Meaning & Analysis
A naïve onlooker, admiring a dressed monkey or caged squirrel, exclaims that people will make remarkably pretty ‘things’ for money—mistaking the living creature for a man-made trinket.
Insights
Money conjures marvels
Wealth commissions wonders; payment mobilizes skill and spectacle so effectively that the products of commerce seem magical or unnatural.
Consumerist credulity
People dazzled by novelty easily mistake show for substance, taking price and polish as proof of value—and even misclassifying life itself as merchandise.
Commodifying nature
Living beings reduced to ‘pretty things’ typify a market gaze that turns creatures into curios, blurring ethical lines between display, play, and exploitation.
Power of presentation
Costume and staging transform perception: dress a monkey in a coat and it reads as an artifact, revealing how appearances rewrite categories.
Satire of ignorance
The saying merrily exposes provincial or inexperienced wonder—how those outside a trade or town read shop marvels and mistake how they’re made.
Shop-window culture
Early modern streets teemed with showmanship—pet squirrels in cages, ‘jackanapes’ in coats, and exotic wares. The proverb captures the gawker’s astonishment at retail spectacle and trained animals.
Price as beauty cue
“Made for money” hints at the price–quality heuristic: cost seems to certify worth, so buyers conflate expense with excellence and novelty with genius.
Xenophile and xenophobe notes
Variants credit ‘Flemings’ with such marvels, reflecting England’s mingled admiration for Low Countries craft and a ready jibe at foreign artificers—commerce framed through stereotype.
Cabinet of curiosities
The period’s taste for wonders—odd beasts, automata, miniatures—makes the misreading plausible; boundaries between art, artifice, and nature were a public entertainment.
Gendered framing
‘Quoth the woman’ supplies a comic voice but also encodes a bias that equates female—or outsider—astonishment with ignorance; a modern reading can enjoy the wit while noting the stereotype.
Moral wink
The line doubles as a caution: if money can ‘make’ anything, be wary of charms and contrivances built to separate the spectator from her coin.
Rhetorical Devices
Anecdotal frame
“Quoth the woman…” stages a miniature scene, turning the proverb into a quotable vignette that dramatizes its lesson.
Irony
Admiring a living animal as a manufactured ‘pretty thing’ flips categories, making the humor ride on misrecognition.
Paronomasia / sound play
The near-rhyme and echo of ‘money’/‘monkey’ (and the m-sounds of ‘made’) give the line a catchy, comic snap.
Parenthetical variant
“(squirrel)” signals oral circulation and flexible retelling, keeping the joke while swapping the creature.
Concrete imagery
A monkey in a coat or a caged squirrel provides vivid specificity; tangible detail makes the proverb sticky and portable.
Transcription
Quotations
He spide a lacke an apes, in a gaie cote . . Good Lord what knacks are made for money, now adaies?
Why it is a Squirrill. —A Squirrill? O Gods what things are made for money.
A Cockney seeing a Squirrell in a shop, greatly admir’d it, and said. Iesu God, what pretie things are made for money!
A jack an apes! quoth she: now, Jesus, what these Fleminges can make for money, thinking verily it had been a thing made by mens hand.
(What pretty Things Men will make for Money, quoth the old Woman, when).
Cross References
- See TAY., p. 209.
Related Proverbs
Original Scan
Used under CC BY-NC 3.0.