[In the following excerpt, Hodgart examines how broadside ballads went from being considered “low art” in the seventeenth century to being a form that was embraced by British literary masters such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge by the end of the eighteenth century.]

The ballads have taken a great deal from learned literature, and … many of them show the hand of skilled poets. Throughout Europe there has been a continual movement of motifs and forms from the poetry of the élite into folk tradition. But there has also been a movement in the opposite direction. The ballads have exerted an influence on learned literature during at least the last four centuries, and they have been important in the history of taste, and above all in the history of Romanticism.

They made their earliest impact on learned literature through the medium of the broadsides. The development of cheap printing at the beginning of the sixteenth century caused a revolution in popular taste. Poems were printed on folio sheets, sometimes in two quarto pages, with the title of a known tune to which they could be sung, and often with a rough wood-cut illustration. Publishers began to produce these sheets in the first decades of the sixteenth century, but it was not until after the middle of the century that they appeared in large numbers. Most of these poems, but not all, were narrative songs, and the majority were written in the quatrain of the traditional ballads. A certain number of the traditional ballads were printed in this way, but the great majority of the broadsides were original compositions. They represent a commercial exploitation of the popular taste for the traditional ballads, and they were the nearest thing that the Elizabethans had to a popular press. A great number are journalistic in subject and as sensationalist as our modern press. Unlike the traditional ballads they are not all anonymous: a few names of the writers have been kept, the most famous being Thomas Deloney (1543?-1600?), whom Nashe calls “the balleting silk-weaver”. The printers issued the broadsides to wandering sellers who would sing them at fairs and then sell the sheets to the country people. The trade was evidently profitable and it expanded greatly at the end of the sixteenth century. Broadsides had to be registered, and the records of the Stationers' company show how popular they were.

Shakespeare gives the classic picture of the itinerant ballad seller in A Winter's Tale: up-to-date broadsides are part of Autolycus's wares:

Here's one to a very doleful tune, how a usurer's wife was brought to bed of twenty money bags at a burden; and how she longed to eat adders' heads and toads carbonadoed.

Mopsa: Is it true, think you?

Autolycus: Very true, and but a month old.”

And Autolycus has another one about “a fish that appeared upon the coast on Wednesday the fourscore of April”. “Is it true too, think you?” “Five justices' hands at it, and witnesses more than my pack will hold.”

There is a fine study of the broadsides by Sir Charles Firth,¹ who says: “Shakespeare was as familiar with the English ballads of his time as Burns was with the songs of Scotland”, and he points out the large number of references to them in the plays. They show the outlook of the townsman, in that they are topical, and, like other bourgeois art, often indecent. Falstaff threatens Hal that he will have “ballads made on you all and sung to filthy tunes” (I Henry IV, ii, 2) and Cleopatra tells Iras that if they are led in triumph “scald rhymers” will “ballad us out of tune”. But sometimes the broadsides were moralist, and, as Firth says, “discharged the functions of the modern pulpit”, or existing ballads were moralized. The topics of the journalistic ballads are much the same as those of the modern cheap press, public calamities, crises, scandals, and victories. Falstaff wants his capture of Colevile immortalized “in a particular ballad with my own picture on the top on't, Colevile kissing my foot” (II Henry IV, iv, 3). The surprises at the end of A Winter's Tale cause the comment: “Such a deed of wonder is broken out within this hour that the ballad makers cannot be able to express it.” A fairly stiff censorship was imposed: for example, no ballad on the death of Essex was allowed until after the death of Elizabeth. The ballad makers were, however, loyal in their sentiments, though they occasionally expressed social criticism like discontent against landlords.

After journalistic subjects, the most popular were stories taken from the Bible (like the ballad referred to in Hamlet's “Jeptha, judge of Israel”) and from the classics. One of the oldest ballads is about Troilus, and, as Firth says, there is “nothing absurd in supposing that Elizabethan artisans were familiar with the story of Pyramus”. English history was used; the ballad makers ransacked Holinshed and other chroniclers, and they may have contributed details to Shakespeare's History Plays. But it is often difficult to say which came first in Elizabethan literature, the play or the ballad. For example, a ballad on Dr. Faustus antedated Marlowe by eight years, but Kyd's Spanish Tragedy was probably the source of the ballad with that title, as is the case with King Lear. Shakespeare used the ballads not only as material to work on, but also as a body of common knowledge to which he could make direct or indirect allusions in the certainty that his audience would get the point.

