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The Black-Letter Broadside Ballad

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Extract

In actual practice the English broadside ballad did not exist before the introduction of printing; but it is not accurate to assert that “street ballads begin about 1540,” or even to call Skelton's ballad on Flodden Field (1513)—said to be the earliest printed street ballad extant—the beginning of the genre. Undoubtedly the ballad had begun to play an important rôle before 1500, and in its origin runs much farther back, far antedating the art of printing. To all intents the street ballad was matured as early as 1500; while satirical poems, invectives, lamentations, and short jocular and religious stanzas of a still earlier period have many of the features that characterize printed broadside ballads and unquestionably prepared the way for them. Early in the fifteenth century, writers of such ballad-poems tried to circulate them on manuscript broadsheets. Naturally, therefore, the advent of printing merely facilitated and increased the production of rimed broadsides, until, in the reigns of Mary and Elizabeth, they came to be the chief publications of the London press and the works most dear to the common people.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1919

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References

page 258 note 1 Gummere, Popular Ballad, p. 4. Percy seems to have originated this idea, and it is everywhere accepted.

page 258 note 2 The “Nut-Brown Maid,” which is older than Skelton's ballad, can hardly be called a ballad at all. Perhaps the best edition of Skelton's work is that made (in facsimile) by John Ashton, London, 1882; it is also reprinted in Ashton's Century of Ballads (Boston, 1888), pp. xiii ff.

page 258 note 3 See his Day-Book, ed. F. Madan, Oxford Hist. Society, Collectanea, 1st series, pt. iii (1885).

page 258 note 4 Statutes of the Realm, iii, p. 894.

page 258 note 5 Duff's Century of the English Book Trade, 1905, pp. xxiv-xxv. Nine so-called ballads (which were really libels and not intended for singing) dealing with Lord Cromwell († 1540) are preserved. They are described with lavish extracts in the Calendar of State Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, xvi, pp. 212–14, and in Lemon's Catalogue of Printed Broadsides in the possession of the Society of Antiquaries of London, 1866, pp. 2–5. Seven of them are reprinted in Hazlitt's Fugitive Tracts, 1st series, 1875, nos. vi-xii; eight are reproduced in facsimile in Kingdon's Incidents in the Lives of Poyntz and Grafton, p. 84.

page 258 note 6 Quoted in Chappell's Popular Music, i, p. 54.

page 258 note 7 Quoted in Ritson's Ancient Songs, 1829, i, p. lxxxi.

page 258 note 8 See especially those reprinted from Brit. Mus. Add. ms. 15,233, by Halliwell-Phillipps, in the Old Shakespeare Society's volume for 1848 (xxxvii).

page 258 note 9 Ibid.

page 258 note 10 See Lemon's Catalogue, p. 16, no. 46. For printing Forrest's epitaph-ballad on Mary without license, Richard Lant “was sente to warde” (Arber's Transcript of the Registers of the Stationers' Company of London, i, p. 101).

page 258 note 11 ms. Ashmole 48 (ed. Thomas Wright, Songs and Ballads, etc., Roxburghe Club, 1860).

page 258 note 12 Cf. Bryant, History of English Balladry, p. 169.

page 258 note 13 Schollers Purgatory, c. 1625 (Miscellaneous Works, ed. Spenser Society, i, p. 31).

page 258 note 14 The Scots Scouts' Discoveries, 1642 (Phoenix Britannicus, 1732, i, p. 466).

page 258 note 15 The Downfall of Temporizing Poets, 1641, sign. A 3 b.

page 258 note 16 Parker's “True Tale of Robin Hood” (Child, no. 154) is of course well known, but few persons know that William Elderton wrote “King James and Browne” (Child, no. 180).

page 258 note 17 These are “The Famous Flower of Serving-Men” (no. 106, and cf. Roxburghe Ballads, vi, p. 570) and “Robin Hood's Golden Prize” (no. 147).

page 258 note 18 Counting white-letter ballads, the Pepys collection contains over 1700 copies, of which 964 are said to be unique. The best accounts of all these collections are given by Chappell and Ebsworth in the Roxburghe Ballads, i, pp. i ff., and viii, pp. 739 f.

page 258 note 19 The Suffolk ballads are reprinted in H. L. Collmann's Ballads and Broadsides, Roxburghe Club, 1912, and in A Collection of 79 Black-Letter Ballads and Broadsides, London, 1867 and 1870. The Bagford, Roxburghe, and about 500 Pepysian ballads are reprinted in the Ballad Society's Bagford Ballads and Roxburghe Ballads. The ballads in the possession of the Society of Antiquaries are, for the most part, reprinted in Collier's Old Ballads, Percy Society, vol. i; the Harleian Miscellany, vol. x; and W. C. Hazlitt's Fugitive Tracts. Many ballads, too, have survived in mss., most of which have at one time or another been edited.

page 258 note 20 When Heywood wished to list the errata in his Troia Britanica, the printer answered him, “hee would not publish his owne disworkemanship, hut rather, let his owne fault lye upon the necke of the author” (An Apology for Actors, 1612, Old Shakespeare Society, 1841, p. 62).

page 258 note 21 Collier's Broadside Black-Letter Ballads, 1868, p. iv. Thus, “A mournfull Dittie on the death of certaine Judges and Justices of the Peace” (A Collection of 79 Ballads, 1867, p. 197) had a woodcut representing two men exclaiming at a baby in a dish placed before them by a servant. See also Ebsworth's discussion of woodcuts in the publications of the New Shakspere Society, series vi, no. vi (1879), pp. 17 ff.

page 258 note 22 Collier's Broadside Black-Letter Ballads, p. v.

page 258 note 23 A Collection of 79 Ballads, pp. 138, 297.

page 258 note 24 For one that was printed on the back of an old prognostication, see ibid., pp. 101, 292.

page 258 note 25 Ibid., pp. 147 ff., 299.

page 258 note 26 The Harvard College Library has several thousands of them. Collectors like Lord Crawford make no effort to catalogue any but black-letter ballads.

page 258 note 27 Attention should here be called to Professor C. H. Firth's excellent chapter on “Ballads and Broadsides,” in Shakespeare's England (Oxford, 1916), ii, pp. 510–538.

