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I
My first task, then, is to demonstrate that eighty-three ballads written in a manuscript volume in the Folger Library (V.a.339) are the work of J. P. Collier. The manuscript is a commonplace book of 291 leaves measuring 5.3 x 3.6 inches, originally bound in reddish-brown calf in the early seventeenth century and rebound, in 1960, in the Folger bindery. At that time, while the book was in sheets, I collated it and pencilled a signature on the first recto of each sheet. The collation, by these added signatures, is as follows:
Of the date at which Collier acquired the manuscript volume all that can be said with certainty is that it was in his possession in 1843, when, in his first edition of Shakespeare (8 vols. 1842-44), VIII (1843), 568, he notices a variant in a piece from the Passionate Pilgrim copied into the manuscript by its first owner, to the end of which have been added the initials W. S. in a hand and ink that, like initials elsewhere in the volume, I believe to be Collier's. Collier's statements about the date are vague and inconsistent; that he bought the manuscript from Thomas Thorpe, as he several times says, we need not question. After his death in 1883 the volume was No. 16 in the catalogue of the sale of his library by Sotheby, Wilkinson, and Hodge, 7-9 August 1884. The successful bidder, Quaritch, paid £52. In another Sotheby sale, 20-22 April 1899, the manuscript was No. 1002 in a section of "Other
Who the first owner and first user of the volume was seems impossible to determine. It may have been the Joseph Hall (not the Bishop of Norwich) whose signature is on what is now the only fly-leaf, A2, but this is doubtful, since the appearance of the signature does not suggest that Hall wrote anything else in the book and does suggest that it was written as late perhaps as 1700. All but two of the 582 pages are pretty well filled with written matter. The first writer appears, from a few scattered dates, to have done his work in the decade from 1630 to 1640. He did about fifty percent of all the writing (by page-count; it would be more by word-count because his writing is always small, sometimes minute, always close packed). Starting with a blank book, he planned to classify his matter, allotting a section of the book to each kind — theology and religion, medicine, remedies, and so on — six sections in all. He began each section at the top of a page and from time to time made additions, leaving no space between old and new matter. None of the five sections of written matter fills the block of pages allotted, so that he left blocks of blank leaves, the biggest containing 142 pages. The second man who used the book did his writing (on about forty percent of the pages) during the next decade — if we can judge by the dates scattered through his portion of the writing, the latest of which is 1648. At first he seems to have continued his predecessor's classification but to have given it up when certain of the available spaces became filled. But he always started just where the first left off, not unusually at the top of a page. When the second writer quit, ff. 39v-41, 107v-179, 181v, 228v, 242-245, 276v-277 were entirely blank, while the lower halves of ff. 39, 181, and 227 were also unused and empty. All of these pages except the last two, still blank, now contain the eighty-three ballads written, as I think I can show, by Collier in a simulated hand of the seventeenth century.