It can be seen that most of the broadsides were very different in origin and content from the traditional ballads. Some of them have great literary merit, showing a highly developed lyrical technique and even great imaginative force, as, for example, “Loving Mad Tom”²:

The moon's my constant mistress
          And the lovely owl my marrow
          The flaming drake
          And the night crow, make
Me music to my sorrow.

But they lack the peculiar virtues of the traditional ballads. They tell their stories, not with the dramatic compression of the latter, but in the more leisurely manner of the “vulgar ballads”. “The Babes in the Wood”, most famous of vulgar ballads, is the typical broadside, registered in 1595 as “The Norfolk Gentleman, his Will and Testament and how he committed the keeping of his children to his own brother, who delte most wickedly with them and how God plagued him for it”.

It has been suggested that the journalistic broadsides caused a decline in the singing of the traditional ballads, especially in the south of England where the ballad sellers flooded the countryside with their sheets. Gerould attributes the predominance of Scottish versions to the fact that Scotland suffered less in this respect: “It is not a question of a finer development in Scotland than in England, but of an earlier decay in regions nearer London as a result of the infiltration of songs from Grub Street.”³ Modern collectors have, however, shown that many of the traditional ballads in fact survived in areas within the range of Grub Street, and the predominance of Scottish versions in Child comes rather from the fact that most of the early nineteenth-century collectors were Scottish. As for the suggestion that the broadsides brought about a decline in folksong generally, it is certainly possible that the printed sheets had a higher prestige than oral songs among the country people. The insistence on truth in the passages quoted above from A Winter's Tale may be significant, and so may Mopsa's other comment on the subject: “I love a ballad in print and life, for then we are sure they are true.” But it would be wrong to make too much of this point, for many traditional ballads were, in fact, printed on early broadsides. Over fifty of Child's texts come from this source, including “Fair Margaret and Sweet William” (74 A), “Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard” (81 A), both of which are quoted in Beaumont and Fletcher's Knight of the Burning Pestle, and such typical supernatural ballads as “Riddles Wisely Expounded” (1 A), “The Elfin Knight” (2 A), and “The Twa Sisters” (10 A). And again, as I have suggested, the broadsides have had a profound influence on the oral transmission of certain traditional ballads, notably in stabilizing one of the versions of “Lord Thomas and Fair Elinor” (73 D). It would be truer to say that both types of ballad have gone on surviving side by side in the countryside, the journalistic broadsides perhaps more fashionable at the time but also more ephemeral, the traditional ballads despised by Mopsas but more enduring. The distinction between the typical broadside and the typical traditional ballad is an æsthetic one, and it is only quite recently that it has been made at all. Before the nineteenth century, people never spoke of the two types as in any way different.

The first sign of any literary appreciation of the ballads is Sir Philip Sidney's famous remark in his Apology for Poetry, presumably about some version of “Chevy Chase”: “I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas that I found not my heart mooved more than with a trumpet; and yet it is sung but by some blinde Crowder, with no rougher voyce, than rude style.” Sidney was partly apologizing for his barbarity and partly asserting that “Chevy Chase” was good poetry because it instructed as well as delighted: it promoted the epic virtue of magnanimity, making it shine throughout all misty fearfulness and foggy desires. But Sidney's praise was exceptional; other Elizabethans speak scornfully of the ballads. Ben Jonson takes off the connoisseur of ballads in Bartholomew Fair, where Squire Cokes recalls “the ballads over the nursery chimney at home of my own pasting up”.

Nevertheless, the ballads did play an important part in English literary life of the seventeenth century. They were all known by intellectuals and ploughmen alike. One of John Aubrey's anecdotes is about the poet, John Corbet, later a bishop, and a Doctor of Divinity at this time, going to Abingdon on a market day. “The ballad singer complayned, he had no custome, he could not put off his ballades. The Jolly Docter putts off his gowne, and putts on the ballad-singer's leathern-jacket, and being a handsome man, and had a full rare voice, he presently vended a great many, and had a great audience.”

A few antiquarians or men of a curious spirit made collections of broadsides. The most famous is Pepys's, finished in 1703, which has over sixteen hundred, a thousand of them unique. Although the broadsides were despised, they became an accepted literary form for burlesque or mock heroic. Many ballads of this kind were produced by literary men of the eighteenth century, including Swift and Cowper; they are sometimes excellent in their own way, but have little in common with folk-literature.

