Post on 13-Mar-2023
Paper prepared for SAA, St Louis, 2014:
Ophelia, the Walsingham Ballad, and the Dis-enchantment of
the early Modern World.
Gary Waller, Purchase College, State University of New York
Investigating “sources,” intrusions by others into
Shakespeare’s texts, we might start by pondering Steve
Mentz’s helpful taxonomy: first, studies that are concerned
with author-centered imitatio or aemulatio: second, studies of
intertextuality, often observable only from historical
distance; and third, derived in part from Foucault and
postmodern Marxist considerations, the repertoire of claims
a text makes on later awareness of the ideological and
cultural surrounds of a text: as Macherey would put it, a
text’s place in history and how history enters a text in
both its absences and silences.1 My paper moves from the
first, traditional scholarly model, through the second and
briefly into the third; to use Mentz’s summary of his
discussion of sources in All’s Well, that Ends Well, I will in
brief be “exfoliating all three models provides a fuller
sense of how ‘source study’ can still affect critical
responses to Shakespeare.”2
As has long been recognized, a brief echo of what is
generally known as the Walsingham Ballad occur in the
1 Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, trans, Geoffrey Waller (London: Routledge, 1978), 86-88. 2 Steven Mentz, “Revising the Sources: Novella, Romance, and the Meanings of Fiction in All’s Well, that Ends Well,” in All’s Well that Ends Well: New Critical Essays, ed. Gary Waller (New York: Routledge, 2007), 57.
opening lines of Hamlet, Act 4, scene 5, in which the
bereaved and distracted Ophelia sings a plaintive lament,
seemingly a fragment of a song of lost love. The often
maligned but theatrically revealing Q1 of Hamlet reads:
“Enter Ofelia playing on her lute and her haire downe
singing”:
How should I your true love knowFrom another one?By his cockle hat and staff,And his sandal shoon. . . He is dead and gone, lady,He is dead and gone;At his head a grass-green turf,At his heels a stone.
Since the mid-eighteenth century commentators have
noted that the origin of these lines is a popular ballad
that mentions “the holy land of Walsingham.” Verity's
annotation in his 1904 edition noted that the song was “of
unknown authorship” and that “indeed, the composition of
ancient ballad-literature is probably 'communal' to a great
extent, not simply individual.”3 It would be over-valuing
its presence in the text to say that Ophelia is singing
this particular ballad: it is a snatch, as when any of us
hum perhaps the first stanza or riff of a popular song or
the opening bars of, say, the Beethoven Fifth.
It is the ‘source’ in question that makes this
particular pericope of such interest. In recent years,
scholarly scrutiny of this ‘intrusion’ has intensified.
3 The First Quarto of Hamlet, ed. Kathleen O. Orace (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1998), 79; A.W. Verity, ed., The Tragedy of Hamlet(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1904), 178.
2
Like the great shrine to the Annunciate Virgin at
Walsingham itself, in her deranged singing and in her
subsequent death, Ophelia has been “wasted”: the phrase is
Susan Morrison’s in her recent study of medieval and early
modern “waste.” Walsingham was, she argues, “literally laid
waste [and] became recycled,” in both its new guise as part
of the Henry Sidney estate and manor house and also “in the
imagination of English culture.” Ophelia’s body, she
argues, has likewise not just been wasted; it has become a
place where “anxieties about the trashing of the submerged
traditional religious past in England are played out and
reconstituted.”4
In his study of pilgrimage in English literature,
Philip Edwards states that Walsingham had little influence
on subsequent literature.5 It is an odd assertion since
there is a rich set of associations with Walsingham in
Elizabethan popular culture, both text and music, variously
nostalgic, adulatory, and hostile. The contradictory
cultural memories of Walsingham are part of a broader
process of “fades” and “traces” of the place of the Virgin
in early modern English culture which I have explored in a
number of studies. Here I explore the Walsingham Ballad’s
special place in that transition from a Mariocentric
culture to one in which the Virgin is repositioned or, as
4 Susan Morrison, “Ophelia, Waste, Memory,” in Dominic Janes and GaryWaller, eds., Walsingham in Literature and Culture From The Middle Ages to Modernity(Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 215.5 Philip Edwards, Pilgrimage and Literary Tradition (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2005), 24-44.
3
Christine Peters terms it, undergoes “adaptation” or
“reshaping,”6 an ideological shift that provides us with a
‘source’ in Mentz’s third sense for Ophelia’s lines.
