'William and Margaret': An Eighteenth-Century ballad.
by David Atkinson; from Folk Music Journal, 2014
[Both Child and Chappell have accused Mallet of forgery concerning his 1924 'William and Margaret'. This article has been proofed once quickly.
R. Matteson 2014]
[Abstract
The Child ballad 'Fair Margaret and Sweet William' (Child 74) can supposedly be traced hack to an echo in a play of the first decade of the seventeenth century, and yet there is no actual trace of the ballad until a broadside of c.1720. At that time, there also start to appear various copies of another ballad, generally known as `William and Margaret', which tells a similar story but in a more 'literary' style. This has been widely, but inconclusively, attributed to the Anglo-Scots poet and playwright David Mallet (formerly Malloch) (1701/2?-65). The present article traces the parallel paths taken by the two ballads, reviews the claims about authorship, and considers their contrasting styles, with a view to a reassessment of what the 'ballad' might have meant to the eighteenth century.]
In the Beaumont and Fletcher play The Knight of the Burning Pestle (c.1607), (1) Old Merrythought, perhaps best described as a burlesque character whose life is given over to song and mirth, sings the following lines:
When it was growne to clarke midnight,
And all were fast asleepe,
In came Margarets grimely Ghost,
And stood at Williams ftete. (2)
Thomas Percy in Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) identified this snatch of song with lines in the Child ballad 'Fair Margaret and Sweet William' (Child 74). (3) Percy's identification was endorsed by Child and has been generally accepted. (4) In particular, Merry-thought's stanza equates to the fifth stanza of Child 74 A, quoted here directly from its source in a broadside titled Fair Margaret's Misfortune [ESTC N69850]:
When Day was gone, and Night Was come,
and all Men fast asleep,
There came the Spirit of fair Margaret,
which caus'd him for to Weep. (5)
Later, Merrythought sings again: You are no love for me Margret, I am no love for you.' (6) This second snatch of song finds a very rough equivalent in the first half of the second stanza of Fair Margaret's Misfortune: 'I see no harm by you Margaret; / nor you see none by me'.
The correspondences, though striking, are certainly not exact. Nevertheless, while some of the snatches of song in The Knight of the Burning Pestle look to have been written specially for the occasion, plenty of others can be identified, either directly or indirectly, as having an independent existence in printed ballads and songs of the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century. (7) Accordingly, the early seventeenth-century date of the Beaumont and Fletcher play has been generally taken as a terminus ante quern for the Child ballad. Nevertheless, there is no further evidence of 'Fair Margaret and Sweet William' at all prior to the broadside Fair Margaret's Misfortune [ESTC N69850], which was issued by Sarah Bates, c.1720. (8) After that date it is well represented in print.
Percy also observed: 'These lines [in The Knigbt of the Burning Pestle] have acquired an importance by giving birth to one of the most beautiful ballads in our own or any language. See the song intitled Margaret's Ghost, at the end of this volume.' (9) The 'Margaret's Ghost' to which Percy refers is a ballad perhaps more generally known by the title 'William and Margaret' which, at least in some manifestations, has been attributed to the authorship of the Anglo-Scots poet and playwright David Mallet (formerly Malloch) 1701/2-65).
At this point, it will be useful to have a summary of the ballads in cricstion. Fair Margaret's Misfortune runs to twenty stanzas, commencing:
As it fell out on a long Summer's Day,
two Lovers they sat on a Hill,
They sat together that long Summer's Day,
and could not, talk their fill.
William tells Margaret that tomorrow she will see a rich wedding, and she duly witnesses William with his new bride, after which she evidently dies. That night, her spirit appears to William in bed, wishes the sleeping lovers joy, and proceeds to her own grave. In the morning, William tells his bride of a terrible dream he had, then rides to Margaret's bower, views her corpse, and kisses her pale lips--although he also assures her seven brothers that he made no vow to her prior to his marriage. Nevertheless, he dies the next clay, and William and Margaret are buried together in the chancel, where a rose and a briar spring from their bodies, growing together into a true-love knot. In a pathetic last stanza, the parish clerk comes along and cuts down the twining branches.
'William and Margaret', on the other hand. runs to seventeen stanzas and begins thus in Percy's Reliques:
'Twas at the silent solemn hour,
When night and morning meet;
In glided Margaret's grimly ghost,
And stood at William's feet.
Margaret's pale countenance is described and then she addresses William, upbraiding him for his faithlessness and urging him to acknowledge his broken promise and give her back her plighted troth. Then the crowing of the cock summons her back to the grave, and at dawn a distraught William goes to the place where she is buried, lays himself down on her grave, calls out her name, and dies.
Notwithstanding Percy's earlier praise. Child was dismissive: '"William and Margaret" is simply "Fair Margaret and Sweet William" rewritten in what used to he called an elegant style?' (10) Certainly there is a marked stylistic difference, which translates into a difference of tone, yet there is really none of the textual contiguity that would indicate rewriting. The most they actually have in common at a lexical level is the Knight of the Burning Pestle stanza. Beyond that, 'Fair Margaret and Sweet William' has more of the commonplaces associated with the matter and diction of the Child ballads. Especially in relation to the supernatural, 'William and Margaret' seems to strain for effect: compare 'Then came the Spirit of fair Margaret' with 'In glided Margaret's grimly ghost', or the symbolic effect of William's dream in the Child ballad C, Dream'd my Bower was full of Red Swine, / and my Bride Bed full of Blood') with the gothic literalness of Margaret's discourse on her own decay (The hungry worm my sister is; / This winding-sheet I wear', and so forth). There is a clear difference at the level of narrative structure, too. In 'Fair Margaret and Sweet William', stanzas balance each other, dialogue alternates between speakers; and there is progression in both time and place. In 'William and Margaret', the marriage to another woman is not depicted at all, action is at a minimum, and speech takes the form of extended declaration rather than dialogue.
