The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [45]
Ephemera also includes specimens of oral art, like ballads, which need to be collected lest they disappear. As the critic Susan Stewart suggests, the justification for the act of collection is the anxiety about disappearance, loss, or contamination, the waning of a supposed authenticity which, paradoxically, will itself be lost when the artifact, having become a work of literature, is removed from the context of performance and placed in the context of art.13 What this changed status for ephemera means is that items gathered under this rubric are not—if they ever were—ephemeral.
“Folkupmanship” and the Ballad
A ballad is a simple song or narrative that tells a story in verse. The category encompasses everything from medieval minstrelsy to printed broadside ballads celebrating or attacking individuals, events, and institutions.
Two familiar examples from Shakespeare will show something of the low or popular status of the ballad in the English Renaissance, and its complicated relationship with true reporting. In The Winter’s Tale, the rogue Autolycus presents himself as a peddler selling ballads, several of which, from their description (here offered by a clueless country servant who comically misstates the case), are of the sort that a modern newspaper might call unsuitable for family fare.
He hath songs for man or woman, of all sizes: no milliner can so fit his customers with gloves: he has the prettiest love-songs for maids, so without bawdry (which is strange); with such delicate burdens of dildoes and fadings, jump her and thump her.
The Winter’s Tale, 4.4.193–197
The ballads include one about a usurer’s wife who gave birth to twenty moneybags, and another about a woman who was turned into a cold fish because she would not sleep with her lover. The latter one sung by the fish, its veracity attested to by “historical” detail: it “appeared upon the coast on Wednesday the fourscore of April, forty thousand fathom above water, and sung this ballad against the hard hearts of maids” (276–279). One eager consumer is a shepherdess, who declares that she “love[s] a ballad in print, a life, for then we are sure they are true” (261–262). Her confident assertion might well serve as a warning to readers of all eras with respect to the automatic credibility of the media, whether printed or electronic. If art is in print, does it mean it is true?
Shakespeare’s other unquestioning believer in the truth-telling capacity of ballads is Bottom the weaver, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Having experienced with remarkable aplomb and lack of anxiety a physical transformation into an ass, an erotic relationship with the fairy queen, and a subsequent return to fully human form, Bottom decides that the best way to report the events he thinks he has dreamed is to transform them into a ballad. “I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream; it shall be called ‘Bottom’s Dream,’ because it hath no bottom; and I will sing it in the latter end of a play, before the Duke” (MND, 4.1.212–16). The ballad both contains the marvelous events and defuses them: art here makes the unbelievable believable, converting danger into pleasure.
Ballads began to be collected and published in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Among these early collectors were Samuel Pepys and Robert Harley, the First Earl of Oxford, and Mortimer, whose “Harleian Collection” is a main part of the British Library. Bishop Thomas Percy’s collected Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) inspired Wordsworth and Coleridge to publish their Lyrical Ballads (1798), which entered the world as what we would now call literature. Sir Walter Scott, similarly intrigued by Percy’s Reliques, set about collecting the ballads he would publish in 1802 in The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. But the popular appeal of Percy’s collection