Below is a list of the ballads. The first column consists of Collier's serial numbers (some counted but not written by Collier and now silently supplied). The second gives the number of the leaf on which
1. | 107v | The Pinnace | A pinnace riggd | [see above] |
2. | 108 | To his Lady | O pity me | |
3. | 109 | *Giue Place You Ladies | Giue place you | p. 152 p. 170 |
4. | 110 | *Kitt hath lost her Key | Kit hath loste | p. 55 |
5. | 110v | *Youth and Age | Olde age and Youth | p. 83 |
6. | 111v | *Women best when at Reste | Women are best | p. 23 |
7. | 112 | *The Praise of Milkemaydes | Passe not for | p. 90 |
8. | 113 | *All in a garden Greene | All in a garden | p. 196 |
9. | 114 | Dames of London | Who so defames | |
10. | 115 | *Ladie Ianes Lament | Now must I lose | p. 72 |
11. | 115v | *The Cuckoes Song | ffull merilie singes | p. 122 |
12. | 116v | *The Kinges hunt is vpp | The hunt is vp | p. 129 |
13. | 117 | *The Batchelour | Hough for a | p. 43 |
14. | 118v | Agaynst Idelness | Though idlenes in | See Shak. Soc. |
15. | 119 | *Beauties fforte | When raging Loue | p. 5 |
16. | 119v | The Maryed Mans lament | To all whose wyues | |
17. | 120v | *The newe Hunts vpp | The hunt is vp | I. 130 |
18. | 121 | *Maides and Widowes | If euer I marry | p. 9 |
19. | 121v | Truth hath a quiet Breast | Whatere my ffortune | |
20. | 122 | The Louer Scoffed | Attend thee goe | H. of Plea Delights |
21. | 123 | *The Damned Soule in Hell | O cruell paynes | p. 117 |
22. | 123v | *The Christians A. B. C. | All men that harken | p. 104 |
23. | 124 | *Citie and Countrey Maidens | Mall. ffaith Ione | p. 145 |
24. | 125 | *Awake and Arise | After midnight when | Sh Soc 89 p. 186 |
25. | 126 | The Clowne turnde Gentleman | A countrey clowne | |
26. | 127 | Home is still Home | Home is still | |
27. | 127v | When raging loue | When raging loue | Surrey |
28. | 128 | The Praise of May | When May is | Par D. Dev |
29. | 129 | *Against Couetousnes | Noe wight in | p. 33 |
30. | 129v | The cittie Maide & Countrey Maide | M. ffaith Cicely | |
31. | 131v | Daintie come thou to me | He Wilt thou from | Roxb Bal |
32. | 132v | *The burning of Powles | Lament eche one | p. 40 1561 |
33. | 133 | Try ere thou trust | Try ere thou | |
34. | 133v | *Wine Women and Dyce | Wine women and Dice | II.82[69] |
35. | 134v | The praise of the Gilliflower | If I should | |
36. | 135 | *Maide will you Marrie? | He Maide will you | II.6 |
37. | 135v | The Tinker and ye Countreyman | T I am a iolly | |
38. | 137v | *The wickednesse of Cruell Women | Though Helen were | p. 132 |
39. | 138v | *Loue me little loue me long | Loue me little | p. 213 |
40. | 139 | My Prettie little One | Sweete if thou | |
41. | 140v | To his Ladie | The rushing Riuers | Googe |
42. | 141v | Womens Tongues | When riuers turne | |
43. | 143 | What is my Ladie like? | My Ladys like | |
44. | 144v | *A Caueat for Beauty | Ye dames that | [II.62] |
45. | 145v | Tinkers Truths | Dick Tarleton was | |
46. | 146v | Send me thy sonne | Send me thy | |
47. | 147v | Tarltons Toye | A countrey damsell | |
48. | 148v | A loue Song | So much I loue | |
49. | 149 | What is my Seruaunt like | My seruaunts like | |
50. | 150 | *Defence of a bald Head | B. Baldnesse though | II.97 |
51. | 151v | The Praise of good Ale | When cloudes of | |
52. | 152v | O Yes: list the Cryer | If once man or | |
53. | 154 | *The Vertuous Wife | ffaine would I | p. 162 |
54. | 154v | Dialogue betw. Venus and Diana | V. All gallant youthes | Qre by Yates, Servingman |
55. | 155v | When Knaues wilbe honest men | When mountains moue |
56. | 157 | Of his Lady | What flower is my | |
57. | 158 | A Toy of Elderton | Will Eldertons red | |
58. | 159 | The olde Man's Song | ffull long ago | |
59. | 159v | *The choice of Friends | In choice of | MS 220 [II.189] |