Nevertheless, 'Fair Margaret and Sweet William' and 'William and Margaret' are founded on an underlying similarity of plot situation - one that has a good deal in common with other ballads in which one of a pair of lovers breaks their promise by contracting a marriage with someone else, perhaps for social and/or economic reasons, and that leads to fatal consequences. Other examples from the Child canon include 'Lord Thomas and Fair Ellinor' (Child 73), which again ends with the twining branches motif; and broadside copies of The Demon Lover' (Child 243), as well as its non-Child counterpart, 'Bateman's Tragedy'. The supernatural dimension is more explicitly paralleled in 'Sweet William's Ghost' (Child 77), where the gender roles are reversed and William's ghost returns to demand that (another) Margaret return his plighted troth. This troth-plight motif occurs in a number of ballads, where it serves as a kind of objective correlative for a lover's broken promise.[11] Elements of these various ballad stories seem to belong to a broad complex of plot elements current in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
'Fair Margaret and Sweet William' and 'William and Margaret' are probably best regarded as separate but intertextually related pieces, representing different ways of handling a shared subject. Scholarly discussion, however, has been drawn into an inconclusive debate concerning David Mallet's possible authorship of the latter. The perceived importance of this point has been enhanced by the starkly contrasting opinions of critics. On the one hand, there is George Saintsbury, writing in The Cambridge History of English Literature in 1912:
William and Margaret, written as early as 1723 is, of course, to some extent, a pastiche of older ballads and of snatches of Elizabethan song. But the older ballads themselves were always, more or less, pastiches of each other. And, if the piece had some creditors, it had many more debtors; nor does any single copy of verses deserve so much credit for setting the eighteenth century back on the road of true romantic poetry by an easy path, suited to its own tastes and powers.[12]
Saintsbury saw in 'William and Margaret', and its putative author David Mallet, a precursor of the romantic ballad revival of later in the eighteenth century. Child, on the other hand, perceived in 'William and Margaret' evidence of a separation between the unaffected early ballad style and the effects of eighteenth-century literary 'taste', and sought to cast the latter as mere appropriation.
The already polarized debate is further complicated by the involvement of David Mallet himself. Samuel Johnson in Lives of the Poets (1781) depicted Mallet's personal motives as mercenary and his literary work as forgettable.[13] This is the view of the writer that has largely persisted, although Mallet's Victorian editor, Frederick Dinsdale, and, more recently and in greater detail, Sandro Jung, have provided a more rounded account of Mallet within his eighteenth-century political and literary context. [14] Nevertheless, his best-known work remains the ballad 'William and Margaret'. a product of his youth, and, rightly or wrongly, it is on this piece first and foremost that his literary reputation depends--if he did indeed write it. For he has been explicitly accused of plagiarism, most directly by William Chappell in the Roxburghe Ballads in 1880.[15] Subsequently, A. E. H. Swaen published an article reviewing the matter in 1917.[16] What follows here necessarily draws quite heavily on their discussions.
'Fair Margaret and Sweet William' (Child 74)
After Fair Margaret's Misfortune [ESTC N69850] of c.1720, the Child ballad appeared on several broadsides issued by the Dicey/Bow Churchyard/Aldermary Churchyard operation with the title Fair Margaret's Misfortunes [ESTC N8158, N70816, T35165, N8156] (the title now in the plural), up to c.1760. (17) There are some textual variants among these copies and, though the overall extent of variation is not great, two Aldermary Churchyard copies [ESTC N70816, T35165] come that bit closer to the stanza in The Knight of the Burning Pestle:
When day was gone, and night was come
And all men fast asleep,
There came the spirit of fair Margaret.
And stood at William's bed-feet.
Later in the eighteenth century, Fair Margaret's Misfortunes is found on a broadside sheet for which ESTC gives the place of publication as [Edinburgh?] and which carries the precise date of 25 April 1776 [ESTC 135166]. Then the ballad appears in Scottish chapbooks around the end of the eighteenth century. These broadside and chapbook copies do not carry music notation, and only the earliest, Fair Margaret's Misfortune [ESTC N69850], has the rather unconvincing direction: 'To an Excellent New Tune'.
Percy reproduced a broadside text in Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, with some alterations from the second edition onwards: 'In this second edition some improvements are inserted, which were communicated by a lady of the first distinction, as she had heard this song repeated in her infancy.[18] There are indeed some textual variants between the first and later editions of the Reliques, but they are slight and essentially confined to different ways of expressing the same thing. 'Fair Margaret and Sweet William' is subsequently found in other anthologies, including those of David Herd and Joseph Ritson, and the serial anthology The Charms of Melody (1795?) which has two slightly variant texts, one of them explicitly taken from Percy's Reliques.