By about 1590 and probably in the previous decade, the
Walsingham Ballad is well known. In Have with You to Saffron
Walden (1596), Nashe mentions it as if everyone would
understand the reference.7 As with other ballads, which
emerge in print out of a folk rather than a ‘literary’ or
elite culture, can we deduce some kind of original for the
Walsingham Ballad? Did the words get adapted to an existing
tune? Or was the tune written for the Ur-version of the
Ballad’s words? It is impossible to say. The relationship
between ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture is a vexed one in any
period. Ballads have long occupied an ambiguous position
between ‘high’ and ‘low’. Poets like Sidney might sneer at
the crudity of ballads and songs, but nonetheless echo them
in their writings. Many ballads were revived in the
eighteenth century as evidence of the rich folk element in
English life, and two hundred years later the Walsingham
Ballad itself is treated as ‘high’ cultural work,
especially in the version given a possible (though shaky)
attribution to Sir Walter Ralegh and incorporated into
elite musical and poetical discussions.
Yet to speak of ‘the’ Walsingham ballad is a misnomer
since, in this case, ‘it’ is really a family of both words
6 Peters, Patterns of Piety, 208, 223. 7 Thomas Nashe, Have With You to Saffron Walden, in Works, ed. R. B McKerrow (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958), III. 162.
4
and music. While the two are often combined both in
Elizabethan published and unpublished songbooks (and indeed
in modern performances and in religious ceremonies at the
modern shrine) each has a significantly distinct place
within the complexities of early modern England. I will
consider each, music and words, in turn, summarizing and
extending recent work by Morrison, Alison Chapman, Bradley
Brookshire and myself.
First, to the Walsingham tune. A definitive history is
hard to trace. But it was clearly ‘in the air’,
Approximately 30 versions and variations of what is
seemingly an Ur-tune can be found, in many collections,
published and unpublished, including the century’s premier
collections of keyboard songs, My Ladye Nevells Book and the
Fitzwilliam Virginal Book. My Ladye Nevells Book was arranged by
William Byrd, and includes his Walsingham variations as the
31st of 42 compositions. The Fitzwilliam book (which also
includes some of Byrd’s) opens with the spectacular
Variations by John Bull. Others composers who wrote
variations on the Walsingham tune include John Dowland,
Francis Cutting, Edward Collard, John Johnson, Anthony
Holborne and John Marchant.
Byrd’s and Bull’s deserve some closer analysis than a
simple survey of variants on the tune. Despite his strong
commitment to Catholicism, which can be dated from the
1570s, Byrd was employed in Elizabeth’s own chapel. Jeremy
Smith terms him the Shostakovich of his age, in that he
5
conformed to the regime but directed much of his work to
opposing it, at least in sentiment. As Master of the
Queen’s music, he dutifully composed for the Anglican
liturgy and celebrated the Queen in anthems like “O Lord,
make thy servant Elizabeth our queen,” and madrigals like
“This Sweet and Merry Month of May,” in which “Eliza” is
described as “the queen of second Troy.” But most of Byrd’s
music shows affinities with, if not outright allegiance to,
some of the age’s more militant recusant forces who were
actively trying to undermine the Elizabethan Settlement and
working to bring about England’s return to Rome. His
religious music is overwhelmingly preoccupied with what
Joseph Kerman terms “guilt-ridden prayers for mercy or at
least expressions of personal penitence,” laments for
Jerusalem, the destroyed city, or the Babylonian
captivity,” all themes that are easily interpreted in terms
of the religious situation in which Byrd and his fellow
recusants found themselves.8
Byrd’s Variations most likely date from the 1580s. His
opening notes, Brookshire shows, put the tune into a
distinctive musical context—not that of a traditional folk
ballad but his own religious works. Brookshire describes
the Walsingham composition as Byrd’s “Walsingham roman a
clef.” Several of Byrd’s other secular keyboard compositions,
such as The Carman’s Whistle or The Maiden’s Song, start with a
monophonic statement followed by second and subsequent
8 Joseph Kerman, “Byrd’s Settings of the Ordinary of the Mass,” Journal ofthe American Musicological Society 32/3 (1979), 408.
