Shakespeare, Abelard, and "The Unquiet Grave"
Shakespeare, Abelard, and "The Unquiet Grave"
by Herbert Halpert
The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 69, No. 271 (Jan. - Mar., 1956), pp. 74-75 + 98
SHAKESPEARE, ABELARD, AND "THE UNQUIET GRAVE": - Although "The Unquiet Grave" (Child 78) has been so rarely reported in America that any new text is of interest, this fragmentary version (the second to be reported from New Jersey)[1] is unusually significant because of the extraordinary legend that follows, which the singer gave in explanation of the ballad.
SHAKESPEARE'S GHOST (Child 78)
(Dictated by the late Charles H . Grant, New Egypt, N. J., 14 August 1938. Two recordings were made on phonograph discs, 15 August 1938. The title is the singer's.)
Woman went to his grave. He did come back, and talk to her. Song was a conversation they had. When he first come back he said:
1. "Bring me a note from the dungeons deep,
And water from a stone;
And lily-white milk from a female's breast,
For a fair maid never had none." [2]
She said:
2. "One kiss, one kiss from your clay-cold lips,
One kiss is all I crave;
Just one kiss from your pale, cold lips,
Then return back to your grave."
He said:
3. "If I was to give to you one kiss,
Your days would not last long;
For my lips are eaten with the worms,
And my breath is earthly strong." [3]
When I asked Grant the source of the song, he said: "Used to be an English settlement in Chatsworth. They came there about 186I, when the railroad first come in. [Some of their names were] Acres, Brooks, Eliots, Humphries. Fellow name of Elwagon sung that. He come direct from England."
On 30 July 1939, nearly a year after I had first recorded the ballad, Grant dictated the following story which he said Elwagon had told to explain the song.
He said that Shakespearwe as a great lover. He married this woman. A fter he was married two or three years, there was another man fell in love with his wife, but she didn't care nothin' about him. This man hired four or five men to kidnap Shakespeare. They took him up into a room and castrated him. Well, his wife said it didn't make any difference to her, she wanted to live with him. He said no, it couldn't be; he couldn't live with her no longer because he wasn't a man. He coaxed her to go into a convent, and after a while she consented and went in. Two or three years afterwards he died- Shakespeare died pretty young. After he died, s he got out of this convent. She used to go to his grave and pray for him to raise-she wanted to speak to him-see him. And this song was made up about that. This song is founded on fact.
There are striking resemblances between this legend and the well-known love story of Abelard and Heloise. The French medieval schoolman and poet, Peter Abelard (A.D. 1079-1142), was suspected by relatives of his wife, Heloise, of planning to get rid of her so that he might secure advancement by entering the church. Hired bravos were sent up to his room to castrate him, thus effectually preventing him from taking orders. After his mutilation he convinced Heloise that she should enter a convent.[4]
The motivation in the New Jersey legend differs considerably from that of the Abelard story. The attempt to take a man's wife away from him by castrating him is a device that seems to be rare in folktales. As a matter of fact, the serious treatment of castration is apparently not common in the Anglo-Americanb allad and folktale tradition.[5]
Despite the differences in motivation, the two legends have in common the fact of the mutilation of the husband in an upstairs room by hirelings, and the husband's successful attempt to have his wife go into a convent. These resemblances are too close to be merely accidental.
The Abelard-Heloise story has a long history in print, but not, to my knowledge, in oral tradition. Probably, like other printed tales and ballads, it came into folk circulation when someone heard it read or retold. I can offer no plausible suggestion, however, that would explain how the Elizabethan playwright, W illiam Shakespearec, ame to have his name associated in this legend with both the Abelard story and the ballad.
Such improbable associations are, I suspect, more common than published materials would indicate. W. Roy Mackenzie says, for example, that a ballad singer in Nova Scotia, after singing "The Battle of Alma," a song glorifying a British victory over the Russians in the Crimean War, explained that King William was leading the English. The sun started to set before the Russians were thoroughly beaten, so the king got down on his knees and "prayed to God to hold de sun still fer a little while longer.... an' God held de sun where it was till de Rooshians was well licked an' on de run like a drove of sheep. An' as soon as de fight was over de sun went down."[6]
Adding the feat of the Biblical leader Joshua to the exploits of an English King William leading the British armies in the
reign of Queen Victoria is as remarkable an example of the fusion of historically disparate elements as is the New Jersey legend. From the viewpoint of history, either melange is absurd. But the folklorist has criteria other than truth to historical fact. Robin Flower phrased it admirably: "Popular tradition is indeed a thing capricious and unaccountable. It remembers, but not as history remembers, seizing upon elements of character and event that the folk mind can assimilate to its own mode of thought, and ruthlessly casting away all beside, confusing times and characters, and building its own timeless world out of the wreck of history."[7]
The two examples given above and Flower's comment indicate the existence of an aspect of folk tradition which has so far had little attention from American folklorists, possibly because of limitations on the part of collectors. A collector should, ideally, be able to curb his major enthusiasm sufficiently to take all marginal material, however pointless it may seem to him at the time. Both Mackenzie's legend and mine from New Jersey were told to explain folksongs. Such stories are valuable to folksong collectors for insights into folksingers' attitudes; but they are equally important to the student of folktales because they illustrate the vicissitudes of literary themes which enter folk tradition. It would seem worthwhile for all collectors of folklore to look for, study, and publish legends of this kind for the light they shed upon the still mysterious workings of oral tradition.
NOTES
1 English versions of this ballad are listed in the study by Ruth Harvey, " The Unquiet Grave" Journal of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, IV, No. 2 (I941), 49-66. This list can be supplemented by the references in Margaret Dean-Smith, A Guide to English Folk Song Collections (Liverpool, I954), p. 113. American references and a North Carolina text are given in The Frank C . Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore, ed. by N. I. White and others (Durham, N. C., 1952), II, 94. My first New Jersey version appeared in the JAF, LII (1939), 53. I hope to be able to publish a transcription of the tune for this second New Jersey text in a full collection of the songs.
2 To clarify the third "impossibility," line 3 should read "maiden's" breast instead of "female's." For a discussion of this "magic task" stanza, which is also found in six British versions of this ballad, see p. 54 of the Harvey study. The stanza does not appear in any of the previously published American texts. I do not agree with Ruth Harvey's theory on this stanza, but reserve
my arguments for a future study.
3 Variant: Of earth is strong.
4 See "Abelard, Peter," Encyclopaedia Britannica (Chicago, 1952), I, 32-33; C. K. Scott Moncrieff, translator, The Letters of Abelard and Heloise (New York, 1942), pp. I9-20 (The First Letter, Chapter VII). See the latter, pp. ix-xiii, for some brief comment on the literary history of the letters, and especially on the so-called English "translation," called "the traditional English
version of the Letters."
5 This statement is based on my own reading. I have not followed up the references in Stith Thompson, Motif Index of Folk-Literature (Bloomington, Ind., 1932-1936), Motif Q 45.I10. Punishment: genitalia cut off. See also Tom Peete Cross, Motif-Index of Early Irish Literature (Indiana University Publications, Folklore Series, No. 7, 1952), Motif S I76.1. Mutilation: emasculation.
6 W. Roy Mackenzie, The Quest of the Ballad, (Princeton, 1919), p. 7. The book gives a magnificent picture of how folksongs function in their 7 setting. Robin Flower, The Western Island, or The Great Blasket (New York, 1945), p. 84.
HERBERT HALPERT
Murray State College Murray, Kentucky