A couple of further texts of 'Fair Margaret and Sweet William', collected from memory and/or oral circulation, were sent to Percy in the 1770s (Child 74 B, C), one of which has the 'grimly ghost' of The Knight of the Burning Pestle:
When clay was gone, and night was come,
All people were asleep,
In glided Margaret's grimly ghost,
And stood at William's feet. (Child 74 B)
More recently, the Child ballad has been collected in variant forms in England and North America (Figure 1). Bronson describes the tune as 'a strong, quite various, and interesting branch of the great family which we have for convenience identified with "Lady Isabel" [Child 4]'. [19]
2.--FAIR MARGARET AND SWEET WILLIAM.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Fair Marg'ret is up at her higher chamber window
A-combing out her hair.
She saw sweet William and his bride,
As they were riding there.
Down she flung her ivory comb,
And up she bound her hair.
Straightway out of' the room she went,
And never more went there.
Sweet William dreamed such dreams that night
Such dreams that were no good;
He dreamed his bowels* were full of wild swine,
And his bridemaid [dagger] full of blood.
'What made you dream such dreams, sweet William.
Such dreams that were no good,
To dream your bowels* were full of wild swine,
And your bridemaid* full of blood?'
He called up his merry, merry men
By one, by two, by three:
'You ride unto fair Margaret's life
By leave of my ladye.'
When he came to fair Margaret's door,
He knocked so loud at the ring.
There was none so ready as Margaret's seven brothers
To let sweet William in.
'Oh! let me see the dead' he cried,
'I think she look pale and wan.'
He oftentimes kissed her pale white cheeks,
But not one smile could he bring.
Then up-spoke Margaret's seven brothers
All in a pitiful tone:
'You may go and kiss your bonny brown bride
And leave our sister alone.'
'If I go and kiss my bonny brown bride,
'Tis no more than I ought to do.
Fair Margaret died for her true love,
And I will die for sorrow.'
Fair Margaret was buried in the higher churchyard,
Sweet William in the lower.
And out from her mouth there sprung a rose,
And out of his a briar.
They growed so high as the higher church wall,
They could not grow any higher,
They mingled, they tied in a true lover's knot
For all the young men to admire.
* 'bower was' * 'bride-bed'
Figure 1 'Fair Margaret and Sweet William' (Child 74) collected from Mrs Crawford, West Milton, Dorset, May 1906 [JFSS, 3.2 (no. 11) (1907), 64-661]
'When all was wrapt in dark midnight'
Merrythought's stanza in The Knight of the Burning Pestle is paralleled most exactly in a group of the 'William and Margaret' ballads, which for the moment can be identified by the opening line as the When all was wrapt in dark midnight' variant (for some 'William and Margaret' texts, see Appendix 1).
Appendix 1.: 'William and Margaret' Texts
London. British The Plain The Tea-Table The Works of
Library, Dealer, 24 July Miscellany, David Mallet Esq.
1876.1.1.(107.) 1724 vol. II (1726), (1759), l,
William and William and pp. 61-65 131-7
Margaret, An Old Margaret, A William and William and
Ballad Ballad Margaret, An Margaret
Old Ballad
When all was When Hope lay Twas at the Twas at the
wrapt in dark hush'd in tearful silent, solemn
Mid?night. And silent Night. Midnight Hour, hour. When night
all were fast And Woe was When all were and morning meet;
a-sleep, In wrapp'd in fast asleep, In In glided
glided Margaret's Sleep, In glided Margaret's grimly
grimly Ghost And glided Margaret's ghost, And stood
Btood at Marg'ret's pale grimly Ghost, at William's
William's Feet. ey'd Ghost. And And stood at feet.
stool at William's
William's Feet.
Feet.
Her Face was like Her Face was Her Face was Her face was like
the April Morn. like an April pale. like an April-morn,
Clad in a Wintry Sky, Dimm'tl by April Morn. Clad in a wintry
Cloud. And Clay a scatt'ring Clad in a w cloud: And
eold was her Cloud: Her intry Cloud; clay-cold was her
Iilly-1 land. clay-cold, And Clay-cold lilly-hand. That
That held the lilly Hand. was her Lilly held her sable
Sable Shrowd. Knee-high. Held hand. That held shroud.
up her sable her sable
Shroud. Shroud
So shall the So shall the So shall the So shall the
fairest Face fairest Face fairest Face fairest face
appear. When apjxar. When appear. When appear, When
Youth and Years Youthful Years Youth and Years youth and years
are flown; Such are flown! Such are flown: are flown: Such
is the Robe that the last Robe, Such is the is the robe that
Kings must wear. that Kings must Robe that Kings kings must wear.
When Death has wear. When must wear, When When death has
reft their Death deprives Death has reft reft their
Crown. their Crown! their Crown. crown.
Her Bloom was Her Bloom was Her Bloom was Her bloom was
like the like the like the like the
springing Flow'r Morning Flowr. springing springing flower,
That sips the That sips the Flow'r, That That sips the
Silver Dew; The Silver Dew: The sips the Silver silver dew. The
Rose was budded Rose had Dew: The Rose rose was budded
in her Cheek; And budded, in her was budded in in her cheek.
Opening to the Cheek, Just her Cheek. Just Just opening to
View. op'ning to the opening to the the view.
View. View.