6
voices added for the later measures. But the Walsingham
Variations open much more emphatically, as if they were a
chorale work: a single cantorial voice gives the first two
bars; a tutti of 4–5 voices responds and then rises to a
complex cadence, a pattern that is repeated throughout, and
which mirrors the characteristic pattern not of his secular
ballads but of his motets. The cadence used in the
Walsingham Variations reflects the typical structure of the
Amens in the motets. William Palmer observes that “the
writing of elaborate and beautiful Amens to various motets,
anthems and liturgical settings seems to have been a
favourite practice … of Byrd’s day.” In employing a
structure distinctive to his religious works, Byrd clearly
intends to sacralize his Walsingham variations and so give
his audience with an audible clue to his and their sense of
Walsingham’s loss from late Elizabethan England. The
persecuted English Catholics, Brookshire argues, would have
immediately made the connection between the “Walsingham”
tune and their own plight. Byrd’s Walsingham variations may
have had particular resonance for the closely-knit
community of Norfolk recusants who gave him support and
patronage and for whom the sit of the great shrine was
likely a common sight. His Norfolk patron, Edward Paston, a
poet and musician as well as a collector and patron of
music, provided a refuge for East Anglian recusants at
7
Appleton Hall, which was located between Norwich and
Walsingham.9
In his adaptation and variants of a popular tune,
therefore, Byrd shows himself not simply as “snapper up”, a
composer able to adapt “unconsidered trifles” (Winter’s Tale
IV. iii. 26) but as “a master of covert speech in which the
musical codes” of the composition direct his audiences
towards a distinctive religious affirmation. Placing the
composition in the context of Elizabethan religious
nostalgia not only what Brookshire terms “the charred
embers” of its religious affirmations—“leveled,” he adds,
by modern “scholarly inattention as surely as the
Reformation laid waste to Walsingham itself”—but also how
Byrd’s specific stylistic features made clear his religious
allegiances.10 Byrd, no less than Shakespeare—though with
more explicit religious intents —was mourning for
Walsingham’s “bare ruin’d quiers” (Shakespeare, Sonnet 73).
The result is a composition in which nostalgia for
Walsingham is made to interrogate the Reformation, its
destructiveness, and the consequent spiritual
impoverishment of Elizabethan England, complex feelings
that lie behind Ophelia’s anguished outburst.
Bull’s Walsingham Variations, also found in the
Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, are musically more extravagant
9 Brookshire, “‘Bare ruin’d quires, where late the sweet birds sang’:Covert Speech in William Byrd’s ‘Walsingham’ Variations,” in Janes andWaller, Walsingham 209-17; William Palmer, “Byrd and Amen,” Music & Letters34 (1953), 140.10 Brookshire, 199–200, 202.
8
than Byrd’s, and in style certainly more flamboyant than
grave. They include “virtually every conceivable virginal
figuration known at the time,” though with the starting
melody remaining the top line throughout.11 Bull’s includes
one of the greatest (and among the longest, at 19 minutes)
keyboard pieces of the age; they are not simply a
demonstration of Bull’s remarkable musical virtuosity: the
passion and complexity of go far beyond what a setting of a
mere ballad would demand. By choosing the Walsingham tune,
like Byrd, Bull seems to be affirming his own commitment to
Catholicism and the memory of Walsingham. Both composers,
in short, take over a melody that had evidently become part
of Elizabethan folklore and elaborately and lovingly
enhance it. For both, the Walsingham tune becomes a
passionate expression of loss and defiance, no doubt all
the more able to be articulated as religious dissent
because, as music, it would escape the verbal scrutiny or
censure that a poem or prose diatribe might attract.
The Walsingham tune, then, seems to have had Catholic
associations. Now to the words, which from the start seem
to have been associated with the basic tune with which
Bull, Byrd and other composers worked, though they
11 John Gillespie, Five Centuries of Keyboard Music: An Historical Survey of Music forHarpsichord and Piano (New York: Courier Dover Publications, 1972), 55;David Yearsley, “The Esserzici Work-Out Book,” CounterPunch, Nov. 12-14,2010: www.counterpunch.org/yearsley11122010.html. The Walsinghamvariations have been recorded innumerable times, from the Virginaliststo the pop/rock singer Sting. See Sting, Songs from the Labyrinth (DeutscheGrammophon B000HXDESU, 2006). For a comprehensive list, and readyaccess to audio files, using Sibelius software, seewww.musicwww.co.uk/walsingham.htm.
