In William Congreve’s Restoration-era comedy The Old Batchelor (1693), Heartwell, a “surly old pretended woman-hater,” is tricked into marrying Silvia, the spurned lover of Vainlove. He laments that his downfall will be the talk of the town. He’ll be “chronicled in ditty, and sung in woful Ballad.”1 The broadside ballads to which Heartwell refers were single sheet, folio-sized publications containing verse, a tune indication, and woodcut imagery that related cautionary tales, current events, and simplified myth and history to a wide range of social classes across early modern England. Broadsides had a very recognizable format and visual appearance, one that remained standard for over a century.2 (See figure 7.1.)
They were sold, displayed, and sung in theaters, homes, streets, bookshops, marketplaces, fairs, and taverns—all manner of spaces.3 New ballads often referenced old ones, and tunes were recycled for broadsides containing similar subject material.4 By Congreve’s time, the broadside was a well-established and venerable form attracting the notice of collectors such as Anthony (à) Wood and Samuel Pepys. In the above passage, Heartwell likens himself to both the print artifact itself and its aural form—that is, like the story of his experience, he will be a cautionary tale for all to remember, hanged in “Effigie” upon the wall. Heartwell then references several popular tunes to which his sad tale will perhaps be sung—“The Batchelors Fall,” “The Superanuated Maidens Comfort”—though there is no record of these exact tune titles within the corpus of melodies employed by the early modern English broadside trade. Because Congreve is actually parodying existing tune titles in this passage, as I will explore later, the success of this comedic lament depended upon seventeenth-century audiences’ intimate knowledge of ballad culture, their recollections of these constantly reused melodies both within and outside of London’s theaters, and the visually recognizable format of the broadside ballad artifact itself. Although twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholars often ignore the aurally circulating tunes associated with the broadside trade or dismiss them as ephemeral, theatrical references to ballad tunes and the common practice of intertexuality in the broadside trade throughout the seventeenth century depended upon the free circulation of ballads in early modern society, the collective memory of consumers, and a sense of musical permanence.5 By analyzing how early modern thinkers believed memory worked, and its affinities with contemporaneous music and drama, I demonstrate how broadsides and their tunes could function as mementos, albeit unstable ones, and redefine our understanding of early modern theatrical space. Even though mnemonics was considered a learned art, the methods a practitioner employed to store and recall information resembled the intertextual processes in the broadside trade and their relationships early modern performance spaces as “memory theater,” even beyond the public stage.6 Memory mediates and complicates the liminal space broadside ballads occupied in early modern English culture as well as the circulation of their tunes through various places and social classes, further destabilizing the categories of public and private places for performance, preservation and unpredictability, material and ephemeral, music and text, and aural and written traditions.
Figure 7.1 The Broadside Ballad A Warning for Wives (1629) to the Tune of “Bragandary.” Pepys Library 1.118–119, © Magdalene College, Cambridge.
Ars memoriae, or the memory arts as devised by Classical thinkers, and rendered into striking visual form by seventeenth-century Hermetic philosopher Robert Fludd, were designed to organize knowledge into memory systems by using images and places. To aid in categorization, storage, organization, and recollection of knowledge, most memory schemes were built around the mental practice of converting ideas into specific, fixed material objects such as pictures and architectural spaces. Originally conceived as a tool for the orator, this technique employs images and architecture as mental repositories through which one might train oneself to store and recall, for example, long passages of text. For early moderns, memoria describes the mental faculty that stores information, the site of that storage (the rear portion of the brain), the images stored, and the process through which storage occurs, or memorization.7 Recollection is how these images and information are retrieved. While the individual definitions of memoria, recollection, and remembering are largely synonymous, their nuances hint at a continuum from individual, cognitive practice to cultural memory: “At one end, ‘memory’ is an internal, cognitive operation (as in ‘the art of memory’), and at the other, it describes as set of material practices with an indeterminate relationship to that operation (as in rituals that are the expression of ‘collective’ or ‘social’ memory).”8
Theater as place, or locus, is intimately related to the memory arts. Theater or theatrum, first theorized by Greco-Roman, medieval, and later echoed by early modern humanist thinkers, was an ideological construct with linkages to learning, imagery and visual culture (sharing a stem with the word theory meaning “a looking”), and pedagogical tools. Classical writers such as Terence and Donatus, widely read by English humanists, imagined the theater an as “imitation of life” or the “image of truth” that could affect the character of society by mirroring didactic concepts such as morality.9 Separate from the physical, performative space we associate with the early modern English dramatic tradition, early humanist writers perpetuated these concepts by defining theatrum as a “looking place,” a monument upon which to meditate on the greatness of Roman culture, and a “large book that claimed to contain knowledge in a visual or visualizeable form.”10 Late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century