"Dispersed thro Shakspere's plays are innumerable little fragments of ancient ballads, the entire copies of which could not be recovered," says Bishop Percy in his preface to 'The Friar of Orders Gray.' What he says of Shakspere is equally true of Beaumont and Fletcher, but it is not true, in either case, that there are many fragments of popular traditional ballads. Portions of ballads of one kind or another, and still more of songs, are introduced into the plays of these authors, though not so frequently as one would suppose from Percy's words. Ten of the twenty-eight stanzas of 'The Friar of Orders Gray' are taken, mostly in part only, from Shakspere and Fletcher,[foot-note] but the original verses are from songs, not properly from ballads. It is not, however, always easy to say whether an isolated stanza belonged to a ballad or a song. Some snatches from familiar ballads, which occur in Beaumont and Fletcher, have already been given at the proper places. A few bits from unknown pieces, which occur in Shakspere, or Beaumont and Fletcher (strictly, perhaps, Fletcher), will be given here. It is surprising that other dramatists have not furnished something.
A very meagre gathering of fragments from other sources follows those which have been gleaned from the dramatists, but it must be once more said that there is not an absolute certainty that all of these belong to ballads.
Some popular tales are interspersed with verses of a ballad character, and one or two cases have been incidentally noted already. Examples are 'The Paddo,' Chambers's Popular Rhymes of Scotland, 1870, p. 87;[foot-note] 'The Red Etin,' ib. p. 89; 'The Black Bull of Norroway,' ib. p. 95; 'Child Rowland and Burd Ellen,' Illustrations of Northern Antiquities, p. 397;[foot-note] 'The Golden Ball,' see No 95, H, II, 353-55.
From King Lear, Act iii, sc. 4, printed 1608.
Act iii, sc. 6.
From The Taming of the Shrew, Act iv, sc. 1, printed 1623, I, 221.
From The Knight of the Burning Pestle, produced apparently in 1611, Act ii, sc. 8; Dyce, II, 173.
Act v, sc. iii; Dyce, p. 226.
From Bonduca, produced before March, 1619: Act v, sc. 2, Dyce, V, 88.
From The Two Noble Kinsmen, printed in 1634, Act iii, sc. 4; Dyce, XI, 383.
The Complaynt of Scotland, 1549, gives two lines of a song on the murder, in 1517, of the Sieur de la Bastie, a distinguished knight in the service of the Regent, Duke of Albany. The song may, or may not, have been a ballad.
The History of the Houses of Douglas and Angus, written by Master David Hume of Godscroft, p. 155, Edinburgh, 1644.
Of the treacherous execution of William, sixth Earl of Douglas, at the castle of Edinburgh, in 1440, Hume of Godscroft says: "It is sure the people did abhorre it, execrating the very place where it was done; in detestation of the fact of which the memory remaineth yet to our dayes in these words." Since Hume mentions no ballad, it is not likely that he knew of more than this single stanza, or that more existed. (Sir Walter Scott, however, confidently assumes that there was a ballad. Minstrelsy, 1833, I, 221 f.)
Written on the fly-leaf of a little volume printed at Edinburgh about 1670 (Quevedo's Novels), Laing Manuscripts, University of Edinburgh, Div. II, 358. (Communicated by Mr. Macmath.)
Finlay's Scottish Ballads, I, xxxii.
A "romantic ballad, of which, unfortunately, one stanza only has been preserved. The tradition bears that a young lady was carried away by the fairies, and that, although invisible to her friends who were in search of her, she was sometimes heard by them lamenting her destiny in a pathetic song, of which the stanza just mentioned runs nearly thus:"
Sent by Motherwell to C.K. Sharpe, with a letter dated October 8, 1825. Also entered in Motherwell's Note-Book, p. 53 (excepting the second line of the first stanza).
(Then follows the description of a queen, jimp and sma, not remembered.)
"I cannot get any precise account of its subject, but it related somehow to a most magnificent marriage. The old lady who sung it died some years ago." (Letter to Sharpe.)
"It may be the same ballad as the scrap I have, with something of a similar chorus." (Note-Book, where the "chorus" is Fa fa lilly.)
The reference seems to be to 'The Whummil Bore,' No 27, I, 255.
C.K. Sharpe's Letters, ed. Allardyce, II, 106 (1813).
Sharpe somewhere asks, Where does this belong?
Possibly in some version of 'Proud Lady Margaret,' No 47, II, 425.
Manuscript of Thomas Wilkie, p. 79, "Scotch Ballads, Materials for Border Minstrelsy," No 73 a, Abbotsford.
"Scotch Ballads, Materials for Border Minstrelsy," No 86 a, Abbotsford, in the handwriting of Thomas Wilkie.
"Scotch Ballads, Materials for Border Minstrelsy," No 73 a; Manuscript of Thomas Wilkie, Abbotsford, derived by Wilkie from his father, "who heard a Lady Brigs sing this when he was a boy."
sung in Wuthering Heights, ch. 9, has not unnaturally been taken for a relic of a traditional Scottish ballad of a dead mother returning to her abused children. It is, in fact, a stanza (not literally well remembered) from the Danish ballad 'Moderen under Mulde,' Grundtvig, II, 470, No 89, B 11, translated by Jamieson, and given in the notes to the fourth canto of Scott's Lady of the Lake.
The following "fragment," given in Motherwell's Manuscript, p. 184, "from Mr. William Steele of Greenock, advocate," I suppose to have been the effort of a self-satisfied amateur, and to have been written as a fragment. The third and fourth stanzas recall the broadside ballad 'The Lady Isabella's Tragedy.'
P. 202 b, last stanza. Mr. Macmath has given me the following variation, communicated (with a story of a wife carried off by fairies) by J.C. to The Scottish Journal, II, 275, 1848.
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