The Ballad and Its Pasts is partly a work on ballads themselves and partly a work on the intellectual history of ballad scholarship. In it, David Atkinson attempts to address both the past of the ballad genre itself (“literary history”) and the ways in which the ballad engages with a real or imagined historical past (“the play of memory”). He frames the book as “an attempt to redress the balance” (ix) of historical ballad scholarship, which focuses on continuity (at the expense of discontinuity) and takes as its main subject a portion of ballads fitting aesthetic criteria set out by Francis James Child, ignoring many other ballads that were part of a literature of cheap print at the time. A certain line in folklore scholarship has stressed tradition as being the creative use of the past as enacted in the present, rather than as something uncritically and continuously handed down from the past. Atkinson’s book is an example of applying that line of thought to ballad studies. It will be particularly useful to those interested in ballads, the history of folklore scholarship, and the culture of early modern print.
The first chapter discusses the themes of continuity and discontinuity in previous ballad scholarship, and provides Atkinson’s theory of how to reconcile the two. This theory includes the concept of “ballad weight,” which is “the cumulative effect of ballads, as printed, as collected, as performed, predicated strictly on the extant evidence” (20), and the concept of “re-presentation,” the way ballads construct ideas of (real or imagined) past events for singers, listeners, and readers.
Chapter 2 is about the concept of the “medieval ballad” and reexamines the perspective brought forth in Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, that ballads were passed down from the medieval period. Atkinson discusses the ways in which ballads could or could not be said to exhibit continuity or discontinuity with a medieval past. In the latter part of the chapter, he examines the ways in which the extra-textual presentation of ballads in the early modern era played into concepts of antiquarianism and medievalism.
Chapters 3 and 4 deal with the histories of distinct pairs of ballads. Chapter 3 explores “Fair Margaret and Sweet William” (Child 74) and “William and Margaret,” and how the latter represents the beginnings of the gothic mode in balladry. The chapter also discusses the implications of defining the former as a “traditional ballad” and the latter as a “literary ballad.” Chapter 4 examines the reception of two ballads on “Sir James the Rose” composed in the eighteenth century, one of known authorship and one of unknown, as well as the literary concept of ballad “imitation.”
The final two chapters deal with how ballads imagine the past. The first one is on shipwreck ballads, a group about the loss of the Ramilles in the seventeenth century, and “Sir Patrick Spens” (Child 58), which has only a tenuous connection to a real historical past. It uses these two cases to examine the concept of collective memory. The final chapter covers the relationship over time between murder ballads and factual events, and questions how that consideration relates to changes over time in the mode of thought that “providence,” rather than forensic evidence, brings murderers to justice.
One of the most important contributions of this book is its reflexivity. It calls on ballad scholars and folklorists to critically examine the history of ballad studies, and it reminds us how certain aspects of previous scholarship have been influenced by an interest in the past and a stereotypical desire to see tradition as an age-old thing being continuously handed down from the past. The book also prompts us to think about notions of authorship and creativity over time. What are the connotations of an “imitation” in different contexts? When does known authorship benefit a ballad’s status?
Additionally, the book is well researched. Atkinson does a thorough job of tracing the histories of specific ballads and their variations, citing plenty of examples. He relies more on examples of the ballads’ use in print than on examples of their performances off the page. But he does state that this book is attempting to correct a lack of focus on print in previous work.
My one criticism of the book is for its lack of continuity. Atkinson notes that each of the chapters following the first one could stand on its own, and this is certainly true. As a reader, however, I wish Atkinson had done more internal work connecting the chapters to each other and more work emphasizing the central points throughout. This might have been accomplished had there been an extensive concluding chapter, rather than the five-page afterword we are given. One has the impression the afterword was an afterthought, beginning as it does with the words, “If pressed to offer some sort of conclusion after the foregoing chapters” (193). But perhaps the discontinuity between chapters is in keeping with Atkinson’s point about wanting to see continuity in ballads, where discontinuity can just as easily be apprehended.
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[Review length: 841 words • Review posted on April 9, 2020]