theater buildings were circular, a design with clear cosmological significance. Indeed, the Globe’s name implies all that it represented: a self-contained mirror of the world, a circle of learning, a “wooden O,” or theatrum mundi.11 These humanist ideas informed how early modern writers on mnemonics constructed their memory theaters. Robert Fludd, believing one should not use fictitious memory places when devising mnemonic schemes, created his in the form of a theater now believed to have been modeled after a public amphitheater, or, more specifically, the Globe: “I call a theatre (a place [locus] in which) all actions of words, of sentences, of particulars of a speech or of subjects are shown, as in a public theatre in which comedies and tragedies are acted.”12 Fludd designed his “memory theater” as constructed from a variety of distinct building materials with five doors or entrances opposite five columns that served as the memory loci. Jonathan Willis, in his seventeenth-century memory treatise Mnemonica, also created a repository, or memory scheme using an imagined architectural structure, fashioned after a theater which he defined thus: “A Repository is an imaginary fabrick, fancied Artificially, built of hewen stone, in form of a Theater.”13 Yet these static, imagined memory theaters stand in stark contradiction to the dynamic performative spaces that were first constructed in London during the 1560s. While the ideology of the theater explains its connections to the memory arts and as a powerfully efficacious “vehicle for displaying worldly knowledge” and social control, it is at the same time at odds with the realization of late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theater as a constantly mutable experience in which the audience is diverted and entertained through music and acting. Analyzing these “diversions” through the ars memoriae, however, exposes the contradictions performed music, theater, and balladry presented in early modern English culture as they straddled oral/aural and written traditions, spatial and class boundaries, and material and performative formats.
Despite these contradictions, the similitudes among theater, music, and memory persist. Seventeenth-century playwrights consistently relied on their audiences’ abilities to recollect fragments of song and passing mentions of balladry to create characters and allusion. Music is often literally and figuratively “in between” in drama; it opened and closed theatrical performances, announced the entrance of important characters, accompanied banquets, and sounded between acts. Music also bridged moments of fiction and reality, interiority and exteriority. One oft-discussed moment is Desdemona’s “Willow Song” in act 4 of Shakespeare’s Othello. Interrupted by her servants, Desdemona sings fragments of an “old song,” or ballad, she recalls from her childhood. Music signals her introspection and a suspension of time, yet a knock at the door quickly draws her back to reality.14 Erin Minear similarly notes the liminality created by musical memories such as Desdemona’s. Music can be elusive, vanishing as soon as it sounds. At the same time, however, in drama
it persists, haunting the memory with the reverberations of half-recalled and half-forgotten phrases. . . . Perhaps the most startling aspect of these musical memories is that the remembered music never remains fully in the past: recollection stimulates repetition and return, breaking down the distinction between memory and experience. To sing or hear a familiar song—or a fragment of song—makes memory experience, and vice versa.15
One of the most striking examples of elusive and fragmentary music in early modern drama is Ophelia’s mad scene in Hamlet wherein she sings, frequently interrupted, snatches of popular and bawdy ballads. In her influential reading of this scene, Leslie Dunn views Ophelia’s performance of broadside ballads that included laments, sexual innuendo, and phallic puns as indicative of disruptive feminine behavior.16 Shakespeare’s audience must stitch together their memories of these ballad fragments and allusions to understand the transgressive nature of the scene, Ophelia’s mental state, and her ultimate demise.
Dramatists often present theater itself as a kind of memory—that is, a representation, or a recollection—one that intimately relies upon time and duration, much like music. Dialogues could be created between dramatist and audience with the actor as intermediary. Dramatists make reference to memory and forgetting as a kind of acknowledgment of the conditions of drama and the play-acting experience.17 Early modern theatrical works also relied upon audience recollection for the purposes of not only allusion, as discussed above, but also communicating didactic exemplars. Thomas Heywood, in his Apology for Actors, notes that memories of a play or particular characters were so powerful they could affect positive behavioral changes in audience members through the presentation of exemplary traits:
If wee present a forreigne History, the subject is so intended, that . . . by sundry instances, either animating men to noble attempts, or attaching the consciences of the spectators, finding themselves toucht in presenting the vices of others. If a morall, it is to perswade men to humanity and good life, to instruct them in civility and good manners, shewing them the fruits of honesty, and the end of villany.18
The early modern theater, in constant conversation with the broadside trade, functioned as a powerful mnemonic scheme, a real and imagined architectural space, a mirror of the world, a didactic tool, a repository of knowledge, and as a communal performative experience. The playhouse, as a public performance space and the street or home as “stageless” theater, reinforced and subverted the music and images present in the broadside trade, dynamic spaces that stood in stark contradiction to the static “monument” or theatrum upon which they were modeled.
