Shakespeare's Ghost- Grant (NJ) 1938 Halpert
[From: Shakespeare, Abelard, and "The Unquiet Grave" by Herbert Halpert; The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 69, No. 271 (Jan. - Mar., 1956), pp. 74-75. His notes follow.
R. Matteson 2015]
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 m ade 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 Shakespeare was a great lover. He married this woman. After 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.
Footnotes:
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.