Swift obviously built his writings on some of the traditions of high culture, such as the classical literature of Greek and Rome, but he also drew on an alternative heritage deriving from less august sources. This chapter provides a concise account of the uses Swift made in his writings of some topics and forms that stood outside the mainstream of polite literature in his day. This includes sections on his hoaxes and parodies; his interactions with the material and practices of Grub Street; his use of the street ballad form; his treatment of daily, chiefly urban, life; and his description of popular entertainments in Gulliver.

Chapter Eighteen introduces us to Scandinavian Romanticism, which helped Denmark, Sweden, and Norway imagine themselves as independent nations by drawing on Old Norse and medieval sources, contributing to a shared sense of identity. The chapter explores its origins in Mallet and eighteenth-century antiquarianism, drawing parallels with Ossian and Percy, and discussing Ewald’s Rolf Krage. It then looks at some of the defining features of Scandinavian ballads, including the figures of elf and shield maiden. Sweden’s loss of Finland led to an ‘Old Scandinavian’ turn in which the Viking became a common topos, as we discover in works by Tegnér and Wergeland. It also led to calls for a new mythology, answered among others by Ewald, Grundtvig, and Oehlenschläger. Other writers include the young Ibsen, who began his career with plays about Norse mythology, and Erik Gustaf Geiger whose stories idealise Nordic liberty. Fairy tales were also an important Romantic genre. Möller discusses the motif of the Isle of Felicity in works by Almqvist and Atterbom before turning to the characteristic features of Andersen’s tales. The chapter concludes with a brief overview of Scandinavian Romantic fiction, including male-authored historical romances but also domestic novels written by women that look towards realism.

This chapter shows how, in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Norse gods and the Scandinavian Viking were reimagined and refashioned in poetry, visual art, and music drama in accordance with Burke’s ideas of the sublime. Coinciding temporally with Burke’s Enquiry, the revival of interest in Old Norse and medieval Scandinavian poetry furnished poets and artists with a new mythology as an alternative to classical Greek and Roman mythology. This chapter argues that the aesthetics of the sublime, as a challenge to neoclassical standards, encouraged an expansion of the poetical canon, allowing for the inclusion of ancient Scandinavian poetry, which the previous generation had scorned as rough and barbaric, and furthermore provided a new verbal and visual idiom in which this poetry could be recreated for a contemporary audience.

“The Song” takes as its subject the material, visual, and sonic circulations of a ballad written about the Kizer and Johnson lynching. The chapter focuses in particular on its first recording, a 1960s single by the folk musician J. E. Mainer. By looking at its circulation first as a performed and then recorded song, the chapter examines the sonic and visual circulations of the ballad as a signifer of southern authenticity. By delving into discourses on authenticity and folk culture, “The Song” points to an evolution in the meaning of racial violence as a constitutive part of a white southern identity. Further, the study examines how this emblem of white southernness came to represent a particular form of personal authenticity for a new generation immersed in the folk revival movement of the 1960s. In this way the chapter serves as a study of both the racist ideology of some countercultural movements as well as the evolution of lynching's meaning in the late twentieth century.

As resistance to British legislation grows in the American colonies, song intensifies as a political force. Amidst continued white perplexity over the meanings of African music, Occramer Marycoo – also known as Newport Gardner – inaugurates Black American formal composition with his “Promise Anthem” of 1764, a resounding condemnation of slavery. Meanwhile, the Stamp Act, Tea Act, and other British “Intolerable Acts” produce more than riots and organizations like the Sons of Liberty: they produce a store of protest song fronted by the likes of John Dickinson, Benjamin Franklin, and the balladeers of the “Boston Massacre.” Loyalist songwriters fight their own losing battles through balladry, and the defeated British troops depart with the strains of “Yankee Doodle” ringing in their ears. The War of Independence may be over; but the songs of class war, women's rights, abolition, and Indigenous lament continue to infiltrate the soundscape of the newborn USA.