Music and theater are also intimately related to early modern mnemonic systems in more concrete, practical ways. For example, drama and music are rhythmic, melodic, and temporal arts; ballad sellers and play actors performed from memory, many learning by rote. Additionally, musical and mnemonic systems share the common object of the image—that is, in the written tradition music relies on the spatial representation of pitch and duration in notation.19 Scholars cite the pictorial nature of musical notation itself as akin to the theory of memory’s transfer from the aural to the visual fields. The medieval pedagogical aid devised by Guido d’Arezzo to teach sight singing, the Guidonian hand, is another example of converting the immaterial to the material, or sound into spatial representation. Musicians adapted the systems of ars memoriae when learning music by affixing the order of pitches against a background scheme of “places” (or loci to use Fludd and Tinctoris’s language), or the joints and fingertips, with each place corresponding to a letter or pitch.20 Cicero explains this transfer—the imprint of music (abstraction) into figures (the material object)—in his De Oratore when he writes that
perceptions received by the ears or by reflexion can be most easily retained in the mind if they are also conveyed to our minds by the mediation of the eyes, with the result that things not seen and not lying in the field of visual discernment are earmarked by a sort of outline and image and shape so that we keep hold of as it were by an act of sight things that we can scarcely embrace by an act of thought.21
Guido’s medieval memory system, and its transference of the abstract to the material, was still very much present in the early modern consciousness at the turn of the seventeenth century. For example, Samuel Pepys, a ballad collector, delighted in visiting Bartholomew Fair in central London near the meat market and often entertained his friends by reading “new ballets,” one in particular “made from the seamen at sea to their ladies in town.”22 There is also evidence he may have copied down the tunes he heard there—transferring the auditory memory of his experience to the visual through musical notation—perhaps to preserve these performances in the same way he meticulously collected broadsides themselves.23 The famous music lesson scene in Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew makes reference to this medieval spatial scheme as representation of sounding pitch when Bianca recites the gamut, referencing the first and lowest pitch of the scale as closest to the earth: “‘Gamut,’ I am, the ground of all accord.”24 Western theories of memory focus on the visual, privileging it as the form of perception that grants stability to memory storage.25 Yet this scene, like the practice of tune indications on broadsides and printed versions of plays, demonstrates a common trend in early modern culture—that is, the consistent tendency to translate acoustic material into visual forms. These translations, often fraught with complications, are akin to the liminal position broadside ballads occupied in early modern English culture when they circulated as, at any given moment, material objects, imagery, and domestic and public entertainments.26
Like Guido’s hand or musical notation, the ways in which ballads and their tunes were consumed and displayed position them as powerful forms of mnemonic imagery. The seventeenth-century fixation on the visual—emblematics, print culture, symbolism, and allegory—can be seen in not only the learned arts but also in popular prints, religious ceremonies, public spectacles, and of course broadside balladry.27 In his 1631 Whimzies: or, a New Cast of Characters, Richard Brathwaite described ballad sellers in public houses and taverns, where their wares were displayed as “lasting-pasted monuments upon the insides of Country Alehouses.”28 Brathwaite’s choice of words here—“monuments”—should not go unnoticed. Ballad sellers, as Braithwaite described, were frequent fixtures in the “Chimney corner[s]” of alehouses, drinking and singing, while their penny sheets were affixed to the walls. Decades earlier Nicholas Bownde commented on the “vain songs” that cottagers sing “though they cannot read themselves, nor any of theirs, yet will have many Ballades set up in their houses, that so they might learne them, as they shall have occasion.”29 There is a long tradition of displaying didactic text and images—including broadsides, emblems, scripture, and moral inscriptions—on the interior walls of early modern English public and private spaces.30 A “national network of communications,” taverns, inns, and alehouses in both city and country pasted “row[s] of Balletts” upon the walls for communal display and singing, while balladmongers sold their wares among the patrons.31 As in Bownde’s description, ballads were also a popular form of decoration in homes of modest means. “Artificers” and “poor husbandmen” papered their walls with broadsides. Abraham Holland also remarks in 1625 that in the “North-villages” “o’re the Chymney they some Ballads have/ Of Chevy-Chase.”32 Surrounded by image, public display, and communal singing, a large and varied number of early modern English citizens from a diverse range of social classes had the opportunity to see and experience ballad performance and its standardized visual format.