9
eventually have a very different history. It was once
thought that the most famous version of the ballad, that
attributed to Ralegh, “As you came from the holy land,” a
dialogue between a male lover and a pilgrim, was the
original. Through its presence in anthologies and lists of
‘best poems,’ it has become widely accepted as part of the
canon of English poetry. It follows the common outline — a
forlorn lover encountering a pilgrim who is returning from
a pilgrimage to the “holy land of Walsingham,” and asking
if he has met his lost love. The pilgrim asks in return how
he might remember since he has met “many one,. . ./That
have come, that have gone.” She is immediately described in
the idealized platonic-petrarchan rhetoric so central to
the poetry of royal praise Elizabeth encouraged her
courtiers to use: “She is neither white nor brown,/But as
the heavens fair;/There is none hath a form so divine/In
the earth or the air.”12 Elizabeth, of course is the queen
not of Heaven, but of Protestant England, yet the
policicized Petrarchanism of the poem derives much of its
rhetoric from medieval Mariology. It is designed to evoke
the collective fantasy that the Elizabethan court is immune
to change—that it is a harmonious, static world, the
secular equivalent of the eternal world presided over by
the Queen of Heaven, when in fact it is in fact ruled by
12 Sir Walter Ralegh, Selected Prose and Poetry, ed. Agnes M.C. Latham (London: Athlone Press, 1965), 49-50. But for the dubious status of the poem within the Ralegh canon, see Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh: A Historical Edition, ed. Michael Rudick (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000).
10
change and unpredictability. The poem’s sentiments are a
parody of the devotion once accorded to the Virgin: Our
Lady of Walsingham has been transformed, but into an ageing
and unpredictable earthly goddess, a figure of royal power,
but a mortal not an eternal queen. Like the masochistic,
self-deprecating medieval worshipper of the Virgin, the
speaker is drawn irrevocably to her, knowing she determines
his salvation, and that even when most stern and
unyielding, she must be revered and worshipped. The “holy
land” becomes an idealization of the court; the “way” to
Walsingham becomes the pathway courtiers take to the
queen’s presence and from which he is now, like the lover,
excluded.
But as Alison Chapman has shown in a careful survey of
references to the ballad, just as the Walsingham tune
occurs in many versions and variations, the one dubiously
attributed to Ralegh is just one of a number of versions of
the poem. There are also, scattered across late Elizabethan
and early to mid-seventeenth century popular literature,
many variants as well as incidental references and echoes,
serious and parodic, especially of the first stanza in
which the ballad’s initial situation is established. This
variety seems once again to point to a broad familiarity
with a lost original—or, rather, a family of originals.13
The extant versions, whether whole poems or simply echoes,
13 Alison Chapman, “Met I with an old bald Mare”: Lust, Misogyny, andthe Early Modern Walsingham Ballads,” in Janes and Waller, Walsingham,217–32.
11
suggest that the basic situation is of a question-and-
answer dialogue an abandoned lover encountering a pilgrim
on a road—presumably since it is somewhere on a road to
Walsingham, the “Walsingham Way” or some reconstructed
memory of it—who is returning from the Shrine. Opening
lines vary: “As I Went to Walsingham,” “Have at you to
Walsingham,” and “As You Came from [the Holy Land of]
Walsingham.” Minor variations of a starting line are again
typical of adaptations of an original, typically communally
developed, perhaps from existing verses. In some versions
Walsingham has some explicit connection to the Shrine of
the Virgin, which might suggest it was written before the
Dissolution: “As I went to Walsingham to the shrine with
speed/ Met I with a jolly palmer in a pilgrim’s weed”—
though that most likely is a construct of nostalgia, not a
clue to dating, or else an instance of the timelessness of
the action at which many ballads aim. The bereft speaker
then bewails that his lover has also gone on pilgrimage to
Walsingham but has not returned. The key question is
whether the pilgrim has seen her and, asked how she would
be recognized, he attempts to describe her. That seems, at
least, to be the general starting point for most versions:
what follows may vary somewhat in tone as in information
and narrative. Bishop Percy’s eighteenth-century collection
of ballads includes another quite distinct narrative, a
dialogue between a pilgrim and a herdsman, starting “As I
went to Walsingham/ to the Shrine with pride.” The pilgrim,
12
who in at least two cases turns out to be a woman, is
wanting to learn the way to Walsingham so she may repent
and die as she has treated her lover so cruelly that he has
died and she wishes to join him. Shakespeare inverts the
gender roles in the Walsingham fragment in Hamlet: the
result is a reversal of the medieval “woman in motion”
where a wife, mother or maid could go on pilgrimage,
whereas by contrast, Ophelia is frozen in her place by her
role as daughter or a potential wife: “I hop'd,” confesses
Gertrude, “thou shouldst have been my Hamlet's wife” (5. 1.
