Jane’s life in legend and literature had begun with her virtual promotion as a heroine through poetry and drama, but in fact her story had already reached a much wider public along a different route, through the ballads. These continued an age-old oral tradition in many European countries and a long history too of story-telling in verse. For people who did not read – and even in Elizabethan times there were many who had not had the chance to learn and in any case could never have bought books – these stories in verse supplied entertainment and education at the same time. Ballads were recited or more usually sung, often with harp accompaniment, and in their early existence there would probably have been dancing too, for the word ‘ballad’ is close to the Italian ballare, to dance. Jane would surely have heard many of these ballads when she was very young and may even have been taught to sing some of them herself. Their range was wide: they could be stories, simple, sad or even sinister, expressing a triumphant celebration of some hard-won battle or a lamentation for one that was lost; there was no limit to their scope and they included brief life-stories of many heroes and some heroines.
Shakespeare liked to introduce memories of old ballads into his plays: the sad ‘Willow, willow’ for instance is mentioned (ironically) by Princess Bona in Henry VI Part III, Act III, Scene 3, sung (pathetically) by Desdemona in Othello Act IV, Scene 3, and echoed by Emilia just before she dies in Act V, Scene 2. Thomas Heywood referred to a well-known lively ballad even on the title page of his two-part play about Edward IV: ‘his merry pastime with the Tanner of Tamworth’. This presents a cheerful story of how the king asked the tanner to tell him the way to Compton Bassett (in Wiltshire); the tanner did not realise he was talking with his king and tried to do a business deal. Then he feared he might be hanged for disrespect, but instead the would-be democratic king generously gave him some land. The earlier ballads used the older themes, such as the inevitable story of Fair Rosamond, and there was even the Confession of Queen Eleanor, while new heroines appeared, including the brave Mary Ambree, and older heroes too, such as Sir Patrick Spens, the sea-captain, while the moving story of King Cophetua and the Beggar-Maid was not forgotten. The variety of subjects was immensely wide, for the ballad writers and performers, often composing ad lib, had to appeal to both men and women of all types while at the same time taking account of local taste as they moved round the country. All these ballads were anonymous or unreliably credited to various forgotten authors, many were told in different versions and most of them changed as the years went by, different themes becoming more or less popular if rumours about national news began to vary. They distributed new gossip, facts or even opinions, and any performer or listener could add or subtract from the verses as they wished.
Jane Shore had never faded from public attention since More’s references to her had been included in several sixteenth-century chronicles, and the success of Heywood’s play had prolonged her remembered life, for apparently she encountered no serious competitors, at least none seem to have been remembered. She and her miseries had impressed women in particular: mothers wanted their daughters to know what would happen to them if they strayed from dutiful behaviour and/or deserted their husbands. From the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century ballads were the tabloid news-sheets of their day, soon followed by the chapbooks, as will be shown later.
It is not known exactly when Thomas Deloney,1 the silk-weaver turned pamphleteer and early prose fiction writer, who lived from about 1543 to about 1599 or 1600, composed his poem about Jane described as a ‘sonnet’, using the word in its meaning as a ‘little song’. Since he did not refer to his heroine as ‘Jane’ he was obviously unaware of this as her ‘adopted’ Christian name through Heywood’s play, and since he himself is thought to have died in 1600 or even earlier, he would probably not have heard it at all. His poem, a monologue spoken by the heroine, regretful but not desperate, reads easily and has a charm of its own:
Shore’s wife I am,
so known by name:
And at the Flower-de-Luce in Cheapside
Was my dwelling:
The only daughter of a wealthy merchant man,
Against whose counsel evermore,
I was rebelling.
Young was I loved:
No affection moved
My heart and mind to give or yield
To their consenting.
My parents thinking richly for to wed me,
Forcing me to that which caused
My repenting.
Then being wedded
I was quickly tempted,
My beauty caused many Gallants
To salute me.
The King commanding, I straight obeyed:
for his chiefest jewel then,
He did repute me . . .
When the King died,
My grief I tried:
From the Court I was expelled
with despite.
The Duke of Gloucester being Lord protector,
Took away my goods, against
All law and right.
In a Procession
For my transgression,
Barefoot he made me go,
For to shame me.
A Cross before me there was carried plainly,
As a penance for my former life,
So to tame me . . .
Wherefore, Fair Ladies,
With your sweet babies,
My grievous fall bear in your mind,
And behold me:
How strange a thing, that the love of a King
Should come to die under a stall,
As I told ye.
The ‘stall’ may be another reference to the rumour that Jane died in a ditch, hence the name Shoreditch, but this place-name had been used since much earlier times and any link with Jane is invalid.