page 265 note 1 Gummere, Old English Ballads, p. xxiv, n. 4. Mr. Gummere's reference to Arber is incorrect. It appears, indeed, that no ballads on pigs were licensed. Three broadsides on monstrous pigs (at least two of them registered in 1562) are printed in A Collection of 79 Ballads, pp. 45 ff., 112 f., 186 ff.; all three describe the pigs in prose, but the first and last also moralize briefly in verse. In the Registers they are simply called “pictures of monstrous pigs.”

page 265 note 2 Jack Drum's Entertainment, 1601 (Richard Simpson's School of Shakspere, ii, p. 165).

page 265 note 3 Licensed by John Tysdale in 1562–63 (Arber's Transcript, i, p. 214). Compare Nicholas Breton's remark in his Figure of Four, 1597 (Works, ed. Grosart, ii, f., p. 5): “There he four especial poor scholars in the world: Pettifoggers, Quacksalvers, Ballad-makers, and A. B. C. Schoolmasters.”

page 265 note 4 Middleton's World Tost at Tennis, 1620 (Works, ed. Bullen, vii, p. 154).

page 265 note 5 Quoted from Martin Mar-Sixtus, in Chappell's Popular Music, i, p. 106. A similar remark is made in Lingua, 1607, sign. D 4.

page 265 note 6 A Collection of 19 Ballads, p. 112.

page 265 note 7 Ibid., p. 304; Henry Machyn's Diary, Camden Society, 1848, pp. 389–390.

page 265 note 8 “The iiij day of June [1562] ther was a chyld browth to the cowrte in a boxe, of a strange fegur, with a longe strynge commyng from the nayyll,—browth from Chechester” (Machyn's Diary, p. 284). For other monstrosities brought to London in 1562, see ibid., pp. 280, 281, 389–390; for a particularly “monstrua” child born in Oxfordshire in 1552, and for some “grett fysses” taken that year, see p. 23.

page 265 note 9 Arber's Transcript, ii, p. 420. This is not called a ballad in the entry, and it may have been a prose pamphlet; but in the present connection the point is not material.

page 265 note 10 Shirburn Ballads, p. 55; Rollins's Notes on the Shirburn Ballads, 1917, Journal of American Folk-Lore, xxx, pp. 370–377.

page 265 note 11 The ballad is preserved in A Handfull of Pleasant Delights, 1584, sign. G.

page 265 note 12 Eastward Ho, v, v, 110.

page 265 note 13 A Collection of 79 Ballads, p. 30.

page 265 note 14 Arber's Transcript, ii, p. 506.

page 265 note 15 Ibid., iii, p. 257.

page 265 note 16 Somewhat like editorials also are the “Looking-glass” ballads, as “A Looking Glass for Cornhoarders by the example of John Russell, a farmer dwelling at St. Peter's Chalfont in Buckinghamshire, whose horses sunk into the ground the 4 of March, 1631” (Pepys Collection, i, p. 148).

page 265 note 17 Arber's Transcript, ii, pp. 367 ff. (April, 1580).

page 265 note 18 Roxburghe Ballads, i, pp. 1 ff.

page 265 note 19 See his Nine Days' Wonder, 1600 (ed. A. Dyce, Camden Society, 1840), passim.

page 265 note 20 Paper's Complaint, 1611, Works, ed. Grosart (Chertsey Worthies Library, 1878), ii, k, p. 77.

page 265 note 21 “The details of ballad-mongers can seldom boast much historical value. The object of the tribe is to place events before their audience in the most picturesque way possible. To this object details must courtsey” (Percy Folio MS., ed. Hales and Furnivall, i, p. 127).

page 265 note 22 Webster's Devil's Law-Case, iv, ii.

page 265 note 23 Reprinted in Collmann's Ballads and Broadsides, no. 52.

page 265 note 24 Annals, sub anno 1568.

page 265 note 25 Ibid., sub anno 1574. Evidently Stowe stopped at nothing in the shape of a fish story; for, under years 1187 and 1322, he tells fables of fishes shaped like men and women who were taken to church and were even “taught to spin very orderly,” but who “spied” their time and, when “not well looked to,” stole back to the sea and more congenial employments.

page 265 note 26 Reproduced in Lemon's Catalogue, p. 53.

page 265 note 27 They seem to be our old friends Chichevache and Bycorne; but compare William Butler's entry of “A Picture of the Fat Monster and the Lean, the one called Bulchim and the other Thingul, graven by Reynold Elstrak,” July 10, 1620 (Arber's Transcript, iii, p. 676).

page 265 note 28 A Collection of 79 Ballads, p. 205.

page 265 note 29 Marston, What You Will, 1607, i, i, 66 f.

page 265 note 30 But Parker's Garland of Withered Roses, registered on July 2, 1632, and November 9, 1633 (Arber's Transcript, iv, pp. 280, 308), is lost.

page 265 note 31 Spenser Society's ed., p. v.

page 265 note 32 Charles Crawford, editing England's Parnassus (Oxford, 1913), p. xix.

page 265 note 33 See Rollins's paper on “The Date, Authors, and Contents of A Handfull of Pleasant Delights,” in Journal of English and Germanic Philology, January, 1919.

page 265 note 34 W. C. Hazlitt, Handbook to Early English Literature, 1867 (s. v. “Clement Robinson”), p. 515.

page 265 note 35 Many poems from Tottel's (e. g., Arber's ed., pp. 16, 137, 138, 205, 220) were printed as ballads: “In Winter's Just Return,” “If Care do Cause Men Cry,” “Who Loveth to Live in Peace,” “Philida was a Fair Maiden,” “The Phantasies of a Troubled Man's Head” (Arber's Transcript, i, pp. 76, 263, 271, 313). It has not been previously observed, I believe, that an epitaph on William Gray, himself a balladist, which Furnivall dated about 1551 and printed for the Ballad Society in his Ballads from MSS., i, p. 435, is included in Tottel's (p. 211). Two ballads by John Thorne (preserved also in Brit. Mus. ms. 15,233, ed. Old Shakespeare Society, xxxvii, pp. 102, 110) are printed in the Paradise. For ballads in the Gorgeous Gallery, see Collier's reprint, pp. 36, 49, 105. “Crabbed Age and Youth cannot Live Together” appeared in The Passionate Pilgrim, which was published by William Jaggard in 1599 as the work of Shakespeare and is still included in Shakespeare's works, though it may have been written by Thomas Deloney.