60. | 161 | A iest of Scoggin | Scoggin a street | |
61. | 161v | Corsbies Confession | If teares could | |
62. | 163 | ffatall ffall at Paris Garden | Listen a while and | 1583 |
63. | 164 | *The death of Deuoreux | Lament lament for | 1576 |
64. | 165 | The life and Death of Lo. Graye | Shed teares wth | 1562 |
65. | 166 | *A iest of Peele and Singer | G. Peele & Singer | [II.216] |
66. | 167 | *Two Spanish Louers | If you list vnto | [II.200] |
67. | 169v | Madge Howlets Song | ffull mournfully hootes | |
68. | 170v | The disobedient Prophet | A prophet of the | |
69. | 172 | *Gods iudgement on a Sorcerer | Of all the crimes | [II.30] |
70. | 173 | The Praise of a Whore | I haue lou'd to | |
71. | 173v | *Life and Death | L Nay what art | [II.43] |
72. | 175 | The Song of a Louer | Desire hath driuen | |
73. | 176 | *Against the newe Playhouses | The fire that frō | about 1576 [II.152] |
74. | 176v | *The great Earthquake | Take warning London | 6 Apr. 1580 [II.111] |
75. | 177v | Spurina and Roman Ladies | If nature beare | Qre printed |
76. | 178v | The Cobler of Colchester | Walking abroad in | V. my other Booke |
77. | 181 | The Louer his Lullabie | Sing lullaby as | Qre Gasc? Yes, p. 8 1587 |
78. | 227 | Churchyardes ffarewell | With shaking handes | |
79. | 243 | The English Rose | Of euerie flower | |
80. | 243v | Husband and Wife | Dear Wife and if | |
81. | 245 | Murther of Iohn Bruin | Murther it is a | |
82. | 39 | Ballad of his Mistresse | Shepherdes haue you | |
83. | 40 | The wise Mans Warning | In youth when teares |
Of these ballads the following are those for which Collier's notes furnish or lead to identifications:
- 14. John Heywood's Works and Miscellaneous Short
Poems, ed. B. A. Milligan, Univ. of Illinois Press, 1956, p. 256;
also in J. O. Halliwell [-Phillipps], ed., The Moral Play of Wit and
Science, and Early Poetical Miscellanies. From an unpublished
manuscript, B. M. Addit. MS. 15,233, Shakespeare Soc., 1848, p. 79. The
poem as printed in these
two editions consists of a burden and six stanzas, of which Collier's version includes four, with many alterations. He probably used Halliwell-Phillipps' collection, as his marginal note suggests.11
- 20. A Handful of Pleasant Delights (1584), STC 21105, ed. H. E. Rollins, 1924, p. 12. Collier's text shows substantive alteration, including additions and omissions.
- 24. The Moral Play of Wit and Science (as in 14, above), p. 89. Halliwell-Phillipps' version consists of a burden and twenty stanzas, Collier's, of eleven stanzas, some owing little to the original, others more or less altered. Of the thirty-four ballads printed in the notes in the Extracts this is the only one for which I have found a printed source.
- 27. Tottel's Miscellany (1557), STC 13860, ed. J. P. Collier, Illustrations of Early English Poetry, I (1886-70), 18; also ed. Rollins, 1965, I, 14. Collier makes a few alterations.
- 28. A Paradise of Dainty Devices (1576), STC 7516, ed. Collier, Illustrations of Early English Poetry, I (1866-70), 13; also ed. Rollins, 1927, p. 9. There is a fair amount of Collier's usual tampering with the text.
- 31. Collier presumably took this from the broadside in the Roxburghe collection of ballads acquired by the British Museum in 1845 from the estate of B. H. Bright, who acquired them in 1813. The ballad was later printed in the Roxburghe Ballads, I (ed. W. Chappell, 1888), 629. In Collier's version almost every line is lengthened by the addition of an extra foot or syllable (a liberty characteristic of Collier), in an attempt at improvement.
- 41. B. Googe, Eglogs, Epytaphes, and Sonnettes (1563), STC 12048, ed. E. Arber, English Reprints, 1871, p. 105; also ed. F. B. Fieler, Scholars Facsimiles & Reprints, 1968. Collier's version contains several verbal alterations by way of improvement.
