Jack and Jill (nursery Rhyme) - Meaning and Origins

Meaning and Origins

The rhyme has traditionally been seen as a nonsense verse, particularly as the couple go up a hill to find water, which is often thought to be found at the bottom of hills, however, in reality wells can and do occur up hills due to groundwater effects, and vinegar and brown paper were a home cure used as a method to draw out bruises on the body. The phrase "Jack and Jill", indicating a boy and a girl, was in use in England as early as the 16th century. A comedy was performed at the Elizabethan court in 1567-8 with the title Jack and Jill and the phrase was used twice by Shakespeare: in A Midsummer Night's Dream, which contains the line: "Jack shall have Jill; Nought shall go ill" (III:ii:460-2) and in Love's Labour's Lost, which has the lines: "Our wooing doth not end like an old play; Jack hath not Jill" (V:ii:874–5), suggesting that it was a phrase that indicated a romantically attached couple, as in the proverb "A good Jack makes a good Jill".

Jack is the most common name used in English language nursery rhymes and by the 18th century represented an archetypal Everyman hero, while by the end of the Middle Ages Jill or Gill had come to mean a young girl or a sweetheart. However, the woodcut that accompanied the first recorded version of the rhyme showed two boys (not a boy and a girl), and used the spelling Gill not Jill. This earliest printed version comes from a reprint of John Newbery's Mother Goose's Melody, thought to have been first published in London around 1765. The rhyming of "water" with "after", was taken by Iona and Peter Opie to suggest that the first verse may date from the first half of the 17th century.