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to love another as passionately. Like Siddal, Swinburne found fascination in the popular ballad and earmarked George Ritchie Kinloch’s fragmentary version of this same poem for inclusion in an (unfinished) anthology in preparation between 1859 and 1861. Given their closeness after her marriage to D. G. Rossetti in 1860 it is possible Swinburne was familiar with Siddal’s three preparatory sketches if not the finished article, yet these two works differ substantially in content. 1 The poem narrates events surrounding Saunders’s murder; Siddal’s interpretation
This book is the first edited collection of poems and songs written in the immediate aftermath of the Peterloo Massacre in 1819. Of the seventy or so poems included in the anthology, many were published as broadsides and almost half were published in radical periodicals, such as the moderate Examiner and the ultra-radical Medusa with many from the Manchester Observer. Although I have provided headnotes and footnotes to support the reading of the texts, I intend them to stand alone, conveying as much of the original publication as possible, in order not to dilute the authenticity.
Following an introduction outlining the events before, during and after the massacre as well as background information on the radical press and broadside ballad, the poems are grouped into six sections according to theme, rather than chronologically or by publication because I want the reader to note the similarity between so many of the poems. Grouped in this manner, one cannot avoid the voices echoing down the centuries, speaking to us of the horrors of the time in texts that can no longer be ignored. Shelley’s Masque of Anarchy is included as an appendix in acknowledgement of its continuing significance to the representation of Peterloo.
This book is primarily aimed at students and lecturers of Romanticism and social history. With the bicentenary of the massacre in 2019 and Mike Leigh’s forthcoming film, I envisage the potential for a wider readership of people interested in learning more about one of the most seminal events in English history.
10 The romance of the road in Athelston and two late medieval Robin Hood ballads Christine Chism This chapter explores the significance of roads as national connective tissue in Athelston, The Gest of Robin Hood and Robin Hood and the Monk. In Athelston, road-running across jurisdictions knits together diverse localities to catalyse more inclusive conceptions of England as nation.1 By contrast, the late medieval Robin Hood ballads explore the pitfalls intrinsic to such border-stepping nation-building, the resistant possibilities of strategic interruption and
This essay examines how Alice Thompson‘s novel, The Falconer (2008), creates a richly allusive Gothic weave by analysing its symbolic languages of myth, nature, and monstrosity, and how it reimagines and reinterprets other modes and texts associated with the Gothic, namely Du Maurier‘s Rebecca and the Bluebeard fairy tale, as well as Scottish ballad tradition and popular fairy belief. Mirroring the trope of metamorphosis which thematically and stylistically informs the novel, the essay also explores how these allusively poetic uses of Gothic become politicised in the portrayal of German Nazism and of traumatic historical memory.
This article considers the music of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds in terms of Gothic aesthetics. The music is Gothic not only in subject matter but also in its very performativity. It is notable for its poly-vocality and multi-genericality. I argue that Gothic music in general is characterised by a conceptual meta-level and demands a certain kind of listening: the auditor must be culturally cognisant, able to spot references to other musics and styles, and to conceive the music in terms of spaces, places and different temporalities. The last section analyses Nick Cave‘s descent into banality after Murder Ballads.
This is a companion to Pastoral poetry of the English Renaissance: An anthology (2016), the largest ever collection of its kind. The monograph-length Introduction traces the course of pastoral from antiquity to the present day. The historical account is woven into a thematic map of the richly varied pastoral mode, and it is linked to the social context, not only by local allegory and allusion but by its deeper origins and affinities. English Renaissance pastoral is set within the context of this total perspective.
Besides the formal eclogue, the study covers many genres: lyric, epode, georgic, country-house poem, ballad, romantic epic, drama and prose romance. Major practitioners like Theocritus, Virgil, Sidney, Spenser, Drayton and Milton are discussed individually.
The Introduction also charts the many means by which pastoral texts circulated during the Renaissance, with implications for the history and reception of all Early Modern poetry. The poems in the Anthology have been edited from the original manuscripts and early printed texts, and the Textual Notes comprehensively document the sources and variant readings. There are also notes on the poets and analytical indices of themes, genres, and various categories of proper names. Seldom, if ever, has a cross-section of English Renaissance poetry been textually annotated in such detail.
Impostors and impostures featured prominently in the political, social and religious life of early modern England. Who was likely to be perceived as impostor, and why? This book offers a full-scale analysis of this multifaceted phenomenon. Using approaches drawn from historical anthropology and micro-history, it investigates changes and continuities within the impostor phenomenon from 1500 to the late eighteenth century, exploring the variety of representations and perceptions of impostors, and their deeper meanings within the specific contexts of social, political, religious, institutional and cultural change. The book examines a wide range of sources, from judicial archives and other official records to chronicles, newspapers, ballads, pamphlets and autobiographical writings. Given that identity is never fixed, but involves a performative dimension, changing over time and space, it looks at the specific factors which constitute identity in a particular context, and asks why certain characteristics of an allegedly false identity were regarded as fake.
This book explores a range of literary and theatrical forms as means of mediating religious conflict in early modern England. It deals with the specific ways available to mediate religious conflict, precisely because faith mattered more than many other social paradigms. The first part explores the ways in which specific religious rituals and related cultural practices were taken up by literary texts. In a compelling rereading of the final act of 'The Merchant of Venice', the book investigates the devotional differences informing early modern observances of Easter. Subsequently, it explores the ways in which Christmas provided a confessional bridge uniting different religious constituencies. Goodnight ballads were not only commercially successful pieces of public entertainment but also effective forms of predominantly Protestant religious persuasion. The book's consideration of Elizabethan romance links the literary form to the sacrament of the Eucharist, and argues that the Eucharist debate had an impact on Elizabethan romances. The second part 'Negotiating confessional conflict' provides a rereading of When You See Me You Know Me, exposing the processes of religious reform as an on-going means of mediating the new normality of confessional plurality. It examines the potential of the tragic form by a reading of the play The White Devil, and discusses the ideological fault line in the views of witchcraft. The book also shows that Henry V anticipates later sermons of John Donne that served to promote 'an interrogative conscience'.
56 3 Singing in the counter: goodnight ballads in Eastward Ho Jacqueline Wylde At the end of Eastward Ho, a play written by Chapman, Jonson, and Marston and performed at the Blackfriars, Quicksilver the prodigal tells the musical story of his downfall –from his drunkenness and womanizing, to his disgraceful release from his goldsmith apprenticeship, to his offshore financial scheme –in his ballad entitled ‘Repentance’. It is, as he says, ‘all the testimony I shall leave behind me to the world, and my master, who I have so offended’.1 The song is the climax