In the late seventeenth century too came the anonymous ballad that was to find even more long-lasting popularity: it fascinated the public and was to appear in at least twenty separate editions. This was The Wofull Lamentation of Mistris Jane Shore, the title followed by an immensely long sub-title: ‘a Goldsmith’s Wife in London, Sometime King Edward the Fourth’s Concubine, Who for Her Wanton Life came to a Miserable End. Set Forth for the Example of All Lewd Women’. It was followed by The Second Part of Jane Shore, Wherein Her Sorrowful Husband Bewaileth His Own Estate, and his Wife’s Wantonness, the Wrong of Marriage, the Fall of Pride, Being a Warning for all Women to Take Heed by.
This full title of the second part does not appear in Volume II of Percy’s Reliques in its various nineteenth-century reprints, the most easily accessible publication where the first part of the ballad can be read today.
As printed by Percy, the ballad begins with the near-inevitable reference to Fair Rosamond, as made earlier by both Samuel Daniel and Drayton:
If Rosamond that was so fair
Had cause her sorrows to declare,
Then let Jane Shore with sorrow sing,
That was beloved of a king.
In thirty-seven four-line stanzas, each one consisting of two rhymed couplets (aa bb) with a further two lines repeated after each stanza, Jane tells her own sad story, referring to her supposed earlier life in Lombard Street:
Where many gallants did behold
My beauty in a shop of gold.
I spread my plumes, as wantons do,
Some sweet and secret friends to woo,
Because chaste love I did not find
Agreeing to my wanton mind.
This seems to indicate a new twist to the story: did Jane perhaps, dissatisfied with her impotent husband, decide to sleep around? But there came an exciting possibility:
At last my name in court did ring
Into the ears of England’s king.
Who came and liked, and love required,
But I made coy what he desired.
At first she did not give in to him, she said. Then another new twist, not forgotten by later writers, for Jane claimed that she received advice:
Yet Mistress Blague, a neighbour near
Whose friendship I esteemèd dear,
Did say, It was a gallant thing
To be beloved of a king.
So she gave in, and deserted her wedded husband.
Many of these ballads were long-lived, remaining in folk-memory. When Wordsworth visited Scotland in 1803 he heard a ‘solitary girl reaper’ singing as she worked in the fields and wondered what the song was about: ‘Will no one tell me what she sings?’ he asked:
Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago:
Or is it some more humble lay,
Familiar matter of today?
Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain,
That has been, and may be again?
The girl singer could have been remembering ‘The Battle of Otterbourne’ or perhaps ‘Mary Ambree’. It is unlikely to have been ‘The Wofull Lamentation of Mistris Jane Shore’, although the ballad singers had probably brought it to Scotland in the seventeenth or eighteenth century; at least one of the chapbooks, which told the tale later, had been printed in Edinburgh in 1750. At the end of the sixteenth century, and throughout the seventeenth, the popularity of Heywood’s two-part King Edward IV had made more people than ever aware of Jane’s story; later editions of A Mirror for Magistrates were still read, so were Drayton’s Heroical Epistles. According to Professor James L. Harner there was even popular accompanying music, for another ballad about three deserters from the army was sung to the ‘Tune of Shore’s Wife’s Lamentation’ and several other ballads were also supported by this melody.
Jane’s story went on:
From city then to court I went,
To reap the pleasures of content;
There had the joys that love could bring,
And knew the secrets of a king.
She was able to help Mrs Blague, for the king gave her a ‘living’, presumably money, but William Shore, whom Jane charitably described as ‘a prince of peerless might’ left the country. She, or rather the composer of the ballad, added that he died overseas, which was not true, but this imaginary sad end suited the story. It also tells how Jane devoted herself to good works possibly out of guilt:
But yet a gentle mind I bore
To helpless people, who were poor;
I still redressed the orphans’ cry,
And saved their lives condemned to die.
It has to be remembered that in the fifteenth century at least, charity had been virtually the only help available to the disadvantaged, and if records of the time prove the generosity of the upper and middle classes, expressed in a variety of ways, it nearly always depended on personal gifts or the carefully managed charitable companies – very little of it, if any, was state organised. Jane described how she cared for widows and small children:
And never looked for other gain
But love and thanks for all my pain . . .
This was the attitude that had earned the notice and praise of Sir Thomas More much earlier.
Unfortunately, after the king’s death, Jane’s so-called friends let her down. Mrs Blague, to whom she had entrusted her jewels, denied that she had ever seen them and would not even allow her into the house. This behaviour, the desertion of friends was, as mentioned earlier, apparently another favourite theme that often occurred in Elizabethan writing, and people became afraid that it might happen to them. Jane had suffered of course from ‘crook-back Richard’, lost all her former friends and according to at least one ballad, when one of them was hanged for helping her she wished that she had died instead.
If Jane had not merely emerged from the merchant class and failed to join the aristocracy – only the truly high-born could describe themselves as aristocrats – she might have grown into a tragic heroine, but for the time being she was merely a downtrodden young woman out of luck, and she had only herself to blame, for she should not have left her husband. However, the ‘Wofull Lamentation’, often without the second part, which is concerned mainly with the imagined travels and death of the unfortunate ‘Matthew’ Shore, never lost its popularity.