245). 14
In short, the words and tune of “Walsingham” reflect
the typical ‘folk’ origins of the ballad form, with a
communal, network of intertextual sources rather than an
individual author. The ballad, says Mary Ellen Brown, is a
“ uid, dynamic practice”: fl simple in diction, direct in
narrative, focused in emotion, oral rather than visual,
communally based rather than individual.15 The Walsingham
ballad incorporates elements of all the three major groups
scholars of traditional ballads have distinguished in
collections from Bishop Percy onwards—the magical and
14 Alison Chapman, “Ophelia's "old lauds": Madness and Hagiography inHamlet,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 20 (2007), 111–35.15 Mary Ellen Brown, “Placed, Replaced, or Misplaced?: The Ballads’Progress,” Eighteenth Century, 47 (2006), 123; For the re-discovery of theBallad in the eighteenth century, see Percy, Reliques of Old English Poetry,183; Nick Groom, The Making of Percy’s Reliques (New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 1999), 52–4.; A Scottish Ballad Book, (ed.) David Buchan (London:Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), 1–2; G.L. Kittredge, “Introduction” to Englishand Scottish Popular Ballads, edited from the collection of Francis James Child (Boston:Houghton Mifflin, 1904), xi.
13
marvelous; the romantic and tragic; and the semi-
historical. Most ballads focus on love lost or won within a
narrative that evokes the emotions of conflicts directly,
sparely, almost impersonally, always stressing the
helplessness of the individual caught up in wider social or
cosmic forces. They grow from desires and needs that are
characteristically ideologically as well as stylistically
marginal to a dominant culture. Both the tune and words of
the Walsingham Ballad constitute the kind of folk-based
composition that might well have originated in small
informal groups, even gatherings around a fire, or at the
ruins of the shrine itself, and then picked up and
elaborated by travelling minstrels or poets or in
gatherings of recusants, especially in the many East
Anglian houses where the Catholic minority found support
and refuge.16
All the variants of the Walsingham Ballads, music and
words alike, have a specific (and absent) point of origin:
the existence, perhaps in the past, perhaps only (by around
1600) in legend, of the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham,
the “holy land,” as many of the versions describe it. To
what extent does the Walsingham ballad look back to the
ruined shrine of Walsingham itself? The different versions
of the ballad likely grew as yet another series of varied,
even contradictory, reactions to the loss of a specifically16 There are some perceptive remarks on the ‘origins’ of the WalsinghamBallad in S. F. Gillespie, Shakespeare and Elizabethan Popular Culture (London: Arden, 2006), 186–9. See also Beatrice Groves, Texts and Traditions: Religion inShakespeare 1592–1604 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 30.
14
Catholic, mariological dimension to English post-
Reformation life. They record the transformation of
Walsingham into a rich symbol of human loss, tragedy and
nostalgia, a shift that was both complex and still partial,
from the worldview represented by the great shrine in the
early 1530s, before the Dissolution, to the world that
Shakespeare’s Ophelia evokes, in her version of the Ballad,
two generations later. What is left of that older world?
Only traces. Yet the lost shrine of Walsingham still echoes
through the Ballad: its “holy land” represents an older
world implied by the nostalgia not only of Byrd’s recusant-
comforting tune, but the lines, and the unnamed and almost
un-namable sadness of the poem’s ending. It is not
coincidental that the Walsingham Ballad emerges into
Elizabethan consciousness in the last decade or more in the
century, in the restless post-Armada decade, when a number
of poets and dramatists are stating to sidle up to the
forbidden trappings of Catholicism.
But change is afoot. The more ‘secular’ versions and
references which, Chapman suggests, appear later in the
period, combine the lost love and tragic regret but the
religious significance of Walsingham has faded even if its
liminal suggestiveness remains.17 It is as if it has come
to represent something broader in the consciousness (and
the unconscious) of Elizabethans. Something, the age seems
to say, has been lost, whether that is youth or love or
17 Chapman, “Met I with an old bald Mare.”
15
identity, something which we cannot perhaps identify and
might be surprised to know where it came from and what its
‘original’ significance was. Late Elizabethans singing,
listening to, re-writing or just making casual reference to
the Walsingham Ballad may not have been aware of its
origins or (some, such as an Elizabethan Catholic like
Byrd, might argue) its continuing if neglected power. The
surfacing of poems and lyrics associated with Walsingham
gives us a specific focus for at least some of the age’s
unease.