page 265 note 36 2 Henry IV, iv, iii, 50 ff.

page 265 note 37 Moses Pitt, An Account of Anne Jefferies, London, 1696; reprinted in Phoenix Britannicus, i, pp. 545 ff.

page 265 note 38 Henry Glapthorne, The Ladies' Privilege, 1640 (Plays, ed. Pearson, ii, pp. 128 f.).

page 265 note 39 I Henry IV, ii, ii, 47 ff.

page 265 note 40 Marston, The Insatiate Countess, 1613, v, ii, 60 ff. Even the Latin university play of Hispanus (1595) refers to the custom: “Dum ex ædibus exeat tibicinem iterum incipe vel hominem in desperatione vel Doctorem Faustum vel Doctorem Lopezzium, vel Labandalashottum” (Shakespeare Jahrbuch, xxxiv, p. 300). For one of these well-known “hanging tunes,” see Chappell's Popular Music, i, p. 163; for another, cf. no. 29 in Rolling's paper on A Handfull of Pleasant Delights, in Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 1919, p. 15. Sometimes ballads and libels were scratched upon the tombs of dead enemies: cf. Thomas Nabbes, The Bride, 1640 (Works, ed. Bullen, ii, p. 9); Much Ado, v, i, 291 ff.; and Thomas Killigrew's Parson's Wedding, 1663 (Dodsley-Hazlitt's Old Plays, xiv, p. 442: “Now they wear out their youth and beauty, without hope of a monumental ballad, or trophy of a libel that shall hereafter point at such a lord, and cry, that is the royal son of such a one!”).

page 265 note 41 Webster, The Devil's Law-Case, v, iv.

page 265 note 42 Massinger's Parliament of Love, 1660, iv, v.

page 265 note 43 Fletcher's Elder Brother, 1637, iv, iv.

page 265 note 44 Sampson, The Vow-Breaker, 1636, i, iv.

page 265 note 45 For the ballad, see Roxburghe Ballads, iii, p. 194.

page 265 note 46 Libels should be distinguished from these ballads: they were not confused by contemporaries.

page 265 note 47 Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, 1619–23, x, p. 346 (no. 101).

page 265 note 48 George Meredith, The Amazing Marriage, chs. i, xlv.

page 265 note 49 Account of a Conversation, etc., 1704 (Political Works, Glasgow, 1749, p. 266).

page 265 note 50 “More solid Things do not shew the Complexion of the times so well, as Ballads and Libels” (Table Talk, 1689, ed. S. W. Singer, 1847, p. 114).

page 265 note 51 Reliques, ed. Wheatley, ii, p. 358.

page 281 note 1 Occasionally a higher fee seems to have been required, as when in 1565–66 (Arber's Transcript, i, p. 304) Richard Scerle had to pay eightpence for his ballad called “A Communication between a young man and a maid who greatly lamenteth the Loss of her Lover”; but this may have been a pamphlet.

page 281 note 2 Arber's Transcript, ii, p. 440 (anno 1585).

page 281 note 3 Sometimes the entry was made after the ballad had been printed: cf. Lambert's eleven ballads entered on December 11, 1639 (Arber's Transcript, iv, p. 493).

page 281 note 4 A ballad was licensed sometimes under its full title, sometimes under an abbreviated one. Up to 1640, however, it was perhaps more common to register it by all or a part of its first line.

page 281 note 5 The name of the licenser, usually the bishop of London, occurs with some frequency after 1569: cf. Arber, ii, pp. 352–5, 364–5, 368–70, 391–2, 470–71, etc.

page 281 note 6 Elderton is mentioned as the author of eight or nine ballads; Deloney is only once named in the registers; Parker's name appears comparatively seldom with the entries of his ballads, though often with the records of his “books.” For mention of a tune, see Arber, iii, p. 567 (and see the ballad itself in the Shirburn Ballads, p. 64).

page 281 note 7 Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, 1661–62, ii, p. 44 (no. 94).

page 281 note 8 Eyre's Transcript, iii, p. 129.

page 281 note 9 Ibid., p. 319.

page 281 note 10 In 1591 the Company paid twelvepence for a link and a boat-trip found necessary by a searcher whom the lord treasurer had sent out to investigate the source of certain ballads (Arber's Transcript, i, p. 555).

page 281 note 11 Ibid., p. 101.

page 281 note 12 Ibid., ii, pp. 334, 849.

page 281 note 14 Ibid., ii, p. 826.

page 281 note 13 Ibid., i, p. 274.

page 281 note 15 Ibid., p. 836.

page 281 note 16 Ibid., ii, p. 848.

page 281 note 17 Ibid., pp. 317, 318, 327, 328, 401, etc.

page 281 note 18 See ibid., pp. 370, 371, 377, 378, 384, 385, 455, etc. Cf. the entry of a fine paid on June 15, 1579 (ibid., p. 849): “Ric Jones Receaued of him for printinge a ballad without Lycence the ballad not toller-able …. iijs iiijd.”

page 281 note 19 Ibid., p. 336.

page 281 note 20 Ibid., p. 576.

page 281 note 21 Ibid., p. 825.

page 281 note 22 Ibid., p. 831.

page 281 note 23 Collier's Extracts from the Registers, i, pp. 13, 103, and cf. p. 165.

page 281 note 24 The letter is signed T[homas] N[ashe]; but in his note “To the Gentlemen Readers” prefixed to his Kind Heart's Dream Chettle admits that he was the real author.

page 281 note 25 Ingleby's edition, in Shakspere Allusion-Books (New Shakspere Society, 1874), i, p. 48. “The Carman's Whistle” may be read in the Roxburghe Ballads, vii, p. xiv, and in Ouvry's Collection, i, p. 59. Shallow, it will he remembered, “came ever in the rearward of the fashion, and sung those tunes to the over-scutched huswives that he heard the carmen whistle, and sware they were his fancies or his good-nights” (2 Henry IV, iii, ii, 339 ff.). In Twelfth Night Sir Toby quotes “Peg a-Ramsey,” a most indecent ballad that can be seen in Pills to Purge Melancholy, 1712, iii, p. 219.