But Love had. But Love had But Love had. But Love had.
like the Canker like the like the canker like the
Worm, Consum'd Canker-worm, Worm. Consum'd canker-worm,
her early Frime: Consum'd her her early Consum'd her
The Rose grew tender Prime: Frime: The Rose early prime: The
pale, and left The Rose of grew pale, and rose grew pale,
her Cheek; She Beauty paid, left her Cheek; and left her
cry'd before her and pin'd. And She dy'd before cheek; She dy'd
Time. dy'd before its her Time. before her time
Time.
Awake, she cry'd. Awake! she Awake!--she Awake! she cry'd.
thy true Love crv'd. Thy true cry'd. Thy true thy True Love
calls. Come from Love calls. Love calls, calls, Come from
her Mid-night Come from her Come Iroin her her
Grave. Now let Midnight Midnight Grave: midnight-grave;
thy Pity hear the Grave! Late, Now let thy Now let thy Pity
Maid. Thy Low let thy Pity Pity hear the hear the maid.
refuse! to save. mourn a Wretch, Maid. Thy Love Thy Love refus'd
Thy Love refus'd to to save.
refus'd to save.
save.
This is the mirk This the clark. This is the This is die dumb
and fearful Hour, and fearful dumb and dreary and drear hour.
W hen injurd' Hour, When Hour. When When injurd
Ghosts complain: injure! Ghosts injurd Ghosts ghosts complain;
Now clmiry Graves complain: And complain. And When yauning
give up their Lovers Tombs, aid the secret graves give up
Dead. To haunt give up their Fears of Night. their dead, To
the faithless Dead, To haunt To fright the haunt the
Swain. the faithless faithless Man. faithless swain.
Swain.
Bethink thee, Bethink thee. Bethink thee. Bethink thee.
William. Of thy William! of thy William, of thy William, of thy
Fault. Thy Fault, Thy Fault. Thy fault. Thy pledge
Pledge, and Pledge of Pledge and and broken oath:
broken Oath, And broken Truth: broken Oath. And give me back
give me hack my See the sad And give me my maiden-vow,
Maiden-Vow. And lesson, thou back my And give me back
give me back my hast taught My Maiden-Vow, And my troth.
Troth. unsuspecting give me back my
Youth! Froth.
How could you say Why did you, How could you Why did you
my Face was fair, first, give Say, my Face promise love to
And yet that Pace Sense of was fair, And me. And not that
forsake? How Charms. Then yet that Face promise keep? Why
could you win my all those forsake? Flow did you swear my
Virgin-Heart, Yet Charms forsake? could you win eyes were bright.
leave that Heart Why sigh'd for my Yet leave those
to break? my Virgin Virgin-Heart. eyes to weep?
Heart, Then Yet leave that
left it, thus, Heart to
to break? break?
How could you Why did you, Why did you How could you say
promise Love to present, pledge promise Love to my lace was fair.
me. And not that such Vows. Yet me. And not And yet that face
Promise keep? Why none, in that Promise forsake? How
did you swear Absence, keep? keep? Why said could you win my
mine Eyes were Why said you. you. that my virgin heart, Yet
bright, Yet leave That my Lyes Eyes were leave that heart
those Eyes to were bright. bright. Yet to break?
weep? Yet taught em left these Eyes
first to weep? to weep?
How could you say Why did you How could you Why did you say
my Lip was sweel. praise my swear, my up my lip was sweet,
And made the blushing Lips. was sweet, And And made the
Scarlet pale? And Yet mike their made the scarlet pale? And
why did young Scarlet pale? Scarlet pale? why did I, young
witless Maid! And why alas! And why did I witless maid!
Believe the did I, fond young witless Believe the
Haltering Tale? Maid! believe Maid. believe flattering tale?
the flatt'ring the flattering
Tale? Tale?
That Pace alas! But, now, my That Face, That face, alas!
no more is fair: Face no more is alas! no more no more is fair;
These lips no Fair; My Lips is fair; These Those lips no
longer red; Dark retain no lied: Lips no longer longer red: Dark
are mine Eyes now Fix d are my red: Dark are are my eyes, now
closd in Death. Eyes. in my Eyes. now closd in death,
And ev'ry Charm Death's still closd in Death, And every charm
is fled. Glare! And And ever is fled.
Love's vain Charm is Red
Hope is fled.
The hungry Worm The hungry Worm The hungry Worm The hungry worm
my Sister is; my Partner is: my Sister is; my sister is:
This This This This
Winding-Shect I Winding-Sheet Winding-sheet I winding-sheet I
wear, And cold my Dress. A wear: And cold wear: And cold
and wear lasts long, and and weary lasts and weary lasts
our Night, Till weary. Night our Night. Till our night. Till
that last Morn must pass. E'er that last Morn that last morn
appear. Heaven allows appear. appear.
Redress.
But hark! The But. hark!--Tis But hark!--the But hark! the
Cock has warned me Day!--The Cock has warn'd cock has warn'd
hence: A long and Darkness flies: me Hence--A me hence: A long
last A D I E U ! Take one long, long and late and late adieu!
Come see, false last Adieu! Adieu! Come Come, see. false
Man, how low she Come, see. see. false Man! man, how low she
lies. That civil false Man! how how low she lies, Who dy'd
for Love of you. low She lies. lies, That dy'd for love of
Who dy'd for for Love of you!'
pitying you. you.