Jane described how she was totally penniless and reduced to begging; she also slept in the streets, or at least she claimed so. The details are horrifying if, of course, they are even partly true, but most of the ballad-makers probably exaggerated them for dramatic effect:
My gowns beset with pearl and gold,
Were turn’d to simple garments old;
My chains and gems and golden rings,
To filthy rags and loathsome things.
It sounded as though the end of her world had come:
Thus was I scorn’d of maid and wife,
For leading such a wicked life;
Both sucking babes and children small,
Did make their pastime at my fall.
Of course there had to be strong emphasis on the moral:
You wanton wives, that fall to lust,
Be you assur’d that God is just;
Whoredom shall not escape his hand,
Nor pride unpunished in this land.
Then comes the lesson which repeats the one already included in Drayton’s Heroical Epistles and also in Shakespeare, through the words of Fenton at the end of The Merry Wives of Windsor. Jane warns everyone:
You husbands, match not but for love,
Lest some disliking after prove;
Women, be warn’d when you are wives,
What plagues are you to sinful lives.
It should be remembered that after every quatrain of the ballad two extra lines were to be sung as a kind of refrain in order to reinforce the simple lesson, too often forgotten, that time passes:
Then, maids and wives, in time amend,
For love and beauty will have end.
Wordsworth had been right to wonder if the Highland girl had been singing ‘some more humble lay,/Familiar matter of today’; for centuries the sufferings of women had been largely ignored and their misdeeds rarely forgiven, while Jane’s situation was only too familiar by now, the ballad-writers intent on emphasising her misfortunes.
Jane had to defend herself through the ballads, and Shakespeare for one did virtually nothing to help her. In his King Richard III, written probably as early as 1593, he could have omitted all mention of her but he chose to refer to her in a way that was quite different from that of the unknown earlier author of The True Tragedie of Richard III who seemed to sympathise with her. The new king was uninterested in Jane’s emotional plight or her earlier good works; he saw her only as a collaborator in witchcraft with Edward IV’s widowed queen, responsible, he said, for his withered arm, and later alleging that she had acted as a messenger between the queen and Lord Hastings.
Richard had learnt that Hastings had moved into her house after Edward’s death, but that did not deter him from ordering the latter’s immediate execution. In Act III of the play, soon after Lovell and Catesby had entered (scene 5) ‘with Hastings’ head’, the Lord Mayor of London admitted that Richard’s former friend deserved his fate, and explained why:
I never look’d for better at his hands
After he once fell in with Mistress Shore.
According to John Stow, in his Survey of London, the Lord Mayor in 1483 was Robert Bilisden, a haberdasher. In this scene Shakespeare, through various characters, seems to have been anxious to blacken Jane’s character: he referred again to Richard’s description of her in the previous scene, which evoked the dramatic meeting in the Tower, as that ‘harlot strumpet Shore’. This was the harshest description ever made of her in this play, but it expressed Shakespeare’s purpose – he was presenting a melodrama with the wicked Richard III as the central character. He succeeded so well in convincing generations of playgoers that his hero was a villain that efforts are still being made today, six centuries later, by biographers and The Richard III Society, to prove that this king was not unduly wicked, but simply a man of his times.
Shakespeare missed no opportunity in this play for some character to attack Jane, emphasising Richard’s cruel revengeful treatment of her. Perhaps he believed that the ballad-writers had gone too far in allowing her to explain herself and utter her endless repentance as a warning to others. However, it is only fair to add that in the twentieth century various directors and producers of Richard III in Britain decided that Jane should appear in person on the film or television set, feeling that she belonged to the play. Obviously she was not given a speaking part, but controversially, her presence seemed essential to some and in her Harlot or Heroine? Re-Presenting ‘Jane Shore’, Maria M. Scott examined these decisions from a feminist standpoint.2 However, these ‘appearances’ by Jane, their significance unexplained to the audience, do not seem to have added anything to the central theme of the play. Perhaps the ballad-writers had been too preoccupied with Jane’s sufferings and as a result had helped to create some opposition to her, so that readers and listeners had grown tired of her; but at the same time she was still seen as a mysterious and potentially interesting character. Surely though it is more fitting that her story should retain at least some mystery, rather than decline into mere romantic fiction. If she had not been mysterious in so many ways the legend would not have appealed to so many writers in so many genres, for it gave them the opportunity to explore her personality and her story in an imaginative way.
It was left to one of Shakespeare’s editors in the eighteenth century to choose Jane as the subject of his own most popular tragedy: he was Nicholas Rowe, whose Tragedy of Jane Shore came to be admired for over a century in England, Europe, Mexico and later in the United States. In the meantime other people became intrigued by her, and if poets and playwrights in different ways had created and prolonged her legend, it was not going to fade away just yet.