page 281 note 26 Collier's Old Ballads (Percy Society, vol. i), p. 49.

page 281 note 27 Gummere, Old English Ballads, p. xxiv, n. 5.

page 281 note 28 Arber's Transcript, i, p. 330.

page 281 note 29 Ibid., pp. 233, 237.

page 281 note 30 Ibid., pp. 261, 327; A Collection of 79 Ballads, pp. 101, 166.

page 281 note 31 Reprinted by Rimbault for the Percy Society (Publications, vol. vi).

page 281 note 32 Arber's Transcript, i, p. 181.

page 281 note 33 Not all of the original ballads here moralized have been identified by the editors. For example, Elderton's “Pangs of Love” is the original of two of the ballads (see A. F. Mitchell's ed., 1897, pp. 209 ff., 213 ff.); and “The Paip, that Pagane full of pryde” (pp. 204 ff.) is a moralization of “The Primrose in the Green Forest,” registered in 1563–64 (Arber's Transcript, i, p. 237) and preserved in Bodelian ms. Ashmole 48 (ed. Thomas Wright, Songs and Ballads, etc., 1860, no. 76).

page 281 note 34 Arber's Transcript, i, pp. 305, 340, 360, 362, 401.

page 281 note 35 Works, ed. McKerrow, iii, p. 104.

page 281 note 36 History of English Balladry, p. 191. Gummere (Popular Ballad, pp. 5–6) also describes the broadside ballad as “scurrilous and lewd.”

page 281 note 37 Nos. 111, 112, 33, 274.

page 281 note 38 Others of dubious morality will be found in the Shirburn Ballads, and in Loose and Humorous Songs from the Percy Folio MS., ed. Furnivall, 1868.

page 281 note 39 On June 21, 1632, Henry Goskin was summoned before the Court of High Commission for printing a ballad “wherein the histories of the Bible are scurrilously abused.” Goskin pleaded that the ballad was written and printed before he was horn, that he had merely reprinted it, and that it had been duly licensed. But Laud contemptuously dismissed his defense. “There was a parish clerk chosen to view all the ballads before they were printed,” he remarked, “but he refuseth to do it; let it be ordered that he shall undertake it by commandment from this Court. This is not worth the sentence of the Court.” Thereupon Goskin was sent to Bridewell. See J. S. Burn's High Commission, 1865, p. 47; S. R. Gardiner's Reports of Cases in the Courts of Star Chamber and High Commission, Camden Society, 1886, p. 314.

page 281 note 40 Phoenix Britannicus, i, pp. 332, 334.

page 281 note 41 See Shakespeare Jahrbuch, xl, p. 229.

page 281 note 42 See, e. g., Roxburghe Ballads, iii, pp. 537, 564, 604, 648; vi, p. 157; vii, pp. 445, 536; and the Loose and Humorous Songs from the Percy Folio MS. Much of the odium attached to the ballads is due to the various editions of Pills to Purge Melancholy; but most of the coarse songs in the Pills were written by men of prominent literary or social rank, not by ballad-mongers.

page 292 note 1 Schollers Purgatory, ed. Spenser Society, pp. 127 (119) ff. Equally uncomplimentary is Samuel Butler's character of “a stationer” (Characters, ed. A. R. Waller, 1908, pp. 261 f.).

page 292 note 2 Arber's Transcript, i, pp. 270, 273, 293.

page 292 note 3 Ibid., p. 333.

page 292 note 4 Ibid., ii, pp. 434, 435, 451.

page 292 note 5 See Bolte's Singspiele der Englischen Komoedianten, p. 4.

page 292 note 6 Arber's Transcript, ii, p. 427. It is of course probable that the clerk was merely copying the title that he found on the broadside and was not expressing his opinion. Arber's italics, however, would not give that impression.

page 292 note 7 Ibid., iii, p. 89.

page 292 note 8 Ibid., ii, p. 644.

page 292 note 9 Ibid., iii, p. 173.

page 292 note 10 Ibid., pp. 81, 87, and cf. p. 84; for other examples, see pp. 512, 545, 580, 596; iv, p. 467, etc.

page 292 note 11 For these two ballads, see the Old Shakespeare Society's volume for 1846 (xxxi), p. 95, and Roxburghe Ballads, viii, p. 26.

page 292 note 12 Arber's Transcript, iii, pp. 564, 572. The book was called “News out of Lancashire, or the Strange and Miraculous Revelation of a Murder by a Ghost, a Calf, a Pigeon, etc.,” but was “not to be printed without further lawful authority.”

page 296 note 1 In the year 1520, however, John Dorne, a bookseller of Oxford, sold more than 190 “ballets,” charging a halfpenny for each but making concessions on lots—as seven ballads for threepence, twelve for fivepence. See his Day-Book, ed. F. Madan, Oxford Hist. Society, Collectanea, 1st series, pt. iii (1885).

page 296 note 2 The Worth of a Penny, Arber's English Garner, vi, p. 271.

page 296 note 3 See prefaces to Troilus and Cressida and Massinger's Bondman.

page 296 note 4 Phæbe Sheavyn, Literary Profession in the Elizabethan Age, p. 72.

page 296 note 5 The Return from Parnassus, ed. Macray (Oxford, 1886), pp. 88–89.

page 296 note 6 The Bondman, v, iii.

page 296 note 7 Fleire, act iii, sign. F 3: “Faith my fees are like a puny Clarkes, a peny a sheet.”

page 296 note 8 The Downfall of Temporizing Poets, sign. A 3 b: “You [ballad-writers] are very religious men, rather than you will lose half a crown, you will write against your own fathers.”

page 296 note 9 Roxburghe Ballads, iv, p. 49.

page 296 note 10 Captain Underwit, c. 1640 (Bullen's Old English Plays, 1884, ii, pp. 349 f.).

page 296 note 11 Diary, ed. Greg, ii, p. 189.

page 296 note 12 Nine Days' Wonder, 1600 (ed. Dyce, p. 20).

page 296 note 13 Pasquil's Madcap, 1600 (Works, ed. Grosart, i, e, p. 12):

Goe tell the Poets that their pidling rimes
Begin apace to grow out of request… .
And tell poore Writers, stories are so stale,
That penny ballads make a better sale.

