hand and presents it to her. She is horrified but not so
horrified as when Abdelazar, seemingly motivated by his desire for the luscious
Christian woman, offers her a fresh token of his love at the rising of each new
moon. Beaumelle is presented with eyes, ears, a nose, feet and more besides
until Abdelazar is dead and Beaumelle, driven mad, throws herself from the roof
of their home. The moral of the tale is clear, even if the narrative is not:
Turks are mad and dangerous and good Christian women are best protected from
them.

As said, this tale could be mistaken for a strange inversion of the Bluebeard
story. But it is not. There is a far more likely, if less well known source, in
the medieval myths of the Sibyl of Cumae, the pagan prophetess reported to dwell
in the highest reaches of the Apennine Mountains of Italy, in a cave guarded by
dragons and poisonous streams. For centuries, she was sought by Christian
knights (who wished to slay this whore of Babylon) and various wizards, warlocks
and necromancers (who sought her wisdom and patronage). Whether she existed on
not, such was the stream of foolish or unholy pilgrims to her domain that a
local noble had the pathways to her cave destroyed with explosives in the
mid‐seventeenth century to prevent any further incursions.

Various stories connected to the Sibyl of Cumae detail how those men who managed
to pass the tests and trials in the cave then proceeded to discover an
underground realm of carnal pleasures in which the Sibyl and her winsome female
companions cavorted with their male visitors in clear pools and shady bowers.
Most stories then relate how this unholy paradise reveals its true nature on
every seventh day, when the Sibyl and her companions took on their true form of
writing demonic serpents. In some tales, this revelation causes the man to flee
and repent his sinful sojourn. In others, the man accepts that there is a price
to be paid for pleasure and remain.

One specific version, related in Antoine de la Sale’s Salade, concerns the
knight Gascon who not only discovers that his lady love Sibyl is a demon but
must give her a token of his love for each week that he remains in her cave.
Such is Gascon’s desire that he does not hesitate in paying up. However, once he
has exhausted his supply of rings and trinkets, Gascon begins to offer up his
body parts as payment. His hand, his eye and his ears are willingly sacrificed
in the name of sexual fulfilment. Only after he has cut off his own manhood and
presented it to the Sibyl does this cycle of sex and violence come to an end.
With Gascon’s penis and testicles in her grasp, Sibyl no longer needs her
knightly lover and he is flung down, pleading and wailing, into that circle of
hell reserved for fornicators.

How light and innocent Ellen Shipton’s book appears in comparison! And yet, it
bears more similarities to the original tale than some might like. In The Token,
our teenage heroine, Kat, is kidnapped by and forced to marry the Undertroll. In
an attempt to forestall their wedding day Kat, like Tate’s Sybillia, demands a
token of her betrothed’s affection and, like Tate’s Sybillia, is presented with
a fake hand (the finger‐like roots of a mangrove in Shipton’s tale) in the hope
that this will shock her out of such presumptuousness. However, the modern
heroine is cleverer than her deceiver and Kat pretends to be delighted with the
Undertroll’s present and demands more. Now, not only does the Undertroll have to
pretend to be minus a hand but he must deliver other cunningly disguised
anatomical gifts in order to secure her love. Throughout Shipton’s cavalcade of
squeamish mock‐dismemberments, Kat is always one step ahead of her would‐be
husband.

The cycle of stories comes full circle. Like the Sibyl of Cumae, Kat is in total
control of the relationship and the man, be it Gascon or the Undertroll, is
forced to continually and increasingly humiliate himself in pursuit of his
desire. And whereas the Sibyl’s power is demonic in nature, Kat, a twenty‐first
century embodiment of female power, wields a more insidious witchcraft of her
own.


                                    THE END