The standardization of the broadside ballad as “image” occurred in the early decades of the seventeenth century, a phenomenon crucial to categorizing the broadside as a memento that could influence all those involved in its consumption. Instrumental in this shift was the creation of the “ballad partners.” The ballad partners were formed on November 6, 1624, when the court of the Stationers’ Company allowed Thomas Pavier and his associates John Grismond, Henry Gosson, and the brothers John, Cuthbert, and Edward Wright to register their ballads “heretofore disorderly printed without entrance or allowance.”33 The partners—and their subsequent generations—consolidated their inventory of popular stock ballads and other print items into shared warehouses with the goal to increase distribution and circulation of their product in “a familiar format.”34 The ballad partners were instrumental in shaping and standardizing the appearance of broadside ballads. Woodblock prints were “one of the best indications of a growing commercial sense in the ballad trade, and an awareness of the demands of the public . . . with the growing prevalence of the style which dominated for most of the seventeenth century: the two-part folio sheet with a row of woodcuts along the top.”35 Another addition to the standard visual appearance of the broadside ballad emerged in the early seventeenth century: indications of tune titles.36 This information almost always appeared directly beneath the broadside title as a separate line of text that was expected and understood, if not completely intelligible, for semiliterate audiences. In his historical and structural analysis of the seventeenth century, José Antonio Maravall describes this manipulation of human conduct through formalized imagery as “guided culture”:
It was a matter of a statistical knowledge serving as the foundation for this “engineering of the human” that came to be baroque culture. The technification of political behavior in the prince . . . was not expressed in a mathematical formula but in symbols. These symbols may have been of very remote origin, but from Machiavelli to the individuals of the baroque they underwent a process that divorced them from their magical references, turning them into a conceptually formalized language.37
This same process is at work in the standardization of the broadside ballad format and imagery. The predictable appearance, or “language” to use Maravall’s term, of the broadside—from the position of text and stock woodblock imagery to its appearance on walls in public and domestic spaces—helps to fashion them as efficacious memory images around which communal discussion, education, and indoctrination could occur.38
Greco-Roman and even early modern treatises suggest that auditory memory—which was temporal—was most efficacious when fixed to an image or a spatial scheme. The medieval philosopher and theologian Albertus Magnus wrote that “something is not secure enough by hearing, but it is made firm by seeing.”39 In the 1697 English translation of Marius D’Assigny’s treatise on mnemonics, he agrees “That the Eyes of the Understanding, and consequently Memory, are carried more easily to the things that are seen, than to those that are heard.”40 Jonathan Willis espouses a similar opinion in Mnemonica when he writes:
Memory is quickened by Idea’s [image/pictures] is thus manifest: No man is ignorant, that Memory is stronger conversant about sensible things then about insensible; and of sensible things, those which are visible make deepest impression; therefore things heard are more firmly retained in Memory, then those which are barely conceived in mind, & things seen better then those which are heard, according to the Poet:
Things heard in mind no such impression make,
As those whereof our faithful eyes partake,
And whereof we our selves spectators are.41
The best images to use as memory aids, according to these early treatises, were active and striking, capable of arousing emotional affect through unusual imagery and aiding memory, from the comic and obscene, to the beautiful or grotesque.42 Broadsides also contain a diversity of visual information—from text size and font style, to woodcuts of human figures, landscapes, or scenes—in a very predictable, and recognizable, format. The woodcuts adorning the top third of the folio were often quite striking as well. To cite only one example, A Warning for Wives contains images that communicate the story in the text below, by picturing on one side a woman standing over a supine man and on the other a graphic image of, ostensibly, the same woman burning alive at the stake. (See again figure 7.1.) In early modern English society, a woman convicted of murdering her husband with a pair of shears, as Katherine Francis did in the ballad text version of this story, was sentenced to burn at the stake.43 This was the same punishment bestowed upon those committing high treason, suggesting the crime for usurping the household hierarchy by murdering its “ruler” was akin to regicide. The pictorial images on A Warning for Wives are striking in their diversity—they contain figures relating the crime and its consequence—and also functioned in a didactic manner. While ballad tunes and their aural performances were ubiquitous, the visual presence of broadsides usually accompanied them in some way either in the hands of a seller, pasted to the walls, or on display in a shop window. In this sense, the broadside itself functions as a memento, or a mnemonic image, to remember the tune (the title of which was always clearly indicated in a predictable location, suggesting semiliterate consumers were capable of understanding the image and its implications), the didactic example, or the theatrical performance of its verses. Brathwaite’s description of broadside ballads as “lasting-pasted monuments” speaks to their ability to function with some degree of permanence, impressing their visual and aural information upon a consumer, and aiding in the recollection, and sometimes the complication, of a particular tune or performance.44
The common practice of changes in tune titles is another illustration of broadside authors relying upon, and stimulating, their audience’s collective memory through sound and image. Several extremely popular seventeenth-century tunes illustrate the mutability of the broadside ballad in the public consciousness, and their close associations with theatrical works. The popular broadside trade melody “Fortune My Foe” was used at the end of the sixteenth century to accompany a ballad on the ill-fated magician Doctor Faustus.45 Later in the seventeenth century, ballads employing the same poetic meter and stanza length appear, calling for their verses to be sung “to the tune of Doctor Faustus.” Most of these later texts in some way recall the original subject material of the Doctor Faustus ballad—that is, witchcraft, the supernatural, the last testaments of criminals, warnings, and grisly murder narratives. Other tunes enjoyed these multiple iterations throughout the seventeenth century. The late-sixteenth-century tune “Bragandary” took at least two alternate titles—“Monstrous Women” and “O Folly Desperate Folly”—from the memorable refrains, or burdens, of the broadside texts with which it was paired.46 (See table 7.1.) From a protocapitalist standpoint, these cross-references could be designed to aid in the recollection of a particularly popular broadside, and thus increase the sales of the new publication. This practice also suggests that while a ballad tune itself altered very little, at least in essential structure, these title changes indicate that the “image” of the tune indication on the broadside—a standard visual feature of the print form for over a century—was involved in some sort of extramusical communication to the consumer.