page 296 note 14 Earle's Microcosmography, 1633, no. 45 (“A Pot-Poet”).

page 296 note 15 Glapthorne, Wit in a Constable, 1639 (Plays, ed. Pearson, i, p. 234).

page 296 note 16 Dekker's Honest Whore, 1604, i, i.

page 296 note 17 Nashe's Works, ed. McKerrow, iii, p. 84.

page 296 note 18 Earle, Microcosmography, no. 45.

page 296 note 19 S. F., Sportive Funeral Elegies, 1656, sign. B.

page 296 note 20 Brome's Northern Lass, i, iv.

page 296 note 21 I Henry IV, iii, i, 129 f.

page 296 note 22 Conversations with Drummond of Hawthornden, in Works, ed. Gifford-Cunningham, ix, p. 404.

page 296 note 23 Works, ed. McKerrow, i, p. 351.

page 296 note 24 Ibid., p. 309.

page 296 note 25 Ibid., iii, pp. 63–64, 69. Compare with this Harvey's account of Nashe's supposedly impending death and the ludicrous ballad, “The Trimming of Thomas Nashe,” 1597, in Harvey's Works, ed. Grosart, 1885, iii, p. 70, and pp. xxix ff.

page 296 note 26 Letter prefixed to Jonson's Folio Works, 1616. His words seem to be consciously borrowed by Crambo, in William Cavendish's Triumphant Widow, 1677, p. 22: “I fear my days of ballating draw near.”

page 296 note 27 “J. C.'s 12th Epigram,” ed. Ingleby, Shakspere Allusion-Books (New Shakspere Society, 1874), i, p. 122.

page 296 note 28 Cf. Farquhar's Love and a Bottle, 1698, iii, ii (Works, ed. Ewald, i, p. 67).

page 296 note 29 Earle, Microcosmography, no. 45.

page 296 note 30 According to Humphrey Mill's Night's Search, 1646 (see British Bibliographer, ii, p. 432), one lady of pleasure possessed

A boxe of salve, and two brasse rings;
With Parker's workes, and such like things.

Another, Thomas Cranley's “Amanda,” owned “Songs of love and Sonets exquisit,” but also Venus and Adonis, Marston's Pigmalion, and Beaumont's Salmacis and Hermaphroditus (see Ouvry's reprint of Amanda, 1869, pp. 46–47). Thomas Lodge writes of a typical hypocritical harlot, “She will reckon you up the story of Mistress Sanders, and weep at it, and turn you to the ballad over her chimney, and bid you look there, there is a goodly sample” (Wit's Misery, 1596, sign. F. iii 6, Works, ed. Hunterian Club, iv, p. 44); and Congreve's infatuated “Old Bachelor” soliloquizes on his way to Silvia, “I shall be the jest of the town. Nay, in two days I expect to be chronicled in ditty, and sung in woeful ballad, to the tune of ‘The Superannuated Maiden's Comfort,’ or ‘The Bachelor's Fall’; and upon the third I shall be hanged in effigy, pasted up for the exemplary ornament of necessary-houses and cobblers' stalls” (Old Bachelor, iii, ii).

page 296 note 31 Joseph Hall, Poems, ed. Grosart, 1879, p. 131.

page 296 note 32 The Return from Parnassus, ed. Macray, p. 83.

page 296 note 33 One of Thomas Rawlins's characters (Tunbridge Wells, 1678, p. 10) “kicked a valet de chambre in the pride of his lord's cast suit, disputing precedence with a ballad-maker.”

page 296 note 34 In the preface to A Collection of Old Ballads (1723) Homer is called the first of the ballad-mongers.

page 296 note 35 The Return from Parnassus, ed. Macray, pp. 72–73.

page 296 note 36 The School of Shakspere, ed. Richard Simpson, ii, p. 51.

page 296 note 37 The Poet's Blind Mans Bough, or Have among you my Blind Harpers, 1641, sign. A 4, B 3.

page 296 note 38 The Scotch “Ballet shewing how a Dumb Wyff was maid to speik” is printed in Laing's Early Popular Poetry of Scotland (ii, p. 28), and elsewhere. A prose tale “of hym that married the domb wyfe” is no. 62 in A C. Mery Talys. Rabelais claimed to have acted a part in “the Moral Comedy of him who had espoused and married a Dumb Wife,” at Montpellier in 1530 (see his Gargantua et Pantagruel, 1533, bk. iii, ch. 34); and on the model of this tale M. France wrote his delightful Comédie de celui qui épousa une femme muette (1912). In English the story occurs also in The Scholehouse of Women, 1541 (Utterson's Select Pieces, ii, pp. 73–75), in Pasquil's Jests, c. 1650, and elsewhere. A Roxburghe ballad of “The Dumb Maid, or the Young Gallant Trapann'd” (Roxburghe Ballads, iv, p. 357) is also reprinted in Ashton's Century of Ballads, p. 319, and in Pills to Purge Melancholy, 1719, iii, p. 276; and a variant of this occurs in Robert Ford's Vagabond Songs and Ballads of Scotland, 1899, p. 30. The Harvard slip-ballads are found in folios shelf-marked 25242.2, p. 111; 25242.4, vol. i, p. 97; 25242.23, p. 6. I have met with the story in many other places.

page 307 note 1 Kind Heart's Dream, ed. Ingleby, i, pp. 49, 47.

page 307 note 2 Chapman's Ball, 1632, ii, i, 551:

There is a hideous woman carries ballets,
And has a singing in her head.

page 307 note 3 The blindness of ballad-singers, like that of beggars, was proverbial. In Fletcher's Maid in the Mill, 1623, ii, i, Gerasto disguises himself “as a blind ballad-singer.”

page 307 note 4 A “noseless ballad-woman” is mentioned in Abraham Holland's Continued Inquisition against Paper-Persecutors, in John Davies's Works, ed. Grosart, 1878, ii, k, p. 81.

page 307 note 5 Schollers Purgatory, ed. Spenser Society, p. 41 (33).

page 307 note 6 “Expect at night to see the old man, with his paper lantern and cracked spectacles, singing your woeful tragedy to kitchenmaids and cobblers' 'prentices” (Love in a Tub, 1664, Works, ed. Verity, p. 85).