Songwork is central to the project of Elizabethan settler colonialism, with English ballads justifying the violence of conquest and reinforcing the stereotypes of Indigenous “savagery” in the Virginia colony. With the introduction of kidnapped Africans as slaves in 1619, the mysteries of African song become the preoccupation of British commentators, who can make neither head nor tail of it. Music becomes a site of colonial policing with the prohibition of African drumming and the attempted control of song. Yet the songs of the oppressed are not wholly stilled, neither in the fields and praise houses of the African bondspeople, nor in the ballads of indentured servants from the prisons and poorhouses of the British Isles. Meanwhile, on the fringes of the Plymouth colony in Massachusetts, iconoclast Thomas Morton establishes his Merrymount settlement and infuriates the Puritan elders with his maypole and his bacchanalian ballads, marking perhaps the first instance of secular song as a challenge to the governing establishment. The musical soundscapes of two wars of Puritan conquest – the Pequot War and King Philip’s War – are set against the wars between hymnody and psalmody in the Puritan church. The songs of Bacon’s Rebellion and the poor dragoons of the French and Indian War conclude the chapter.

Chapter 1 begins by comparing Gilbert Burnet’s focus on the song “Liliburlero” as the media event of the 1688 Revolution with what contemporary scholars have written about the importance of printed works at the time. It asserts the importance of adopting a multi-media perspective on the 1688 Revolution. It analyzes James II/VII’s shifting use of media in the context of challenges to his throne by the Duke of Monmouth and the Earl of Argyll in 1685 and William of Orange in 1688. It assesses William’s Declaration outlining “the Reasons Inducing him, to Appear in Armes in the Kingdome of England” and suggests that the document gained its authority as a printed text by being represented in oral and manuscript forms. It concludes by suggesting that the initial mediation of the 1688 Revolution impacted its later re-inscription as a site of “Glorious” cultural memory when William’s Declaration was reprinted in early eighteenth-century histories of recent events such as those by Edmund Bohun and Abel Boyer.

Chapter 1 considers the material and discursive factors which defined the representation of hunger and appetite in the Renaissance theatre. It explores the lived experience of hunger and appetite in early modern England, situating these issues in the context of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. It engages with early modern dietaries, religious texts and popular cultural forms such as ballads in order to define the precise nature of early modern attitudes to hunger and appetite. The chapter concludes by considering the practical and theoretical implications of staging hunger and appetite on the Renaissance stage. It focusses on the theatres as places devoted to the sale of both plays and food, and considers the complex and multifaceted relationships of the period’s various audiences with the lived experience of hunger and appetite.

Tracks Shakespeare's emergence as a print author, noting that his first publications were a pair of narrative poems which, though intended primarily to secure aristocratic patronage, proved to be singularly successful commercially. The earliest publication history of Shakespeare's individual plays is mapped in detail, with particular attention being given to the career of Thomas Millington, who, in effect, provided 'proof of concept' that Shakespeare publishing was a worthwhile venture. Andrew Wise's subsequent success in publishing Shakespeare titles is also noted. The fact that the plays were, initially, published anonymously is registered, as is the fact that many of the earliest editions offered significantly attenuated texts. Some speculation is offered as to the derivation of these shortened texts. The chapter notes that, by the end of the first decade of the seventeenth century, Shakespeare was well established as a recognised print author as well as a successful playwright.

Begins by offering a contrast between Shakespeare's current status as one of the best-known and most revered writers in the world and his position in the early 1590s, when his plays were published without attribution of authorship in disposable editions very different from their contemporary equivalents. Notes that the aim of the book as a whole is to track how we have moved, over the course of the centuries, from a situation where Shakespeare's texts were throwaway publications to a situation where copies of the first edition of his collected plays change hands for millions of pounds. Logs the parameters of the book as a whole and explains the logic of the Chronological Appendix.