Intertextuality or cross-reference, a common practice in the broadside trade that relied upon collective memory, could also be reinforced through theatrical works.47 The tune metamorphoses of “Fortune My Foe” and “Bragandary” were supported through not only the public circulation of ballads in theaters and the street trade but also in domestic spaces. In Margaret Cavendish’s closet drama The Comical Hash (1668), the Lady Censurer recalls an instance in which she was implored by the ladies at court to sing “an old Song out of a new Ballad”:
I was to sing them a Song for my money; so I sung them an old Song, the burden of the Song, Oh women, women, monstrous women, what do you mean for to do? but because the Song was against women, they would have had me given them their money back again . . . so then I sung them Doctor Faustus that gave his Soul away to the Devill; for I knew Conjurers and Devills pleased women best.48
The broadside ballad melodies the Lady Censurer mentions are well known to her courtly audience—that is, she references only the burden, or refrain, of an “old Song” by which she means a ballad. In commenting that the song “Oh Women, Women, Monstrous Women” is “against women,” she implies her listeners would recollect the various broadside texts to which “O Women Monstrous Women/ Bragandary” was set—in this case, those describing female crimes and witchcraft trials. Settling on the tune “Doctor Faustus,” she also demonstrates her audience would have been familiar with a century-old melody and could vividly recall the dozens of murder and witchcraft broadsides with which it was paired. Another such instance of theatrical allusion occurs in Samuel Rowley and Thomas Dekker’s drama The Noble Souldier (1634) when the character of the Poet is asked to write a libel on the subject of the King. The consequence of this treasonous act, the Poet fears, will be ballads “sung to the hanging tune” (i.e., “Fortune My Foe” or “Doctor Faustus”) about his miserable end:
Table 7.1 Selected Seventeenth-Century Broadsides Set to “Bragandary.”
1English Short Title Catalogue.
The King! shoo’d I be bitter ’gainst, the King,
I shall have scurvy ballads made of me,
Sung to the hanging tune. I dare not, Madam.49
In these disparate dramatic works for courtly, domestic, and public audiences, playwrights rely on their listeners to recall the various broadside texts that the mention of a tune might evoke. The ars memoria and its affinities with music and theater help us expand our definition of the “theatrical space” in early modern English culture—that is, a ballad melody’s mnemonic function and its circulation among staged and “stageless” spaces reconfigure the home, theater, and street as interrelated performative loci.50
Audiences could further reinforce their memories of ballad tune performances through the mnemonic device of image by purchasing a broadside set to the tunes they heard in the theaters from sellers both within and outside of the playhouse, or even one of the many broadside ballad versions of contemporaneous theatrical works including, for example, Shakespeare’s King Lear and Titus Andronicus.51 Broadsides and the theatrical performances thereof functioned as visual aids to memory—plastered upon walls in communal spaces both public and private, read at home, acted on a stage, or sold and collected as mementos sometimes within or directly outside of the amphitheater itself.52 Broadsides moved fluidly between these performative venues and visual formats, and their reception both within and outside of London’s theaters was complicated by performance and the intricate histories of the music accompanying their verses. These histories were, in turn, confused by the unruly and unpredictable memories of audiences. Standing in stark contrast to the controllability of humanist theater, seventeenth-century playwrights and ballad authors capitalized on these uncertainties when crafting their entertainments.53
In the passage from Congreve’s The Old Batchelor that opened this chapter, Heartwell, for fear of being a cuckold undone by love, lamented that his story would be sung in ballad to tunes such as the “Superanuated Maidens Comfort” or the “Batchelors Fall.” There is no record of tune titles such as these in the late-sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English broadside trade. More likely, these are puns on existing tunes such as “The Ladies Fall” or “The Poor Man’s Comfort,” melodies that had long been paired with narratives about unfortunate women, supernatural events, or henpecked husbands. “The Ladies Fall” often accompanied verses about jilted brides and other stories of women wounded by the men who loved them.54 Heartwell capitalizes on this history and the collective memory of his audience by making reference to the title here, substituting himself, the “Batchelor,” as the object of pity. The Poor Man’s Comfort, on the other hand, is the title of a 1684 broadside to the tune of “Fair Angel of England,” the text being a dialogue between “a despairing Husband and a comfortable wife.” Later, the tune title “The Poor Mans Comfort” appears on several other broadsides during the seventeenth century, including one titled The Poor Mans Councellor, an obvious reference to the original sheet and published the same year. This time, instead of cautionary tales and moralizing advice for women, as was the case with ballads set to “The Ladies Fall,” the advice associated with this melody is directed to the bachelor on how to choose the proper wife. The ballad instructs the listener to select a spouse that is “loving and kind,” but not “froward” or else she’ll “lavishly spend.”