page 307 note 7 About 1636. The sketch is reproduced in Collier's Book of Roxburghe Ballads, p. xxix, and in the Old Shakespeare Society's volume (xxxix) on Inigo Jones, 1848.

page 307 note 8 Kind Heart's Dream, ed. Ingleby, p. 43.

page 307 note 9 For a picture of such a pair, see the sketch by Marcellus Lauron reprinted in Ashton's Century of Ballads, p. xix.

page 307 note 10 Brome's Antipodes, iv, viii.

page 307 note 11 “The Exchange in its Humours: being an unperfect Draught of all that is extant of a Comedy, designed to have been written, by B. J.,” in A Garland for the New Royal Exchange, 1669, no. xiv (reprint of 1845, pp. 44–45). The “Exchange” is a delightful burlesque of Jonson's Bartholomew Fair.

page 307 note 12 The Weekly Register, January 9, 1731, quoted in M. Percival's Political Ballads (Oxford Historical and Literary Studies, vol. viii, 1916), pp. xxix-xxx.

page 307 note 13 Sir John Davies, Epigram 38 (Complete Poems, ed. Grosart, 1876, ii, pp. 36 ff.).

page 307 note 14 The Return from Parnassus, ed. Macray, p. 51.

page 307 note 15 Thomas Nabbes, The Bride, 1640 (Works, ed. Bullen, ii, p. 31).

page 307 note 16 Britannia's Pastorals, 1613, bk. ii, song 1, ll. 389 f.

page 307 note 17 Continued Inquisition, etc., p. 81.

page 307 note 18 Sir William Cornewaleys, Essayes, 1600, essay 15.

page 307 note 19 John Earle, Microcosmography, no. 45.

page 307 note 20 Bartholomew Fair, iii, v.

page 307 note 21 Cavendish's Triumphant Widow, 1677, p. 6. Gervas is of course repeating the words of the clown in Winter's Tale, iv, iv, 188.

page 307 note 22 Winter's Tale, iv, iv, 269 ff.

page 307 note 23 The London Chanticleers, 1659 (Dodsley-Hazlitt's Old Plays, xii, pp. 329 f.).

page 307 note 24 See Glapthorne's Albertus Wallenstein, 1640 (Plays, ed. Pearson, ii, p. 34).

page 307 note 25 At least, this is true of most ballads. Early in Elizabeth's reign they were sometimes printed with only brief titles followed by the refrains (see A Collection of 79 Ballads, pp. 1, 9, 30, 33, 231, etc.); but possibly the refrain itself and the measure gave a sufficient clue to the tune.

page 307 note 26 Stephen Gosson, School of Abuse and Apology of the School of Abuse, ed. Arber, pp. 27, 70.

page 307 note 27 The old Richard II, iii, iii (Shakespeare Jahrbuch, xxxv, p. 88).

page 307 note 28 Works, ed. MoKerrow, iii, p. 122.

page 307 note 29 This had long been the custom. Sir Thomas Elyot wrote in 1531, “The names of dances were taken, as they be now, either of the names of the first inventors, or of the measure and number they do contain, or of the first words of the ditty, which the song comprehendeth, whereof the dance was made” (quoted by Chappell, Roxburghe Ballads, i, p. xii).

page 307 note 30 For a ballad to three tunes, see ibid., p. 249; for one to fifty or more, see “The Four-legg'd Elder … to the tune of The Ladies Fall, or Gather your Rose Buds, and 50 other tunes,” in Rump Songs (1662, reprinted 1874), i, p. 350.

page 307 note 31 William Chappell's Popular Music of the Olden Time is the standard work on ballad tunes.

page 307 note 33 In Massinger's Duke of Milan, ii, i, Graccho offers to sing “a scurvy ditty to a scurvy tune.”

page 307 note 33 Fletcher, Monsieur Thomas, iii, ii.

page 307 note 34 Tom Jones, bk. iv, eh. v.

page 307 note 35 Lingua, 1607, sign. G 3b.

page 307 note 36 Glapthorne, Wit in a Constable, 1639 (Plays, ed. Pearson, i, p. 232).

page 307 note 37 “The Ballad of the Cloak,” Roxburghe Ballads, iv, p. 605.

page 307 note 38 Ibid., iii, p. 593.

page 307 note 39 Britannia's Pastorals, bk. ii, song 1, ll. 393 ff.

page 307 note 40 Only a few ballads earlier than 1600 are in two parts (examples will be found in A Collection of 79 Ballads, pp. 66 ff., 157 ff., and in Arber's Transcript, ii, pp. 86, 172). From the latter part of James I's reign, however, practically every ballad was so divided. In the eighteenth century ballads in four or five parts, printed on large folio sheets and called “Garlands,” were common. See the list of “Garlands” given by Ebsworth in the Roxburghe Ballads, viii, pp. 179 ff.

page 307 note 41 Roxburghe Ballads, ii, p. 367.

page 307 note 42 Cf. Nashe's Works, ed. McKerrow, iii, p. 84.

page 307 note 43 Roxburghe Ballads, i, p. 8.

page 307 note 44 Ibid., p. 417.

page 307 note 45 Shirburn Ballads, pp. 6–7.

page 307 note 46 Brief Lives, ed. Andrew Clark, i, pp. 184 f.

page 307 note 47 A groat, later sixpence, was the regular “fiddler's money” (see Chappell, Popular Music, i, p. 252).

page 307 note 48 John Wilson, The Cheats, 1664 (Works, 1874, p. 44).

page 307 note 49 See Chettle's Kind Heart's Dream, ed. Ingleby, p. 50; Warton-Hazlitt's History of English Poetry, iv, p. 428.

page 307 note 50 Percy's Reliques, ed. Wheatley, i, p. xxxiv.

page 307 note 51 Jack of Newbury, 1630 (Richard Sievers's Thomas Deloney, p. 195).

page 307 note 52 Percy's Reliques, i, p. xxxiv.

page 307 note 53 Pimlyco, or, Runne Red-Cap, 1609, sign. D 2b.

page 307 note 54 Collier's Broadside Black-Letter Ballads, p. 42.

page 307 note 55 Anatomy of Abuses, 1583 (ed. Furnivall, New Shakspere Society, i, p. 171).

page 307 note 56 Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, iii, v. There is a similar case in Fletcher and Shirley's Night-Walker, 1633, iii, v.