One particular poem, also written in the 1590s, is by
Philip Sidney’s brother, Robert Sidney, later Earl of
Leicester, the cousin of the then-owner of what becomes
Walsingham Abbey, and the father of an eventual owner of
it. In Sidney’s Sixth Song, Our Lady of Walsingham makes a
fascinating and typically disruptive comeback. It is yet
another variant of the basic starting-point of the Ballad,
a faithful woman asking whether the pilgrim has met her
absent lover. We can hear the language and rhythms of the
Ballad in the background—and behind it the ur-tune upon
which Byrd and others were developing their variations.
These are, again, echoes suggesting the general
familiarity with a popular song and the shared starting
point of its story. But the universe the poem invokes is
hostile to any such idealization, and it does not seem to
provide any religious consolation: “Heav’n no more behold
doth he/He lies deep in dark grave.” The grieving Lady of
16
Penshurst Place, the Sidney’s great house in Kent, who
waits for her absent lover, is a domestic pietà, one who
replaces the sorrowing Lady of Walsingham. The original
Lady of Walsingham has been banished.18
The reworkings of the Walsingham ballad by (definitely)
Sidney and (dubiously) Ralegh mark the literary high points
of its poetical tradition. The evolution of the words and
their connotations takes a very different path in the
seventeenth century. With the music, the connotations
remain sympathetic to the Catholic sense of loss and
nostalgia; the words, however, become associated with
idolatry and sexual scurrility. In a number of texts in the
early seventeenth century, Walsingham becomes a place not
merely for contrition, punishment and death, but a symbol
of sexual depravity, as if the sexualization of the Virgin
that the Reformers saw in the medieval over-valuation of
Mary was now, more than fifty years later, being displaced
onto memories and associations of her great shrine. In her
study of this deviant tradition of the Ballad, Chapman
discusses allusions to Walsingham in works by Thomas
Deloney, George Attowell, in Beaumont and Fletcher’s The
Knight of the Burning Pestle, Francis Quarles’ The Virgin Widow, and
a number of anonymous plays and poems. Walsingham, she
argues, becomes “associated in the popular imagination with
sexual immorality, even long after its relationship to a
specific shrine in Norfolk had been half-forgotten.”
18 The Poems of Robert Sidney, ed. P. J. Croft (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984),185–95.
17
References to the Walsingham Ballad become “a kind of code
phrase for corrupt sexual practices,” to the point that, in
The Virgin Widow, simply “whistling the Walsingham tune
onstage is construed as a crude sexual insult.” Chapman
traces such references well into the seventeenth century;
they provide a “debased view of pilgrimage, one in which
men pursue women for corrupt ends and in which women prove
fickle and unreliable.”19 Such a development of the poem-
ballad reflects the Protestant view of Walsingham just as
surely as the tradition of musical variations, starting
with Byrd, reflects the Catholic.
Indeed, this process of dual traditions starts in
Hamlet itself. To what extent, we might ask, was
Shakespeare aware of the Catholic associations of the tune?
Does its presence connect with the blurring of Catholic and
Protestant references in the play, especially on the matter
of Purgatory, which Greenblatt and others have isolated?20
This is a play, after all, that takes a position on few of
the rich issues it raises: is the ghost to be trusted, from
Heaven, hell, or Purgatory (or just from beneath the
stage!), whether Hamlet delays or not, whether Gertrude
knows of Claudius’ crimes, whether Hamlet is mad,
disturbed, or play-acting. Within this complexity of
ambiguities, did Ophelia’s snatches, her allusions to
19 Chapman, “Met I with an old bald Mare, ” in Janes and Waller,Walsingham, 227.20 Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 2001).