This chapter adds to our understanding of popular memory by considering how English Catholics memorialised the effects of the Reformation through music, and focuses on Catholic songs that were preserved and circulated in manuscript miscellanies. Catholic musical responses to the Reformation can be divided into three necessarily interrelated categories: self-memorialisation; the composition of music that represented and remembered religious change; and musical memorials by future generations of Catholics which were informed by previous musical traditions. Composing, collecting and copying songs into manuscript miscellanies were creative, transformative activities; writing preserved visual evidence of acoustic events, and imprinted the music, words and ideas more firmly into the minds of the individuals holding the pen. Acts of preservation also subjected the songs to transformations due to their spatial context on the page. As well as thinking about their performers, composers and subjects, we also need to focus on the material aspects of the songs themselves. As a result, this chapter ends by focusing in particular on the little known manuscript miscellany BL Add MS 38599 started by Richard Shanne (1561-1627) from Methley, West Yorkshire. Attending to the commemorative layers of preserved manuscript miscellanies, it challenges existing binary understandings of confessional identity and memorial practices.

Chapter Six looks at three plays by William Shakespeare which explores the merry world broadside ballad as a mode of consumption, probing the nature of audience complicity that it invites. It begins with The Winter’s Tale (c. 1610), which interrogates the status of old tales and of happy endings, and the idea – explicitly articulated in Cymbeline (c. 1610–11) – that to be ‘put into rhyme’ is to suffer aesthetic and emotional impoverishment. It then contrasts As You Like It (c. 1598–99) with King Lear (c. 1605–06) as rival disguised-king stories, in which the failure of ballad tropes to reflect reality is played first as farce and then as tragedy.

This chapter argues that the phrase ‘the merry world’ – and sometimes even the word ‘mirth’ – acquired a coded status in Reformation polemical print that then shadowed its use in other contexts: a way of expressing nostalgia for the pre-dissolution past that was proximate to, but not identical with, sedition and recusancy. There is evidence that these feelings were widespread, even amongst orthodox Protestants, but also that they remained potentially incendiary. Focusing on a series of disguised-king broadside ballads set in a pseudo-medieval ‘merry’ past, it suggests the historical fictions of cheap print recuperated the psychic materials of merry world complaint as a source of cosy and uncontentious pleasure.

This chapter reassesses the aesthetics of the early modern broadside ballad, arguing for the paradoxical readerly and writerly value of literary inadequacy. The authenticity gap, between the reality of the pre-Reformation past and the stylised conventions through which these broadsides approached it, offered an opportunity in which both writers and readers were complicit. One was the commodification of ‘northern-ness’ in popular literary culture in the years after the Northern Rising, which reveals in miniature the cultural and political work this kind of print could carry out: for example in William Elderton’s A New Yorkshyre Song. It also opened up creative possibilities ifor entrepreneurial writers and printers. These are very much at work in invocations of the cheap print merry world in William Kemp’s Nine Daies Wonder (1600) and Thomas Nashe’s Lenten Stuffe (1599), both from the disorderly world of commercial entertainment, who use these tropes both to shape and legitimate their authorial personas and as springboard for innovation.

Chapter Three explores a series of polemical adaptations to the long poem A Lytell Geste how the Ploughman Learned his Pater Noster (1510), arguing that the figure of the simple English countryman came to embody national tradition. First emerging in the Tudor rediscovery of the reformist ploughman and the poetics of Protestant plainness, Luke Shepherd’s John Bon and Mast Parson (1548) reflects an understanding of the common man as naturally Protestant.During the second half of the sixteenth century this figure became assimilated to a recusant aesthetic, first as comedy in Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1552) Respublica (1553) and William Stevenson’s Gammer Gurton’s Needle (c. 1553), and then tragically in John Heywood’s Pater Noster poems (c. 1550) and Thomas Deloney’s ‘A pleasant Dialogue betweene plaine Truth, and blind Ignorance’ (c. 1588). Both discourses, however, shared an understanding of the common man as an embodiment of English tradition and as a therefore a source of political and theological legitimacy.