The next major event in the history of ballad criticism, and perhaps the first sign of a genuine appreciation, is Addison's appraisal of “Chevy Chase”. In 1711, he published two remarkable Spectators⁴ on what he called “the favourite Ballad of the people of England”. The theory underlying his criticism is not very different from that of Sidney's. According to neo-classical dogma, poetry must instruct and delight: epic poetry is the highest kind of literature because it gives instruction in the best kind of principles. “The greatest modern critics have laid it down as a rule, that an Heroic poem should be founded upon some important precept of Morality, adapted to the constitution of the country in which the Poet writes. Homer and Virgil have formed their plans in this view.” Addison showed great originality and daring when he put “Chevy Chase” on the same plane as the Iliad and the Æneid. “The Poet before us has not only found out an Hero in his own country, but raises the reputation of it by several beautiful incidents.” He quotes the heroic end of Earl Douglas:

Who never spoke more words than these;
          Fight on my merry men all!
For why, my life is at an end,
          Lord Percy sees my fall.

and compares it with the death of Turnus in the Æneid. He begins cautiously in the first article: “Earl Percy's Lamentation over his enemy is generous, beautiful and passionate; I must only caution the reader not to let the simplicity of the style, which one may well pardon in so old a poet, prejudice him against the greatness of the Thought.” But he finally warms up to the point of praising the style itself: he compares its simplicity with the simplicity of the Ancients and says that it is not “Gothic”, but truly classical. (“Gothic”, he applies to what he calls the false wit of the Metaphysical poets.) “Homer, Virgil, or Milton, so far as the language of their poems is understood, will please a reader of plain commonsense, who could neither relish nor comprehend an epigram of Martial or a poem of Cowley. So, on the contrary, an ordinary song or ballad, that is the delight of the common people, cannot fail to please all such readers as are not unqualified for the entertainment by their affectation or ignorance: and the reason is plain, because the same paintings of nature which recommend it to the ordinary reader will appear beautiful to the most refined.” Addison was indeed unconventional and far-sighted in these essays, and he was taken to task by his fellow neo-classics. In the first half of the eighteenth century it was fashionable to sneer at this eccentric quirk of taste on the part of an otherwise impeccable critic.

But under the surface of Augustan correctness, a true revolution in taste was beginning. Despite the dominant influence of Pope, writers and critics began to look for poetry that would be simple, sensuous, and passionate. The superiority of “nature” to “art” was not a new concept in eighteenth-century thought; a kind of primitivism had been part of the European climate of thought since the Renaissance. The belief that man was somehow better in a “natural” state can be traced back to Montaigne and was certainly widely held long before Rousseau elaborated his doctrine of the Noble Savage: it is expressed by Pope:

Can that offend great Nature's God
          Which Nature's self inspires?

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, primitivism became transferred to nature, in the sense of scenery; that, too, was somehow better in a natural state. This belief lay behind the gardens of Capability Brown and Kent, with their ha-has or invisible fences, their dead trees carefully planted in picturesque situations; even Pope's grotto was a rather contorted product of the “cult” of nature. As Lovejoy points out,⁵ it was only a matter of time before this primitivism became extended from philosophy and gardening to literature; someone was bound to say that poetry, too, would be better if it were in a state of nature. Lovejoy gives Warton's poem, “The Enthusiast” (1740), as the first instance:

What are the lays of artful Addison
          Coldly correct, to Shakespeare's warblings wild.

But we have already seen a hint of the same doctrine in Addison's own criticism, though certainly not in his lays. Fantastic as it now seems, others besides Warton looked upon Shakespeare as the child of Nature, who had produced his warblings without the help of rules; and the new complex of feeling about nature had something to do with the growing appreciation of Shakespeare in the first half of the eighteenth century. Despite their outward adherence to correctness and neo-classical dogma in poetry, readers were becoming prepared to accept the ballads. A few collections were made in England and Scotland in the first decades of the eighteenth century: A Collection of Old Ballads (1724) consisted mainly of broadsides, but Allan Ramsay's Evergreen (1724) and The Tea Table Miscellany (1724-7) contained some folksongs. The Foulis brothers in Glasgow printed “Gill Nourrice”, “Young Waters”, and “Edom o Gordon” in 1755. Gray quotes the first of these in a letter to Mason (1757) and showed great critical acumen when he described it as beginning in the fifth act; that was the first attempt to judge ballads on their own grounds. The swing-over in taste had already begun when Percy produced his Reliques of Ancient Poetry in 1765, but that work did most to accelerate it. It caused more excitement all over Northern Europe than almost any other book of the period except MacPherson's Ossian, a bogus primitive epic which met much the same demands. Percy suffered a conflict between his impulse to reveal the poetry of nature and his anxiety about conforming with current good taste. He felt he could not leave in their crudity the poems from the seventeenth-century folio he had rescued from the house-maids, and so he tricked them out to meet the contemporary requirements of correctness. He added a few contemporary ballad versions sent to him from Scotland, some broadsides, and some mediæval verse. As scholarship, the collection is useless, and it is highly uneven in literary value; it is nevertheless a remarkable achievement.