Now Birds did The Birds sung The Lark sung The lark sung
sing, and Morning out; the out. the loud, the morning
smile. And shew Morning smil'd; Morning smil'd, smild. With beams
her glistering And streak'd And rais'il her of rosy red: Pale
Head; Pale the Sky with glist ring William quak'd in
William shook in Red; Pale Head: Pale every limb. Anil
ev'ry Limb. Then William shook, William quak'd raving left his
raving left his in ev'ry Limb. in every Limb; bed.
Bed. And staned from Then, raving,
his Bed. left his lied.
He hy'd him to Weeping, he He hy'd him to He hy'd him to
the fatal Place sought the the fatal Place the fatal place
Where Margaret's fatal Plan. Where Where Margaret's
Body lay. And Where Marg'ret Margaret's Body body lay: And
Stretch! him on Body lay, And lay, And strelch'il him on
the green Grass stretch'd him stretch'd him the grass-green
Turf, That wrapt o'er the o'er the green turf. That wrap'd
her Breathless Green-grass Grass Turf. her breathless
Clay. Turf, That That wrapt her clay.
veil'd her breathless
Breathless Clay.
Clay.
And thrice he Thrice call'd. And thrice he Anil thrice he
call'd on unheard, on call'd on call'd on
Margaret's Name, Margaret's Margaret's Margaret's name,
And thrice he Name, Anil Name, And And thrice he
wept full sore; thrice he wepl thrice he wept wept full sore:
Then laid his her Fate: Then lull sore: Then Then laid his
Cheek to the cold laid his Cheek laid his Cheek cheek to her cold
Berth, Anil Word on her cold on her cold grave. And word
spake never Grave, Anil Grave, And spoke never
more. dy'd--And Woril spoke more!
lov'd, too never more.
late.
The earliest exemplars of this group are disparate and encompass cheap print of the broadsheet kind as well as more substantial anthologies. The latter can be dated with more confidence. The earliest known appearance is in an anthology called The Hive (1724), where the ballad begins:
When all was wrapt in dark mid-night,
And all were fast asleep,
In glided Marg'ret's grimly ghost,
And stood at William's feet.
The following year, 'William and Margaret' appeared in the third volume of the (nowadays) rather better-known anthology A Collection of Old Ballads (1725). There, the ballad is one of three items preceded by an almost facetious-sounding comment from the editor: 'I have inserted the Three following Songs for the Sake of those amongst my Readers, who profess themselves Lovers, that they may learn to be Faithful, and to dread the Curses that attend inconstancy and broken Vows.' (20) The anthology itself is a curious and even controversial publication, and it has been argued that one purpose of A Collection of Old Ballads was simply to reassert copyright in ballads previously issued by the London booksellers; (21) although the third volume includes some items that might be more or less new songs.
Also in 1725, 'William and Margaret' was given with a musical setting in William Thomson's Orpheus Caledonius (1725). The following year, in Miscellaneous Poems, by Several Hands (1726), the English ballad text was interspersed with a Latin version, titled Thyrsis & Chloe', by the Latin poet and translator Vincent Bourne (c.1694-1747); and the pairing of English and Latin is repeated in further editions of Bourne's works. This is potentially significant because Vincent Bourne's Latin is also paired with 'William and Margaret' in editions of the works of David Mallet (see below). At the end of the decade, this 'When all was wrapt in dark midnight' variant was printed in an anthology with a complicated printing history called The Choice (1729); and subsequently it recurs in various later songsters.
Items in cheap print among this group of 'William and Margaret' ballads are harder to ascribe to a particular date, or even place of publication, and ESTC is not entirely helpful here. (Terms such as 'Old' and 'New' in broadside titles are generally regarded as promotional and not useful as indicators of chronology.) Among the earliest is a black-letter broadsheet, printed on both sides, with accompanying music notation, titled William and Margaret, An Old Ballad [ESTC T52506: British Library, 1876.f.1(107)] (22) The notation is for what Simpson calls 'an interesting tune in recitativo style', (23) and which Chappell claims is 'eminently suited for recitation, as an old minstrel would have chanted it (Figure 2). (24) At the end of the text there is a supplementary musical note: 'N.B. This Ballad will sing to the Tunes of Montrose's Lilt, Rothes's Lament, or the Isle of Kell.' The broadsheet is without imprint. Place and date of publication are given by ESTC as [London, 1723/24], but by the British Library catalogue as [Edinburgh?, 1723?/1725?] (different dates in music and general reference catalogues). Here ESTC is apparently following the Foxon catalogue of early eighteenth-century verse, which also gives place and date as [London, 1723/24]. (25) The idea of a Scottish provenance was perhaps suggested by the alternative tunes named in the supplementary note. The musical setting in Orpheus Caledonius is identified by Simpson as I'll never love thee more', the 'Montrose's Lilt' named as one of the alternatives. (26)
[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]
A different copy of the ballad is printed as a four-page white-letter chapbook, with drop-head title William and Margaret, An Old Ballad [ESTC T2208]. This begins with a variant opening stanza (variant readings in the first and third lines), which comes even closer to the stanza in The Knight of the Burning Pestle:
When it was grown to dark Mid-night,
And all were fast asleep,
Then in came Margaret's grimly Ghost,
And stood at William's Feet.
