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.

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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.

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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

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