- 54. James Yates, The Castell of Courtesie (1582), STC 26079, sig. L3. Collier's text is essentially that of the original, but with many verbal alterations little affecting the sense, some of them improving the metre, and all looking like Collier's work.
- 77. G. Gascoigne, A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (1587), STC 11638, ed. C. T. Prouty, University of Missouri Press, 1942, p. 150.
- 33. A Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions (1578), STC 20402, ed. Collier, Illustrations, III, 124; also ed. Rollins, 1926, p. 100. Collier's text agrees fairly closely with Rollins'.
- 40. Collier must have taken this either from the broadside in the
Roxburghe collection (see No. 31 in the foregoing list) or from that he
himself had recently published, A Book of Roxburghe Ballads, 1847. Collier's manuscript consists of only eleven stanzas and differs in other repects from his own printed version with fifteen stanzas. That this latter followed the original broadside closely (except in omitting one stanza) is shown by its (for Collier) surprising textual agreement with the sixteen-stanza version printed in the Roxburghe Ballads, VI (ed. Ebsworth, 1888), 277.12
- 72. A Gorgeous Gallery, ed. Rollins, p. 24. Collier's text follows the original fairly closely except for the interpolation of an erotic stanza.
- 75. A Paradise of Dainty Devises, ed. Rollins, p. 59. A stanza probably of Collier's composition is substituted for one that appears in all early editions and in Rollins'.
The many page references that Collier pencilled in his book in connection with the eighty-three ballads (shown above in the complete list) are references to a work of Collier's own, Extracts from the Registers of the Stationers Company . . . 1557-1570 and, Vol. II, 1570-1587, Shakespeare Soc., 1848, 1849 (hereafter abbreviated as Extracts). Collier's selection of entries from the Register for printing in this work is in keeping with his life-long concentration upon the popular literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The entries are of ballads and other light verse, plays, tales, romances, and the like. For about half of his entries he furnishes notes that exhibit his quite impressive familiarity with the material. They supply bibliographical data, gloss words, discuss subject matter, suggest alternative readings, and occasionally assert that a ballad has not survived in print. It is with these notes that we are mainly concerned. Thirty-three of them, mostly notes to ballad entries, say that the piece entered in the Register is not known to exist, or does not exist, and add a reference to a manuscript volume in the editor's possession that contains the ballad in question. Then follows the ballad printed in full. The note that includes ballad No. 12 also prints one stanza of No. 17. Thus in thirty-three notes thirty-four of the ballads from Collier's old manuscript volume (which is of course Folger MS. V.a.339) are printed fully or in part. Henceforth I refer to these as "the thirty-four ballads." They are the ballads marked with asterisks in the list on pages 8-10, above. Strictly speaking, they are not all ballads in any proper sense, but Collier always so calls them, and no confusion will result from my using the term for the sake of brevity.
My primary interest is not in the ballads themselves, but in the way they came to be written in the old commonplace book. The evidence will show that before "finding" the thirty-four ballads and identifying
Here we may pause to consider what Collier asks us to believe. In his preface to the Extracts (I, p. vii) he writes as follows:
If Collier's date were correct — if the ballads had been written in the commonplace book in the reign of James I — we would find nothing odd in the fact that twelve of the ballads that are on datable historical subjects (Nos. 32, 47, 57, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 73, 74, 78, 81) are all Elizabethan and we would scarcely notice the fact that the early poetical collections in which ten of the ballads had been printed were all published before 1588. That the entries in the Stationers' Register that correspond with thirty-four of the ballads were all made before 1588 we might think a curious coincidence but would not regard as utterly incredible.