There is no music notation here, but at the end there is the same note concerning possible tunes: 'N.B. This Ballad will sing to the Tunes of Montrose's Lines [sic], Rothes's Lament, or, the Isle of Kell.' Once again, there is no imprint. ESTC and the British Library catalogue give the place and date as [Edinburgh?, 1730?]. The Foxon catalogue, however, favours [Edinburgh, 1723?], noting that extant copies are bound with verses by Allan Ramsay and that it is likely that Ramsay published the ballad.[27] Certainly. there is sufficient similarity in typography to suggest that Allan Ramsay's Jenny and Meggy (1723) and William and Margaret: An Old Ballad [ESTC T2208] might have been printed together. If the 1723 date is correct, then this item might have preceded the William and Margaret, An Old Ballad [ESTC T52506; British Library, 1876.f.1.( 107.)] broadsheet.
Three further broadside copies of the 'When, all was wrapt in dark midnight' variant, all of which carry music notation, are not listed in either ESTC or the Foxon catalogue. These are William and Margaret, A New Ballad [British Library, G.315.(18.), G.315.(104.), H.1601.(521.)]; William and Margaret, A Ballad [British Library, G.316.f.(95.)]; and William and Margaret, A Ballad [British Library, G.313.(76.)]. The British Library catalogue gives the place of publication for these broadsides as [London] and the dates as, respectively, [1725?], [1727?], [1730?]. They all carry music notation for the same melody, which Simpson identifies as the setting most commonly found in the eighteenth century (Figure 3).[28]
[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]
Another broadside copy has the names reversed in the title, Margaret and William, A Ballad [ESTC T4951; British Library C.121.g.8.(115.)]. It also has a slightly variant first line: 'Now all was wrapt in dark Mid-Night' (versus 'When all was wrapt ...'). This sheet does not carry any music notation, but it does specify the popular ballad tune 'Fair Rosamond' (aka 'Chevy Chase' or 'Flying Fame'). (29) It is almost certainly an Irish printing: ESTC gives the place and date of publication as [Dublin, 1728?]; and the British Library exemplar is part of a collection of Dublin broadsides, mainly of c.1725/30.
In the mid-century, the 'When all was wrapt in dark midnight' variant was printed on broadsides issued by the Dicey/Aldermary Churchyard operation in Northampton and London. (30) It was also included in a mid-century chapbook issued from Bow Churchyard, titled (confusingly for the present purpose) The Hive. A curiosity is that a 'When all was wrapt in dark midnight' text of 'William and Margaret' is printed as a second part to the Child ballad 'Fair Margaret and Sweet William' on the broadside sheet dated 25 April 1776 mentioned above [ESTC T35166]. Later on, and going into the nineteenth century, 'When all was wrapt in dark midnight is still sometimes found on broadsides and in chapbooks, in England and Scotland.
There are textual variants among different copies within this group of 'William and Margaret' ballads, but they can be fairly characterized as relatively slight. Mostly, this ballad is given without attribution to a specific author, though just occasionally it is possible to find the name of David Mallet attached to a later copy--in The Charms of Melody (1795?), for example. The picture that emerges is of this 'When all was wrapt in dark midnight' ballad circulating from c.1723/24 in a variety of printed formats. This is important because dating will be critical to the question of Mallet's possible authorship of 'William and Margaret', and especially to William Chappell's charge of plagiarism, which posits a date of as early as c.1711 for William and Margaret, An Old Ballad [ESTC T52506; British Library, 18761.f.007.)]. To pre-empt somewhat the discussion below, there is currently no convincing evidence for such an early date. It is true that there is not the firm evidence to rule it out altogether, but the weight of instances points to the 1720s as the period when this group of 'William and Margaret' ballads first came into circulation.
David Mallet, Allan Ramsay, and The Plain Dealer
William and Margaret, A Ballad' was printed as an appendix to David Mallet's The Excursion (1728), a long poem in two books, initially published without attribution. There the opening stanza reads:
'Twas at the silent Midnight-Hour,
When All were fast asleep;
In glided Margaret's grimly Ghost,
And stood at William's Feet.
Subsequently 'William and Margaret' was included in Mallet's Poems on Several Occasions (1743) and The Works of David Mallet (1759). in both of these editions the opening stanza reads:
Twas at the silent, solemn hour,
When night and morning meet;
In glided Margaret's grimly ghost.
And stood at William's feet.
In both editions, too, 'William and Margaret' is given along with Vincent Bourne's Latin rendering.
In August 1723, David Malloch left Scotland for London, and soon afterwards anglicized his name, In a poem titled 'To Mr. David Malloch, On his Departure from Scotland', his friend Allan Ramsay (1684-1758), the renowned Scottish poet and bookseller, described Mallet as 'he that could in tender Strains / Raise Margaret's plaining Shade, / And paint Distress that chills the Veins, / While William's Crimes are red', which lines are glossed with the footnote: 'William and Margaret, a Ballad in Imitation of the old Manner, wherein the Strength of Thought and Passion is more observed than a Rant of unmeaning Words.' (31) So Mallet was certainly known, in some circles at least, as the author of 'William and Margaret' as early as 1723. In October of that year, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, in a letter to her sister, Lady Mar, quoted in passing lines from 'William and Margaret'. (32) In a letter of 10 July 1725, Jaines Thomson, fellow poet and Anglo-Scot, wrote to Mallet in a probable reference to 'William and Margaret': 'Your own celebrated performance is a shining instance of your being able to enter into the very spirit of a peice [sic] wher kid nature reigns.' (33) The preface to the second edition of Thomson's poem Winter (1726) explicitly refers to Mallet as the author of William and Margaret'. (34) In Richard Savage's anthology, Miscellaneous Poems and Translations, by Several Hands (1726), a contribution is identified simply as 'By the Author of the celebrated Ballad of William and Margaret'. (35)
Volume II of The Tea-Table Miscellany (1726), Allan Ramsay's hugely popular anthology of poetry and song, includes 'William and Margaret, An Old Ballad', printed over the initials 'D.M.'. (36) In A New Miscellany of Scots Saw (1727), also compiled by Allan Ramsay, there is 'William and Margaret', given without attribution. (37) The first stanza in these copies reads:
'Twas at the fearful Midnight Hour,
When all were fast asleep,
In glided Margaret's grimly Ghost,
And stood at William's Feet.