The Poor Mans Comfort is also the title of a Jacobean tragicomedy by Robert Daborne originally acted at the Cockpit amphitheater around 1618 but revived in the Restoration.55 The play depicts Gisbert, a shepherd whose daughter is abandoned by her nobleman husband. Gisbert’s quest for justice leads him on a journey during which he must navigate a society filled with characters representing vice, from whores to corrupt lawyers. Congreve mines his audience’s collective memory in this passage wherein Heartwell bemoans his fate as a cuckold and whose story will be accompanied by tunes known for the misfortunes of young ladies. He demonstrates that as late as 1693, his audience would have been familiar with contemporaneous dramatic works, domestic and public broadside display, ballad trade tunes, and the typical texts associated with those tunes. Congreve’s allusions require the audience to recall printed ballads containing these tunes, and the kinds of ballad texts with which they were routinely paired, through a complex web of theatrical reference, musical recollection, and communal remembering.
The “lasting-pasted monuments” affixed to the walls of Tudor-Stuart homes were plastered and painted over throughout the centuries. Printed on heavy, cheap paper, these penny sheets were used for all manner of household and hygienic tasks.56 While the late-seventeenth-century antiquarians Anthony Wood and Samuel Pepys aimed to preserve broadsides in their personal collections, they often haphazardly trimmed and cropped the original sheet to fit in their scrapbooks, and reshuffled and reordered pieces of a single broadside, further fragmenting the ostensibly fixed “material object.”57 The disintegration, dismemberment, and disregard of broadsides continued through the nineteenth century. Yet, to be “chronicled in ditty” connotes the idea of preservation—that is, Congreve’s Heartwell is concerned he will be stigmatized through song in a lasting way. In her important study on voice and agency in early modern England, Gina Bloom challenges the definition of “the material” as visible and tangible by theorizing the relationship among voice, theatrical performance, gender, and agency: “Invisible yet substantial, ephemeral yet transferable, voice destabilizes any easy assumptions about the category of matter.”58 Considering the intertexual practices at work in the broadside trade through the lens of ars memoriae further complicates these ostensibly fixed categories of the material and immaterial. The standardized visual image of the broadside, coupled with the performative experience of ballads in the theater, home, street, and communal gathering spaces again destabilizes the notion of the “tangible” object and the “ephemeral” voice elegantly problematized by Bloom. Tunes were mutable—changing titles and associations with specific subject material over the century—and yet permanent enough in the collective memory of seventeenth-century ballad consumers, home audiences, and playgoers that a complex system of intertextuality and cross-reference could exist between these seemingly disparate theatrical spaces. The fixed, didactic nature of the ars memoriae, like the broadside print artifact and humanist theater, is complicated when translated to the realm of performance. The imagined theatrum presupposed an audience that emphasized decorum, “consistency, uniformity, and the coordination of characters with ‘appropriate’ and therefore expected roles,” one that “responded predictably and homogeneously.”59 While humanists, and also the playwright Thomas Heywood, believed in the didactic capabilities of theater, they could not control the audience’s responses and behaviors, as well as the co-optation of texts, references, and, most especially, the circulation of music beyond the “wooden O.” The memory arts were similarly problematic. Though they were designed to “affix” knowledge in the mind of the practitioner, the primary metaphor for the process of imprinting information was a wax tablet, a surface that could be wiped clean and easily remolded.60 Broadside ballads as material objects—easily recognizable and ubiquitous—were capable of extending the life of a tune, converting its acoustic properties to visual imagery, naming it on the page, and rendering it more permanent in the minds of consumers. Yet the material object eventually disintegrates and the song’s memory is perpetuated through constant, mutable, and unpredictable performative references within the ballad trade and theatrical productions. Detached from their original referents, tunes will become unruly agents, possessing lives of their own as misremembered “monuments.”