But we know that the second of two early writers in the commonplace book was still at work in 1648 and that the ballads were written after he had stopped. While Collier was working on his second volume he must have come upon the evidence of a date much later than the time of James I. Several of the notes in Volume I refer to that time as the date of his manuscript volume, but notes near the end of Volume II give the date as "about the middle of the seventeenth century" (p. 200) and "about the reign of Charles I" (p. 215), and the new preface makes a perfunctory correction of his earlier assumption. That Collier ever saw the implications of this later date there is no reason to believe. The implications are severely damaging of his whole case regarding the ballads. He would have us believe that a ballad collector of 1650 gathered eighty-three ballads, of which thirty-four (forty percent) had been printed, or at least entered, between 1570 and 1587 (just the period of Collier's Extracts) and none that were later,[1] twelve on historical events of the reign of Elizabeth (none later),
One of the most curious features of the ballads is their relationship to the Stationers' Register, and these go deeper than we have yet seen. Further examination of the thirty-four ballads (those printed in notes to the Extracts) reveals another kind of relationship, which is made clear in the two tables that follow:
Ballad number | Where printed | Date of entry |
3 | I.152 | 1566-7 |
4 | I.55 | 1561-2 |
5 | I.83 | 1563-4 |
6 | I.23 | 1558-9 |
7 | I.90 | 1563-4 |
8 | I.196 | 1568-9 |
10 | I.72 | 1562-3 |
11 | I.122 | 1565-6 |
12 | I.129 | 1565-6 |
13 | I.43 | 1561-2 |
15 | I.5 | 1557-8 |
17 | I.130 | 1565-6 |
18 | I.9 | 1557-8 |
21 | I.117 | 1565-6 |
22 | I.104 | 1564-5 |
23 | I.145 | 1565-6 |
24 | I.186 | 1568-9 |
Ballad number | Where printed | Date of entry |
29 | I.33 | 1560-1 |
32 | I.40 | 1560-1 |
34 | II.69 | 1570-1 |
36 | II.6 | 1570-1 |
38 | I.132 | 1565-6 |
39 | I.213 | 1569-70 |
44 | II.62 | 1578 |
50 | II.97 | 1579-80 |
53 | I.162 | 1566-7 |
59 | II.189 | 1584-5 |
63 | II.35 | 1576-7 |
65 | II.216 | 1586-7 |
66 | II.200 | 1585-6 |
69 | II.30 | 1576-7 |
71 | II.43 | 1577 |
73 | II.125 | 1580-1 |
74 | II.111 | 1579-80 |
Where printed | Balled number |
I.5 | 15 |
I.9 | 18 |
I.23 | 6 |
I.33 | 29 |
I.40 | 32 |
I.43 | 13 |
I.55 | 4 |
I.72 | 10 |
I.83 | 5 |
I.90 | 7 |
I.104 | 22 |
I.117 | 21 |
I.122 | 11 |
I.129 | 12 |
I.130 | 17 |
I.132 | 38 |
I.145 | 23 |
Where printed | Balled number |
I.152 | 3 |
I.162 | 53 |
I.186 | 24 |
I.196 | 8 |
I.213 | 39 |
II.6 | 36 |
II.30 | 69 |
II.35 | 63 |
II.43 | 71 |
II.62 | 44 |
II.69 | 34 |
II.97 | 50 |
II.111 | 74 |
II.125 | 73 |
II.189 | 59 |
II.200 | 66 |
II.216 | 65 |
What can be seen at a glance, in Table I, is this: that of the first twenty-four ballads written in the manuscript (Nos. 1-24) Collier was to "find" that seventeen corresponded with ballad titles entered in the Stationers' Register before 1570 and that the last eight corresponded with titles entered after 1575. Thus there is a roughly chronological order in the thirty-four ballads as they stand in the manuscript. In the ballad-number column of Table II I find five pairs of numbers that are consecutive in Table I: 29 and 32, 22 and 21, 11 and 12, 74 and 73, 66 and 65. Among thirty-four ballads this kind of correspondence among ten does not look like pure chance.