In most of the many subsequent editions of The Tea-Table Miscellany the same item, usually headed William and Margaret, An Old Ballad', is attributed to 'D.M.'. It seems quite clear that Allan Ramsay was publishing what he understood to be David Mallet's work.
There was, however, a Further development at this time, which saw the anonymous publication of 'William and Margaret, A Ballad' in the literary periodical The Plain Dealer, no. 36 (Friday, 24 July 1724). The Plain Dealer was published twice-weekly between March 1724 and May 1725, as a joint venture of the writers Aaron Hill (1685-1750) and William Bond (c.1675-1735). (38) There, the text of 'William and Margaret' is preceded by an extended account of how it supposedly came into the editor's hands:
having taken up, in a late Perambulation, as I stood upon the Top of Primrose-Hill, a torn Leaf of one of those Half-penny Miscellanies, which are published for the Use and Pleasure of our Nymphs of low Degree, and known by the Name of Garlands [... I] fell, unexpectedly, upon a Work, for so I make no Scruple to call it, that deserves to live for Ever! And which notwithstanding its Disguise of coarse, brown Paper, almost unintelligible Corruptions of Sense, from the Blunders of the Press, with here and there an obsolete, low Phrase, which I have alter'd for the clearer Explanation of the Author's Meaning, is so powerfully filled, throughout, with that Blood-curdling, chilling Influence, of Nature, working on our Passions (which Criticks call the Sublime) that I never met it stronger in Homer himself; nor even in that prodigious English Genius, who has made the Greek our Countryman.
This copy presents a range of textual variants when compared with the Tea-Table Miscellany text, and overall the style might be described as more consciously florid. The opening stanza is:
When Hope lay hush'd in silent Night,
And Woe was wrapp'd in Sleep,
In glided Marg'rees pale ey'd Ghost,
And stood at William's Feet.
Following the text, the editor expresses regret that he is unable to name the author of the piece, and he goes on to extol its earnestness: (I am of Opinion, That it was founded on the real History of some unhappy Woman of the Age the Author liy'd in'), its felicitous similes and other merits, and the 'Genius' of its anonymous author.
The writer in The Plain Dealer seems to indicate that 'William and Margaret' formed part of a garland, or chapbook, and that initially he took note of another item in the same publication:
That Part of it, which first caught my Eye, had its Turn a little too Modern, as well in the Matter, as the Poetry, and celebrated the Midnight Triumphs of some straggling Female, of whom I had no knowledge; but one, it should seem, of more Beauty than Delicacy;
Who took the Place of Ladies bright,
And with their Lords lay all the Night!
Who pleas'd them with her Humour free;
Oh! the charming Sally Sarsbu--ree!
But I pass'd lightly over this Lyrick Fragment, as too ludicrous for a Person of my Gravity [...]
This turns out to be a song about Sally Salisbury (1690/2-1724). (39) Born Sarah Pridden, Sally Salisbury was famed for her beauty and had risen from humble beginnings to become one of the most celebrated courtesans of her day, with numerous lovers among the nobility. In 1722, in an argument over a theatre ticket, she stabbed the Hon. John Finch, third son of the second Earl of Nottingham, and, despite the efforts of her victim (who was not fatally wounded) to have the charges dropped, she was convicted of assault. Sentenced to a year in prison, she died in Newgate of gaol fever in February 1724. During this time her deteriorating health was the subject of bulletins in the London Journal, and her life was celebrated in contemporary biographies as well as in popular song.
Given Sally Salisbury's notoriety, the claim that the writer in The Plain Dealer had no knowledge of her seems highly improbable. No garland of the kind described here has ever been identified, and although such a thing is not intrinsically impossible, it is conceivable that the Sally Salisbury verses might be there simply as a foil to the perceived merits of 'William and Margaret'. The Plain Dealer promoted the work of the editors' own literary circle, among whom were numbered both James Thomson and David Mallet. So the suspicion remains that the account given in The Plain Dealer may be not altogether ingenuous.
Then, the day following the appearance of William and Margaret' in The Plain Dealer, the same text was reprinted in The Weekly journal; or: British Gazetteer (Saturday, 25 July 1724, pp. 2927-28). This was preceded by a short letter, ostensibly from a female contributor, who was desirous of seeing it printed there: (i) because it came recommended by a 'celebrated Author': and (ii) so that it might stand as a warning to men against making casual vows of fidelity, and to women against believing in them. The 'celebrated Author' who had recommended the ballad was evidently a reference to the editor of The Plain Dealer, whose phrase (quoted above) about the 'bloodcurdling, chilling Influence of Nature', and comparison with Homer and praise of his English translator ( i.e. Pope), are directly echoed here.