1. Congreve, The Old Batchelor, 20.
2. For more information on the standardization of the broadside ballad’s visual format, see Watt, Cheap Print, 64–79.
3. See Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, sig. M1, and Brown, Britannia’s Pastorals, sig. C2r for descriptions of various spaces both public and private that broadside ballads were performed.
4. See Williams, “‘A Swearing and Blaspheming Wretch,’” 309–356.
5. Many recent studies in literary history and popular culture privilege ballad texts over tunes and performance issues. See, for example, Fumerton, Guerrini, and McAbee, Ballads and Broadsides in Britain, 1–10; Würzbach, The Rise of the English Street Ballad, 1–27; Shepherd, The Broadside Ballad, 18–23; Clark, Women and Crime, 70–86; Dolan, Dangerous Familiars, 1–19. For existing studies on broadside trade tunes, see Simpson, The British Broadside Ballad and Its Music; Ward, “Apropos the British Broadside Ballad and Its Music,” 28–86; Poulton, “The Black-Letter Broadside Ballad and Its Music,” 427–437; Chappell, The Ballad Literature, 254–384; for more current contextual studies of the broadside and its music, see Marsh, “The Sound of Print,” 171–190, and Music and Society, 225–327; Smith, Acoustic World, 168–205; Duffin, Shakespeare’s Songbook, 15–42, and “Ballads in Shakespeare’s World,” 32–47.
6. For excellent texts on the memory arts in early modern Europe, see Minear, Reverberating Song, 1–16; Iselin, “Myth, Music, and Memory,” 173–186; Cressy, “National Memory in Early Modern England,” 61–73; Ivic and Williams, Forgetting in Early Modern English Literature, 1–17; Carruthers, The Craft of Thought, 7–59; Bolzoni, “The Play of Images,” 16–65, and The Gallery of Memory, 236–259; Sherlock, Monuments and Memory, 197–230; Engel, Mapping Mortality, 1–11, and Death and Drama, 389–393; Hiscock, Reading Memory, 1–36; Wilder, Shakespeare’s Memory Theater, 10–13, 24–58. See also the following primary sources on the memory arts and drama in early modern English culture: Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, 31–34; Agrippa, Of the Vanitie and Uncertaintie, sig. 24v–25r; Heywood, An Apology for Actors, sig. F3v.
7. Sullivan, Memory and Forgetting, 7. See also Yates, The Art of Memory, 11–12 for a more recent and particularly useful explanation of how to use a memory image and 2–4 for how to create a memory repository; Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 60–68. For early modern instructions on how to construct mental repositories, see Willis, Mnemonica, 61, 71–74; Willis, The Art of Memory, 1–10; D’Assigny, The Art of Memory, 83–90. In his preface to Mnemonica, Willis also describes the portion of the brain where images are stored as the “imaginative faculty” (sig. A5v). Fludd’s diagram on the intellect and the functioning of the senses from Utriusque Cosmi . . . Historiae (217) locates this area in the rear of the brain.
8. Sullivan, Memory and Forgetting, 6. See also Engel, Death and Drama, 32.
9. Quoted in West, Theatres and Encyclopedias, 46.
10. Ibid., 2, 44–45.
11. See West, Theatres and Encyclopedias, 45, 55. See also Smith, Acoustic World, 206–245.
12. Fludd, Utriusque Cosmi . . . Historiae, 55. See Yates, The Art of Memory, 330–354 for an explanation of why she believes Fludd envisioned the Globe in particular.
13. Willis, Mnemonica, 52.
14. See 4.3.52–53. For more on the “Willow Song,” see Austern, “The Music in the Play,” 450–454.
15. Minear, Reverberating Song, 10–11.
16. See Dunn, “Ophelia’s Songs,” esp. 58–61.
17. See Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 5.
18. Heywood, An Apology for Actors, sig. F1v.
19. For the purposes of this study, however, I am more concerned with the act of recollection as early modern treatises on memory made the distinction between rote learning and reminiscence. See Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 20; Enders, “Music, Delivery, and the Rhetoric of Memory,” 450–464; Busse Berger, Medieval Music, 1–8.
20. For more on the Guidonian hand and solfege as mnemonic aids, see Berger, “The Hand and the Art of Memory,” 87–120; Busse Berger, Medieval Music, 92–93; and Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 21–22.
21. Cicero, De Oratore, 357–358.
22. Pepys, Diary, May 15, 1668, 200; Pepys, Diary, January 2, 1665, 2.
23. Pepys wrote of one visit to the fair wherein he heard the popular tune “Mardike” but decided it was too “silly” and so “did not write it out.” This could perhaps indicate he did write out tunes he found interesting on occasion. Pepys, Diary, February 4, 1660, 41.
24. 3.1.71. Emphasis mine.