18
Walsingham, and so to England’s Catholic past, reinforce in
Protestant minds suspicion of the Old Religion centered on
Walsingham as sexually corrupting? Or does the bleak
Protestant universe of (with the ambiguous exception of the
Ghost) Lutheran Denmark and Protestant England bring about
her madness and give her no comfort in the way traditional
religion would have? When Hamlet advises her to go to a
nunnery, what did that connote in Protestant England’s
audience? A false hope? A deluded attempt to escape? A
joke? Or a lost possibility of salvation of which her
madness reminds her in vain? Ophelia’s sexuality is
associated with decay and corruption: Laertes warns his
sister against the “canker” of sexuality and “contagious
blastments”; her father (Polonius in the fuller Q2 and F1
versions, Corambis in Q1) refers to Hamlet’s affections for
her as “ unholy suit/ Breathing like sanctified and pious
bawds” (Folio, I, iii, 39, 42, 129–30), and that his tokens
of love, erotically charged trinkets that serve as fetishes
of sexual desire, are “keys to unlock Chastity unto Desire”
(Q2, 4, 67-8). Hamlet himself is revolted by female
sexuality and thereby his own in what he obsessively
fantasizes over as his mother’s “rank sweat of an enseamed
bed / Stew’d in corruption and making love/Over the nasty
sty” (I, v, 93–4). Like the Reformers appalled at the
sexualization of the Virgin’s purity, Hamlet (in many ways
the epitome of Protestant self-consciousness) is repelled
by the association of sexuality and both actual and
19
potential motherhood.
So far my argument has brought together and in places
has extended work on the Walsingham Ballad in the past five
or so years by Brookshire, Chapman, Morrison and myself. I
want to conclude, moving onto Mentz’s third category of
“sources,” and anticipating a forthcoming book, look
briefly at a broader cultural patterns – some of
Macherey’s “absences” and “silences,” – behind the dual
tradition of the ballad’s word and music. Here, as so often
happens, Shakespeare’s use of the Walsingham Ballad
explores a deeply rooted cultural transition. Hamlet echoes
not just the Ballad celebrating a shrine dedicated to the
Virgin of the Annunciation but, presenting it with deep
irony, the Annunciatory experience itself. When Claudius
and Polonius ‘loose’ Ophelia to Hamlet, she takes up the
familiar posture of an isolated woman reading a book
subject to a visit from a male figure. Ophelia’s ‘orisons’—
her posing as a pious devotee with a prayer book — and
Hamlet’s quip about her getting to a nunnery, associate her
with the lost Catholic world. The curtains behind which the
two conspirators hide is also a familiar Annunciation
motif; Ophelia is addressed ironically as ‘gracious, so
please you’; in Q2, the reference is made more explicit by
Polonius’ remarking ‘that show of such an exercise may
colour/Your loneliness [or lowliness]’.21 She has rendered
21 Peter McCullough, “Christmas at Elsinore,” Essays in Criticism 58 (2008), 324.
20
herself their “handmaiden.” Isolated and alienated in a
society that traps and exploits her, she can be taken as
representing the alienation suffered by Catholics within
the new, harsh world of Protestantism, with its empty
fallen, material universe, its transcendent, masculine God,
and its repression of any female presence in or near the
deity.22
Walsingham was the primary English shrine dedicated not
just to the Virgin Mary but specifically to the Virgin of
the Annunciation. The Annunciation story, a spectacular
late addition to the evolving Lukan narrative, initiated a
remarkable 2000-year-long, repeatedly re-invented,
tradition with seemingly unending cultural impact, for the
Annunciation became among the most commented upon and
speculated about ‘event’s in Western history. The
historicity of the scene comes slowly under scholarly
scrutiny in early modern Europe. As some advanced scholars
were starting to discover, the Annunciation scene may lack
any reliable historical verifiability; and Walsingham,
specifically dedicated to the Annunciate Virgin, is
(symbolically) wrecked, its inhabitants executed or
dismissed, its treasures destroyed.
The desacralization of European culture which Ophelia’s
brief lines epitomize is a change famously enshrined in
Weber’s phrase, ‘the dis-enchantment of the world’.23 A
powerful modern metaphor for this process is Gerhard
22 Verity, Hamlet, 178; Orace, First Quarto of Hamlet, 79.
21
Richter’s ‘Verkündigung nach Tizian’ (Annunciation after
Titian) is a sequence of five paintings the artist which
records a further blurring from the ‘original’ Titian with
the Virgin and her angelic visitor disappeared into wide
amorphous brush stokes and pools of swirling color.
Richter’s sequence, which he describes as a personal and
cultural “failure” to embody the supernatural is an image
of the historical dis-enchantment of European culture. 24
Shakespeare’s place in this emergent development – why his
response to the Walsingham Ballad is of broader cultural
significance than a mere echo of a popular song – is that
it provides an early sign of what Raymond Williams terms a
‘long revolution’.25 Ballads and other collective
expressions of popular culture are often the first signs of
changes of this magnitude: emerging into Hamlet and
emergent within the broader culture of early modern
England, the echoes of the Walsingham Ballad in Ophelia’s
ramblings point us to a massive cultural transition within
which we are still living.
