So I'm interested in genres, somewhat longitudinally, from the 1580's through the end of the 1700's--the ballad, the sonnet, and the satire. The sonnet is the easiest of those to trace--it disappears after.. Milton? There aren't many written in the 17th century, I know, and I doubt there are many after the war, period. The ballad I need to study more, pending my questions from Friday. And the satire's trajectory I know a little more about: Marston, Donne, Weever, Guilpin, and Hall---Jonson---Oldham, Rochester, Cowley, Dryden---Pope. Of course, I haven't read most of those guys, and there's a lot that I'm missing, but that's all right for now. It's only books.
I went and read a few Elderton ballads--they're all very orthodox. I didn't see subversion there, so I guess I can't stop interpreting. But I could quite imagine a crowd of people singing them--there's a lot of content there.
In the future, I'm not allowed to stop writing to read things. It doesn't help and it doesn't give me time to think about what I read before I start writing again. So that's what I mean--I got distracted there.
Is part of the pleasure of a ballad finding new words to a tune you already know? so it's a pleasure of fittingness--topicality, plus the words fitting the tune? If that's the case, then it reconciles with my Puttenham/Gascoigne argument completely--the bad doesn't fit, and the good does fit.
How does this reconcile with the arguments about the theater? Is there anything about fit there? Can I find anything about fit in the ballad tradition more generally? I may need to look more closely at those rude rusticall ballad mongers as they come up in texts, to see if there's anything there.
Fit is easy in a ballad, of course--you just need to have the right emphases. One of the Elderton ballads I was reading had accent marks--I MUST check to see if those are authorial. If they are, that's REALLY interesting. (I'm capitalizing a lot.) I think it was the Northumberland or the poisoning King James ballad.
Treason is a topic for a number of ballads. Could they have been sold at executions? Rather--I'm sure they were sold at executions--were they also sold throughout the countryside in order to share news from London? Who else besides Elderton and Donnelly are writing ballads.
How old are the songs that these ballads are tunes for--Greensleeves, for example. What is the chain of transmission for those songs? Maybe Hollander's book will be more helpful than I thought.
Are all ballads mono-vocal, at least largely? These aren't like the court songs I've read so much about--they ain't Purcell. I need to talk to Susan about ballads at some point. I think she could be a great help. She's probably out of town, but hmmmm.
I must finish that doggone review. This sort of daily free-writing is only effective if I keep reading every day, or if I have a problem I'm working on, I'm afraid. I guess it did get me through four Elderton ballads, that now I know. But I'm totally squeezing it out today.
That's okay. I had a couple good ideas, and this is a discipline of showing up. Today, I have shown.
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