page 307 note 57 Third Part of Conny-Catching, 1592 (Works, ed. Grosart, x, pp. 161–164).

page 307 note 58 Cf. Journals of the House of Commons, 22 Car. i, v, p. 73; Rushworth, Historical Collections, iv, ii, pp. 824 f.; Whitelocke, Memorials, p. 337; Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, ed. Firth and Rait, 1911, ii, p. 252.

page 307 note 59 Cf. Ebsworth's quotations in Bagford Ballads, ii, p. 1117.

page 307 note 60 “… the old Ballad Woman, who gave you a Song and a Dance, and all for the Price of a Halfpenny” (Round about our Coal Fire, London, 1730, p. 5).

page 307 note 61 Trivia, bk. iii (Works, ed. Underbill, i, p. 152).

page 307 note 62 Fog's Weekly Journal, July 22, 1732, quoted in Percival's Political Ballads, p. xxx.

page 307 note 63 Cf. Percival, Political Ballads, p. xxx.

page 307 note 64 Percy's Reliques, ed. Wheatley, i, p. xlii.

page 307 note 65 A Cater-Character, 1631 (reprinted in Halliwell-Phillipps's ed. of Whimzies, 1859, p. 138). Cf. Mrs. Behn's Round-Heads, v, iv (Plays, 1871, i, p. 358): “Enter Wariston, drest like a pedlar, with a box about his neck full of ballads and things.”

page 307 note 66 Pedlers Prophecie, sign. D 3 b.

page 307 note 67 “Then will I turn ballet-singer,” says Eleazer, in Heming's Jew's Tragedy (1662, ed. H. A. Cohn, Louvain, 1913, p. 68); “you shall carry my pack.”

page 307 note 68 The London Chanticleers, 1659 (Dodsley-Hazlitt's Old Plays, xii, pp. 329 ff.).

page 323 note 1 Holland, Continued Inquisition, etc., p. 80.

page 323 note 2 In 1514 Thomas Symonds testified in a lawsuit that he was “standing before his stall” at 7 a. m. (Duff's Century of the English Book Trade, p. xvii). The Stationers' Registers contain many notes of fines inflicted on stationers who kept their stalls and shops open on Sunday. For this offense Norton and Waterson were each fined twenty pence on August 30, 1559, and Peperell was fined two shillings (Arber's Transcript, i, pp. 123 f.).

page 323 note 3 See Calendar of State Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, xvi, no. 366 (Dec. 30, 1540); Proceedings and Ordinances of the Privy Council, ed. Nicolas, vii, pp. 103, 105.

page 323 note 4 See his Mirror of Man, and Manners of Men, 1594, “To the generall Readers.”

page 323 note 5 Three Lords and Three Ladies of London, 1590 (Dodsley-Hazlitt's Old Plays, vi, p. 404).

page 323 note 6 Kind Heart's Dream, ed. Ingleby, pp. 48–49.

page 323 note 7 A favorite place for the posts, as innumerable references prove, was Paul's Churchyard. “Ere long not a post in Paul's Churchyard but shall be acquainted with our writings,” prophesies Madido in The Pilgrimage to Parnassus (ed. Macray, p. 8). In The Elder Brother, iv, iv, Fletcher informs us incidentally that ballads were “pasted upon all the posts in Paris.” See also note 11 below.

Then have the copies of it pasted on posts,
Like pamphlet-titles, that sue to be sold,

says one of the characters in Beaumont and Fletcher's Honest Man's Fortune, 1613, iii, ii.

page 323 note 9 Epigram III (Works, ed. Gifford-Cunningham, viii, p. 146).

page 323 note 10 Minor Poems, ed. Cyril Brett, p. 112.

page 323 note 11 Dekker's Gull's Hornbook, 1609 (Works, ed. Grosart, ii, p. 235); Nashe, Works, ed. McKerrow, i, p. 194; iv, pp. 119 f. See also Dekker and Webster's Westward Ho, 1607, ii, ii, sign. C 3; Marston's What You Will, 1607, iii, iii, 60; and note 7 above.

page 323 note 12 The Return from Parnassus, ed. Macray, p. 30.

page 323 note 13 For a ballad of 500 words, the title of which runs to 230 words, see Roxburghe Ballads, iii, p. 340; and cf. Kuehner, Litterarische Charakteristik der Roxburghe- und Bagford-Balladen, p. 25.

page 323 note 14 A Dialogue full of Pith and Pleasure, in Works, ed. Grosart, ii, j, p. 6.

page 323 note 15 Holland, Continued Inquisition, etc., p. 81:

To see each Wall and publike Post defil'd
With, diuers deadly Elegies, compil'd
By a foule swarme of Cuckoes of our Times,
In Lamentable Lachrymentall Rimes… .

To see such Batter euerie weeke besmeare
Each publike post, and Church dore, and to heare
These shamefull lies, would make a man in spight
Of Nature, turne Satyrist.

page 327 note 1 Edited by Andrew Clark, Oxford, 1907.

page 327 note 2 Nashe's Works, ed. McKerrow, i, pp. 23–24.

page 327 note 3 A Reply to Stephen Gosson, c. 1580 (Works, ed. Hunterian Cub, i, p. 20).

page 327 note 4 Samuel Rowlands, A Crew of Kind Gossips, 1609 (Works, ed. Hunterian Club, ii, p. 19).

page 327 note 5 Westward for Smelts, 1620, ed. Halliwell-Phillipps, Percy Society, xxii, pp. 7–8.

page 327 note 6 Brome, The Antipodes, iii, v.

page 327 note 7 Whimzies, 1631, no. 2 (“A Ballad-monger”).

page 327 note 8 Sir Aston Cokain, The Obstinate Lady, 1657, iii, ii.

page 327 note 9 John Day, The Blind Beggar, 1659, iv, iii (Bullen's ed., pp. 90–91).

page 327 note 10 As You Like It, ii, vii, 147 ff.

page 327 note 11 John Cook, Green's Tu Quoque, 1614 (Dodsley-Hazlitt's Old Plays, xi, p. 194).

page 327 note 12 Primer of English Literature, 1889, p. 73. In his English Literature, 1897, p. 100, Brooke repeats this remark verbatim, save that he inserts the word “popular” before “intellectual life.”