23 Max Weber, Essays in Sociology, trans. and ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 155.24 Gerhard Richter, Writings ed. Dietmar Elger and Hans Ulrich Obrist (New York: D.A.P. 2009), 86.25 Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London, Chatto & Windus, 1961.
22
Bibliography
Brookshire, Bradley. “ ‘Bare ruin’d quires, where late the sweetbirds sang’: Covert Speech in William Byrd’s ‘Walsingham’Variations.” In Janes and Waller, Walsingham, 199-216.Brown, Mary Ellen. “Placed, Replaced, or Misplaced?: TheBallads’ Progress.” Eighteenth Century, 47 (2006): 115-29Buchan, David, ed. A Scottish Ballad Book. London: Routledge & KeganPaul. 1973.Chapman, Alison. “Ophelia's ‘old lauds’: Madness and Hagiographyin Hamlet.” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 20 (2007): 111–35.------., “‘Met I with an old bald Mare’: Lust, Misogyny, and theEarly Modern Walsingham Ballads.” In Janes and Waller,Walsingham, 217-32.Edwards, Philip. Pilgrimage and Literary Tradition. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2005.Gillespie, John. Five Centuries of Keyboard Music: An Historical Survey of Musicfor Harpsichord and Piano. New John York: Courier Dover Publications,1972.Groom, Nick. The Making of Percy’s Reliques. New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1999.Groves, Beatrice. Texts and Traditions: Religion in Shakespeare 1592–1604.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.Hassel, Chris Jr. “Painted Women: Annunciation Motifs in Hamlet.” Comparative Drama 32 (1998): 47-84.Hunt, Maurice. “Twelfth Night and the Annunciation.” Papers on Language and Literature 25 (1989): 264-71.Janes, Dominic and Gary Waller, eds. Walsingham and English Culture:Landscape, Sexuality, and Cultural Memory. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010.Kittredge, G.L. “Introduction” to English and Scottish Popular Ballads,edited from the collection of Francis James Child. Boston: Houghton Mifflin,1904.Mann, Alfred. The Study of Fugue. New York: Dover, 1987.May, Steven W. The Elizabethan Courtier Poets: The Poems and Their Contexts. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991.McCullough, Peter. “Christmas at Elsinore.” Essays in Criticism 58 (2008): 311-32. Morrison, Susan Signe. Excrement In The Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer’s Fecopoetics.. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008. ------. “Ophelia, Waste, Memory: Pilgrimage Badges and Walsingham Remembered.” In Janes and Waller, Walsingham, 49–66.Orace, Kathleen O., ed. The First Quarto of Hamlet. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1998.
23
Palmer, William. “Byrd and Amen.” Music & Letters 34.2 (1953): 140–3.Percy, Thomas. Reliques of Old English Poetry: Consisting of Old Heroic Ballads, Songs etc. New York: F. Warne & Sons, 1887. Peters, Christine. Patterns of Piety: Women, Gender, and Religion in Late Medieval and Renaissance England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.Ralegh, Sir Walter. Selected Prose and Poetry, ed. Agnes M.C. Latham. London: Athlone Press, 1965.Richter, Gerhard. Writings ed. Dietmar Elger and Hans Ulrich Obrist. New York: D.A.P., 2009.Roy, Matthew. “Conserted Consort: ‘And all the while sweeteMusicke did apply Her curious skill, the warbling notes toplay’.” www.matthewjroy.com/1/post/2010/05/conserted-consort-and-all-while-sweete.html. Sidney, Sir Robert. The Poems of Robert Sidney. Ed. P.J. Croft. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984. Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. Ed. Thomas P. Roche.Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979.Sting. Songs from the Labyrinth (Deutsche Grammophon B000HXDESU,2006). Verity, A.W. ed., The Tragedy of Hamlet. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1904.Waller, Gary. The Virgin Mary in Late Medieval and Early Modern English Literature and Popular Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. ------ Walsingham and the English Imagination. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. ------. ‘The Virgin’s “Pryvytes”: Walsingham and the Late Medieval Sexualization of the Virgin’. In Janes and Waller, Walsingham, 88-102.Weber, Max. Essays in Sociology. Trans. and ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press, 1946.Williams, Raymond. The Long Revolution. London, Chatto & Windus, 1961.David Yearsley, “The Esserzici Work-Out Book,” CounterPunch, Nov.12-14, 2010: www.counterpunch.org/yearsley11122010.html.
24