If we are to believe in Collier's sevententh-century ballad collector we must be able to put forward a reasonable hypothesis to account for the unmistakable traces of chronological arrangement in thirty-four of the ballads as they stand in his manuscript. The assumption that he copied these from printed broadsides does not help, since the printers of ballads, fully conscious of their ephemeral nature, almost never dated their imprints. Our supposed collector would have had to be a tireless researcher to achieve even such a degree of chronological arrangement as we find. Yet with the twelve ballads about easily-dated events — Lady Jane Grey's lament, the burning of St. Paul's steeple, the great earthquake, and the others — he took no trouble to set them down in any order.
I can make no sense out of this. But if instead we assume that Collier himself wrote the ballads in the commonplace book we can reach a reasonable explanation of all the main features of the collection. Looking into the Stationer's Register and finding it rich in entries of popular literature, he began, in 1847, transcribing all the entries that interested him, with a view to publication. At some point during the work of editing it occurred to him that he might compose pseudo-Elizabethan ballads to fit the titles that struck his fancy as he came across them and that he could then "find" them and print them in his notes. We cannot know whether or not he wrote the ballads in the order in which he found appropriate titles. It was obviously not in this order that he copied them into his commonplace book. The first ballad listed in Table I, above, is the eighteenth in Table II, and the sixth in Table I is the twenty-first in Table II. Presumably Collier first wrote the ballads in his ordinary hand on ordinary sheets of paper; at what stage in his work he copied them into the book appears to be inscrutable and irrelevant. When he prepared for the task of copying in his "old" hand, though he did not sufficiently appreciate the problems of avoiding detection, he realized that the thirty-four
I have been assuming that all but one of the ballads printed in the Extracts and most of the others were of his own composition. He may have drawn from printed sources more than the thirteen identified above, but I doubt that many more will prove to be of this sort. The existence of some seventy ballads apparently unique among the eighty-three argues not only against an early collector but for Collier's authorship. Further evidence, tenuous though it is, supports this assumption. In his notes, where he is vague as always in speaking of his old manuscript, Collier frequently notes that a ballad is not known to have
More telling perhaps, when we take Collier's evident vanity into account, is his praise of certain ballads — praise not warranted by any special excellence that I can recognize. No. 3 "runs thus pleasantly, and by no means unpoetically." No. 11 is a "remarkable and spirited ballad," No. 12 "an extremely spritely performance." No. 15 "has considerable merit" and "must have been written by no inferior hand." About No. 21 "There is something very striking in the manner and measure," and No. 71 is "a remarkable and striking relic of the time." Collier's vanity is well illustrated in a letter to J. W. Ebsworth, 12 August 1879 (an uncatalogued Folger manuscript), where he writes of his Poet's Pilgrimage (1825), a poem in four dull cantos, "I thought, & think, that I never wrote anything else that was half as good — yet nobody cares a fig about it, but its poor old Author. . . . It is good: it is of its kind, highly meritorious and imaginative. It is good, let who will say the contrary, and by it I will live & die." His sensitiveness as a result of the neglect of that poem was such that he never again, I believe, publicly exposed an acknowledged poem of his own. Perhaps that is all the explanation we need for Collier's cryptoauthorship of the ballads published in the Extracts, there exposed in the hope that they would be praised by others.
That Collier could and did write ballads meant to be approximately Elizabethan in character is proved by several among the many specimens of his own verse scattered through his privately-printed Old Man's Diary (2 volumes, 1871-72). In another letter to Ebsworth, 27 October 1879, he writes, "ballad writing is merry work, if good, both for writer and reader." I do not wish to press the evidence of Collier's authorship of most of the eighty-three ballads, though it helps to explain the uniqueness of seventy of them. The point is not essential to my purpose.
If it was in hope of praise that Collier printed his ballads in the Extracts he was not altogether disappointed, for William Chappell thought highly enough of seven of them (Nos. 7, 8, 12, 17, 18, 32, 57) to print them in his Popular Music of the Olden Time (2 vols., London, 1859), with references to the Extracts or to Collier's old manuscript, which Chappell could have known only from the Extracts.
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