Interlude I

Summary

‘Oh! Cruel’, the first interlude, extends my analysis of sources to songs about or purportedly by singers, centring on the song ‘Oh! Cruel’ itself. The performance of this and other songs prompted especial anxieties around issues of charity and class relations. I contend that, though many of these songs share the stock characteristics and prejudices of the representations considered in Chapter 1, their crucial difference is that because they were actually performed by ballad-singers, they afforded the singer a degree of agency and self-expression denied them in other media. It is this sort of autonomous performance that I see as central to the role of the ballad-singer in society.