Jack and Jill (nursery rhyme)

"Jack and Jill"
Roud #10266
Jack and Jill in the act of tumbling down, as illustrated by William Wallace Denslow
Song
Written	England
Published	c. 1834
Form	Nursery rhyme
Writer(s)	Traditional
Language	En

"Jack and Jill" (sometimes "Jack and Gill", particularly in earlier versions) is a traditional English nursery rhyme. The Roud Folk Song Index classifies this tune and its variations as number 10266. The rhyme dates back at least to the 18th century and exists with different numbers of verses each with a number of variations. Several theories have been advanced to explain its origins and to suggest meanings for the lyrics.

The first and most commonly repeated verse is:

only a few more verses have been added to the rhyme, including a version with a total of 15 stanzas in a chapbook of the 19th century. The second verse, probably added as part of these extensions has become a standard part of the nursery rhyme. Early versions took the form:

By the early 20th century this had been modified in some collections, such as L. E. Walter's, Mother Goose's Nursery Rhymes (London, 1919) to:

A third verse, sometimes added to the rhyme, was first recorded in a 19th-century chapbook and took the form:

Twentieth-century versions of this verse include:

The rhyme is made up of quatrains, with a rhyming scheme of abcb (with occasional internal rhymes), using falling rhymes (where the rhyming sound is on a relatively unstressed syllable: de-emphasising the rhyme) and a trochaic rhythm (with the stress falling on the first of a pair of syllables), known as a ballad form, which is common in nursery rhymes. The melody commonly associated with the rhyme was first recorded by the composer and nursery rhyme collector James William Elliott in his National Nursery Rhymes and Nursery Songs (1870). The Roud Folk Song Index, which catalogues folk songs and their variations by number, classifies the song as 10266.

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. Vinegar and brown paper were a home cure used as a method to draw out bruises on the body. The phrase "Jack and Jill" was in use in England as early as the 16th century to indicate a boy and a girl. A comedy with the title Jack and Jill was performed at the Elizabethan court in 1567-68, 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). These lines suggest that it was a phrase which indicated a romantically attached couple, as in the proverb "a good Jack makes a good Jill".