page 327 note 13 Chappell, Popular Music, i, p. 105.

page 327 note 14 See his “Epistle to the Reader,” Poems Lyrick and Pastorall, 1606? (Poems, ed. J. P. Collier, Roxburghe Club, 1856, p. 382).

page 327 note 15 When Richard Atkyns, in an epistle to Charles II prefixed to his Original and Growth of Printing, 1664 (Hazlitt's Prefaces, 1874, p. 402), remarked that the common people “believed even a ballad, because it was in print,” he was probably not giving his own opinion, but was borrowing Mopsa's words (Winter's Tale, iv, iv, 263 f.). So perhaps was Cavendish when he made one of his ballad-listeners in The Triumphant Widow (1677, p. 6) exclaim, “Lord, Lord, what lying things these ballads are, and to be in print too!”

page 327 note 16 A Collection of 19 Ballads, pp. 194 f.

page 327 note 17 Shirburn Ballads, pp. 159 ff. The pamphleteers sinned as well as the balladists. Thus Anthony Munday's View of Sundry Examples, 1580 (reprinted with Collier's edition of Munday's John a Kent, Old Shakespeare Society, 1851, p. 89), gives the most absurd accounts imaginable of monstrous births “as the printed book doth witness.” There was, he informs us, “in Italy, also, of an ancient woman … borne a deformed creature, the which spake many words, as the book in print dooth witnes, which was printed by Thomas East.” But Munday himself had served a long apprenticeship in ballad-writing.

page 327 note 18 John Day, Law-Tricks, 1608, act ii (Bullen's ed., p. 22).

page 327 note 19 Works, ed. McKerrow, i, pp. 23, 194.

page 327 note 20 Bartholomew Fair, iii, v.

page 327 note 21 Neptune's Triumph, 1624 (Works, ed. Gifford-Cunningham, viii, p. 28).

page 327 note 22 Ibid., ix, pp. 403 f. Cf. Chapman's All Fools, 1605, v, ii, 48 ff.:

My boy once lighted
A pipe of cane tobacco with a piece
Of a vile ballad, and I'll swear I had
A singing in my head a whole week after.

page 327 note 23 Licensed on August 1, 1586 (Arber's Transcript, ii, p. 451). Stowe's Annals (sub anno 1586) gives an account of the marvel.

page 327 note 24 Reprinted in Collman's Ballads and Broadsides, no. 64.

page 327 note 25 Shirley's Love-Tricks, 1625, ii, i. There is a ballad to this tune in Roxburghe Ballads, viii, pt. ii, pp. xli ff.

page 327 note 26 Shirley's Hyde Park, iv, iii.

page 327 note 27 A Garland for the New Royal Exchange (1669, reprinted 1845), p. 47. Nashe declared ironically (Works, iii, p. 67) that Harvey found the ballad of “In Crete when Dedalus” as delightful as “food from heaven, and more transporting and ravishing than Plato's discourse of the immortality of the soul was to Cato.” See Sidgwick's letter on the ballad, Gentleman's Magazine, ccci, pp. 179–181 (1906).

page 327 note 28 Wit in a Constable, 1639 (Plays, ed. Pearson, i, pp. 193, 206).

page 327 note 29 The Amazing Marriage, chs. i, xxviii.

page 327 note 30 Very likely Shakespeare himself produced an occasional ballad, as did many other poets from his day to Goldsmith's. There is no reason why he should not have written the one on Lucy that is traditionally attributed to him; and see also Halliwell-Phillipps's Discovery that Shakespeare wrote one Or more Ballads or Poems on the Spanish Armada, 1866 (twenty-five copies printed, only ten preserved). Several ballads by Ben Jonson lived a long life on common broadsides.

page 327 note 31 One version is Child's number 273.

page 327 note 32 See Halliwell-Phillipps's introduction to his reprint of the ballad, 1846, Old Shakespeare Society, xxxi, pp. 101–105.

page 327 note 33 Arber's Transcript, i, p. 306.

page 327 note 34 Roxburghe Ballads, vi, pp. 700 ff.

page 327 note 35 Arber's Transcript, ii, pp. 521 ff., 540.

page 327 note 36 See, e. g., Calendar of State Papers, Venetian, viii, no. 45 (March 21, 1559).

page 327 note 37 See the reply of James V of Scotland to Henry VIII, in Henry Ellis's Original Letters, 1st series, ii, pp. 103–104; and cf. Calendar of State Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, xiii, pt. ii, nos. 1129, 1145.

page 327 note 38 Spectator, October 6, 1712.

page 327 note 39 Diary, ed. M. A. E. Green, Camden Society, 1856, p. 109.

page 327 note 40 Shackerley Marmion, Holland's Leaguer, 1632, v, iii.

page 327 note 41 Ritson's Ancient Songs, 1829, i, p. xcviii.

page 327 note 42 Holland, Continued Inquisition, etc., p. 81. Cf. Cavendish, The Humorous Lovers, 1677, p. 40: “I will never be a friend to the muses again; James, pull down the ballads my maid has starched up in the kitchen, and look in my study for the Garland of Good Will [a collection of ballads by Thomas Deloney], and burn it; I will never have a good opinion of rhyme more.” But the Duke of Newcastle himself knew the Garland of Good Will by heart!

page 327 note 43 Brief Lives, ed. Clark, ii, p. 249.

page 327 note 44 Pills to Purge Melancholy, 1719, v, p. 222, marginal note.

page 327 note 45 Bartholomew Fair, iii, v.

page 327 note 46 Spectator, June 7, 1711.

page 327 note 47 Memoirs, i, p. 135.

page 327 note 48 For example, about 1765 Dicey published “Chevy Chase” (Mr. Child's version B), together with the explanatory note just quoted and an introduction of thirteen lines (in which he gives a history of the ballad, quoting Sidney's and Addison's praise of it), all on one folio sheet. Dicey's words are very similar to those in which the editor of A Collection of Old Ballads (1723) announced his purpose and his plan of procedure.

page 327 note 49 Fletcher, Wit without Money, 1614, ii, iv.

page 327 note 50 The Trial of Chivalry, 1605 (Bullen's Old English Plays, 1884, iii, p. 312).

page 327 note 51 Diary, ed. Wheatley, viii, p. 17.