25. See Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 17–28 for the spatial nature of memory images.
26. See Minear, Reverberating Song, 10 and Iselin, “Myth, Music, and Memory,” 180. On the relationship between performance and printed plays in the seventeenth century, see Stern, Making Shakespeare, 137–158, and Documents of Performance, 160–168.
27. For more on the visual nature of seventeenth-century popular culture, see Maravall, Culture of the Baroque, 96–101.
28. Brathwaite, Whimzies, 9–11.
29. Bownde, Doctrine of the Sabbath, 241.
30. Watt, Cheap Print, 192–195. See also Fleming, “Graffiti,” 327, and Fumerton, “Not Home,” 493–518. See Maravall, Culture of the Baroque, 97, 99, on imagery used as a psychological tool to alter and educate mass culture.
31. Saltonstall, Picturae loquentes, sig. E10. See also Walton, The Complete Angler, 49.
32. Bownde, Doctrine of the Sabbath, 241–242. H[olland], A Continued Inquisition, 4.
33. See Watt, Cheap Print, 75.
34. Ibid., 74.
35. Ibid., 79. See also Thompson, “The Development of the Broadside Ballad Trade,” 64.
36. Watt, “Cheap Print and Religion,” 107.
37. Maravall, Culture of the Baroque, 64–65.
38. Tessa Watt’s influential study on cheap print examines how godly ballads, and in turn the “godly tunes” and woodcut imagery associated with them, were capable of shaping popular piety. See Cheap Print, 63–65, 150–168, and 248–250, in particular.
39. Quoted in Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 17.
40. D’Assigny, The Art of Memory, 65.
41. Willis, Mnemonica, sig. A5r.
42. Yates, The Art of Memory, 10–12. See also West, Theatres and Encyclopedias, 85–86, 102–106.
43. See Dolan, Dangerous Familiars, 20–25.
44. Musicologists have also noted a similar interplay of aural and visual learning at work in seventeenth-century emblem books containing musical allegories. Contemporary with the broadside ballad, emblem books were designed to teach lessons through cryptic but culturally significant pictures and poetic epigrams. See Austern, “The Siren,” 95–138, for more information on representations of music in emblem books and their relationship to sex roles in early modern England. See also, for example, Austern, “Nature,” 5–7; Simonds, Myth, Emblem, and Music, 13–28; Leppert, The Sight of Sound, 4–12.
45. A Ballad of the Life and Deathe of Dr. Faustus, the Great Cungerer (1589) and The Judgment of God Shewed upon Dr. John Faustus ([1658]).
46. For a more extensive table of broadsides set to “Bragandary,” see Williams, Damnable Practises, 76.
47. For a lengthier discussion of “Fortune My Foe” and “Bragandary” and their histories of circulation in the seventeenth-century performative arts, see Williams, Damnable Practises, 65–80, and “‘A Swearing and Blaspheming Wretch,’” 329–332.
48. Cavendish, Playes, 573. A play by Thomas May also contains a possible reference to this burden and tune. See May, The Heire, sig. H2r.
49. Rowley and Dekker, The Noble Souldier, sig. D4v.
50. For more on Cavendish’s knowledge of ballad tunes in particular, see Larson, “Margaret Cavendish’s Civilizing Songs,” 109–134. See also Larson, “Song Performance and Spatial Production,” this volume. For the transmission of ballad tunes to notated lute music, see Freeman, “The Transmission of Lute Music,” this volume.
51. See Titus Andronicus Complaint; The Tragical History of King Lear, though an earlier version titled The Tragecall Historie of Kinge LEIR and His Three Daughters appears in the Stationers’ Company register in 1605; A Newe Ballad of Romeo and Juliett was also registered with them in 1596.
52. For contemporaneous dramatic works referencing ballad sellers within the theater, see Filmer, A Defence, 32, and Cowley, The Guardian, sig. D3r. For other evidence of ballad sellers in and around amphitheaters, see Gurr, Playgoing, 55.
53. See West, Theatres and Encyclopedias, 118–121.
54. “Superannuated” could be a further satirical reference to an older woman’s lament as opposed to the young women and brides referenced in broadsides set to “The Ladies Fall.”
55. Daborne, The Poor Mans Comfort, sig. D3r.
56. These tasks included fire starters, book linings, and toilet paper; in his essay Of the Observation and Use of Things, Sir William Cornwallis mentions he makes use of broadsides in the “privy” wherein he employs them as “waste paper” (sig. I6–I7v).
57. For an excellent essay on the implications of these seventeenth-century collecting procedures, see Fumerton, “Remembering by Dismembering,” 26–28.
58. Bloom, Voices in Motion, 6. See also Dunn and Jones, Embodied Voices, 1–13.
59. West, Theatres and Encyclopedias, 118.
60. See Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 32–33.