Largely through the Reliques, the ballads influenced many of the poets of the middle eighteenth century. Dr. Johnson resisted to the end what he considered a deplorable deviation from neo-classical standards. In 1777, “he observed that a gentleman of eminence in literature had got into a bad style of poetry of late. … Boswell: That is owing his being much versant in Old English Poetry. Johnson: What is that to the purpose, Sir? If I say a man is drunk and you tell me it is owing to his taking much drink, the matter is not mended. No, Sir ——— has taken to an odd mode.” (And he then produced his famous parody: “Hermit hoar, in solemn cell”.)

Percy's Reliques caused an even greater stir in Germany than in England. The younger German writers were looking for poetry that would be natural rather than artificial, popular rather than aristocratic and national rather than cosmopolitan; there were strong political and social influences which made them ready to accept the Reliques. Percy's work stimulated them into searching their own folk-tradition. The first result was Bürger's “Lenore” (1773), a combination of a Low German folktale and of “Sweet William's Ghost” from Percy. Bürger presents the international theme of the Dead Rider, who carries off his love to the grave, with some very “Gothic” effects of gallows and coffins, and with some heavy moralizing. Though it is not very like folksong, it is extremely original. In the same year, Herder included a translation of Percy's “Edward” in his Correspondence of Ossian:

Dein Schwert, wie ist's von Blut so rot?
                    Edward, Edward!

He included a revised version of this in his Volkslieder (1778-9), which is a collection and translation of folksongs from many nations. Many of Goethe's earlier poems were written under the same stimulus; for example, “Erlkönig” (1782) owes something to Herder's translations of the Danish ballads.

The stimulus of Percy's Reliques came back from Germany to this country like a boomerang. In the 1790's, Walter Scott translated Bürger's “Lenore” (inaccurately), and Goethe's “Erlkönig”, as well as some traditional German ballads. Scott's translations are poor poetry, but mark an important stage in the Romantic Revival. The Germans inspired Scott to collect and to adapt the traditional ballads of his own district, and to write his own poetry in the ballad style. Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border was published in 1802-3, and by that time, a number of collections had been issued, including David Herd's, Ritson's, and Johnson's Scots Musical Museum (to which Burns contributed). The ballads had won their status as serious poetry.

In 1798, appeared the most famous book of all to bear their name. Wordsworth, curiously enough, was less influenced by Percy's Reliques or the traditional ballads than by the broadsides. This embarrassing fact is proved by the way he quotes in his Preface a stanza from “The Babes in the Wood”; and elsewhere, his remarks on “Goody Blake and Harry Gill” show that he was thinking of the broadsides. They did not do Wordsworth any good but rather encouraged the naïveté of his worst poetry. Coleridge, on the other hand, learned a great deal from the traditional ballads. “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” was professedly written in imitation of the style as well as the spirit of the elder poets, and Coleridge has taken over and transmuted the rhythm, diction, and atmosphere of the best supernatural ballads.

The ballads then became part of the heritage of the nineteenth-century poets, to be rediscovered and used by each generation in turn. After “The Ancient Mariner”, the finest transformation of the ballad form into literature is “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”. Matthew Arnold based “The Forsaken Merman” on a Danish ballad story, but not on ballad forms: the result is far removed from folksong. The Pre-Raphaelites' generation took the ballads for their own purposes: William Morris wrote an admirable pastiche called “Two Red Roses across the Moon”, and less happily, Rossetti painted Clerk Saunders' portrait. Swinburne was also an enthusiast and came near to reproducing the “ballad note”. It is possible that the ballads are now an exhausted vein, that the poets have no more to learn from them for the time being. Yet in the 1930's, one of the “little reviews” which had a Surrealistic ambience was publishing modern American versions: and with their violent and shocking imagery they did not look out of place beside the last flarings of European Romanticism.

Notes

1. Sir C. H. Firth, “Ballads and Broadsides”, Shakespeare's England, 1916, ch. xxiv; reprinted in Essays Historical and Literary, 1938, pp. 1-33.

2. “Loving Mad Tom”, first found in Giles Earle, Songbook, 1615.

3. Gerould, op. cit., pp. 243-4.

4. The Spectator, numbers 70 and 74.

5. A. O. Lovejoy, “The Discrimination of Romanticisms”, Publications of the Modern Language Society of America, Vol. XXXIX, 2, June, 1924.