Gessler's Prohibitions
William Tell (P. G. Wodehouse Edition)Gessler's Prohibitions are a series of bans through which Governor Hermann Gessler makes the Swiss people's ordinary pleasures targets of rule. Their stated justifications present enjoyment as a nuisance or impediment to work, but the narrative identifies annoyance as his purpose; when familiar activities have all been forbidden, he must find a new way to extend his control.
Purpose and Method
The prohibitions begin with Hermann Gessler's habit of looking for fresh ways to annoy the Swiss people whenever he has time away from governing. He studies what they most enjoy and has a herald announce that it must stop. The official message is framed as regret, but its effect is to deny people precisely the pleasures the governor has selected for restriction.
This method makes prohibition itself the point: Gessler does not respond to a particular disturbance so much as turn the people's preferences into a list of possible targets. The narrator underscores the deliberate spite behind that practice, distinguishing his public authority from the personal amusement he takes in using it.
Activities and Justifications
Gessler forbids dancing and singing, along with playing any kind of musical instrument. He claims that the noise disturbs people who want to work. The explanation makes pleasure sound like a public nuisance, while the breadth of the ban reaches well beyond any one performance or instrument.
He also restricts food, allowing only bread and the simplest sorts of meat. His stated concern is that other food will upset people and leave them fit only to sit still and complain of illness. The account presents this reasoning as another excuse for intervention, extending the prohibitions from public recreation into what people may eat.
Games are forbidden as well, on the ground that they waste time. Together, the bans reach music, dance, singing, food, and play: distinct parts of daily life united by the fact that the Swiss people enjoy them.
Exhaustion and the Next Idea
The system reaches a comic impasse when Gessler wants to forbid something else but cannot think of anything left. That moment reveals the logic's appetite for expansion: the problem is not that a specific activity has caused trouble, but that the governor wants another object for his authority.
His next idea begins with an order to have a very long pole cut. He has his servants fetch his oldest hat—not the one reserved for Sundays and state occasions, his everyday hat, or the one he wears hunting—and place it on top. He then sends them to set up the pole in the middle of the meadow just outside the town gates. The passage establishes this conspicuous new display as what follows the exhausted list of bans; it does not yet explain what the people are required to do about the hat.
Significance
Gessler's Prohibitions turn governing into a sequence of petty intrusions, each dressed in the language of work, health, or wasted time. The stated reasons offer respectable-sounding cover for restrictions whose selection is governed by the pleasures they take away. The comic progression—from banning familiar activities to searching for something else to forbid—makes the governor's desire to regulate the Swiss people's lives more visible than any of his excuses.