A month later, in The Plain Dealer, no. 46 (Friday, 28 August 1724), the editor owned that he had now become apprised of the identity of the author of 'William and Margaret'--who, at his own request, is still not publicly named, but is identified as 'a North-Briton' (i.e. a Scot). There follows a letter from the author himself, professing to have been surprised to see his ballad in print, and outlining the circumstances of its composition. Here, he confirms the editor's earlier conjecture that it was founded on a true story and relates at some length the tale of a lady who was seduced by a vain young gentleman, became pregnant and died; and he claims that he himself saw her laid in her grave, along with her child. (Later, it was claimed that she was a daughter of Professor James Gregory or St Andrews, seduced by a son of Sir William Sharp of Strathtyrum. (40)) The letter continues:
It was some Time after this, that I chanc'd to look into a Comedy of Fletcher's, called, The Knight of the burning Pestle. The Place I fell upon was, where old Merry-Thought repeats these Verses;
When it was grown to dark Midnight, And all were fast asleep:
In came Margaret's grimly Ghost, And stood at William's Feet.
Which, I fancy, was the Beginning of some Ballad, commonly known, at the Time, when this Author wrote.--These Lines, naked of Ornament, and simple, as they are, struck my Fancy; I clos'd the Book, and bethought myself, that the unhappy Adventure, I have mentioned above, which then came fresh into my Mind, might naturally raise a Tale, upon the Appearance of this Ghost.
This is the same explanation regarding the lines from The Knight of the Burning Pestle that is appended to 'William and Margaret' in Mallet's Poems on Several Occasions and Works. The author enclosed a copy of his own ballad along with this letter to the editor of The Plain Dealer, but, in spite of some textual variants, the latter did not see fit to reprint it: 'The Author's Copy, which he inclos'd to me, is different in several Places, from that which fell into my Hands; but the Sense of both, is exactly the same; and the Variation, in some Expressions, not considerable enough to make it necessary to republish that excellent Ballad.'
So, Mallet certainly laid claim to authorship of 'William and Margaret'--the ballad beginning "Twas at the silent Midnight-Hour', or "Twas at the silent, solemn hour', or "Twas at the fearful Midnight Hour'--and his friend Allan Ramsay equally certainly acknowledged his claim. Notwithstanding the textual variants, it is recognizably the same 'work' that appears with The Excursion (1728), in The Tea-Table Miscellany from 1726 onwards, and in Mallet's Poems on Several Occasions (1743) and Works (1759). The variant readings in The Plain Dealer and The Weekly Journal are more extensive, going well beyond the opening lines. Nevertheless, there is considerable weight of evidence pointing to Mallet as the unnamed author of the Plain Dealer/ Weekly Journal ballad. Whether particular textual variants were the work of the periodical's editor (who admits to altering a phrase here and there), the author's own earlier drafts and later revisions, or some combination thereof, remains unclear - although there may be a clue in the note appended to the 'Advertisement' to The Excursion (1728): 'N.B. The little Poem [i.e. 'William and Margaret'], that follows this, is added here, only because it was printed formerly from an incorrect Copy.' (41) Mallet certainly made textual revisions between editions of others of his published works, notably The Excursion.
Aside from the numerous editions of The Tea-Table Miscellany, where the ballad is usually attributed to 'D.M.', this 'David Mallet' variant was printed mostly, though certainly not invariably, without attribution. It is given with (different) musical settings in Watts's Musical Miscellany (1729) and Thomson's Orpheus Caledonius (1733) (Figure 4). Both The Hive (1732) and Orpheus Caledonius (1733) substitute a "Twas at the silent midnight hour' text for the 'When all was wrapt in dark midnight' text of their earlier editions. Throughout the eighteenth century the 'David Mallet' variant, sometimes titled 'Margaret's Ghost', is found in a succession of English and Scottish, and at least one American, songsters, which look to have fed successively off one another. It was printed by Percy as 'Margaret's Ghost', with attribution to Mallet, and by David Herd as 'William and Margaret', without attribution. The copy in The Charms of Melody (1795?) is attributed to Mallet. At the end of the eighteenth and into the nineteenth century it was printed in various (mostly Scottish) chapbooks.
[FIGURE 4 OMITTED]
While the anthology copies remain textually similar to one another, there are some variant readings, which particularly affect the opening lines: "Twas at the silent midnight hour, / When all were fast asleep' (The Hive, Orpheus Caledonius, Philomel); "Twas at the fearful midnight hour, / When all were fast asleep' (A Complete Collection of Old and New English and Scotch Songs, The New-Tea-Table Miscellany); "Twas at the silent solemn hour, / When night and morning meet' (Reliques of Ancient En1ish Poetry), for example. Variant readings are found among the chaphooks, too, with even a few reprintings of the Plain Dealer text (When hope lay hush'd in silent night, / And woe was wrapp'd in sleep') (Figure 5). Nevertheless, whether attributed or not, it seems fair to hold that these are all versions of the same work', and that it can be identified with David Mallet's authorship.
[FIGURE 5 OMITTED]
The Charge of Plagiarism
The headnote to 'Margaret's Ghost' in Reliques of Ancient English Poetry reads as if Percy thought Mallet's ballad was in some way indebted to an earlier model:
The two introductory lines (and one or two others elsewhere) had originally more of the hallad simplicity, viz.
When all was wrapt in cark midnight.
And all were fast asleep, &c. (42)
Percy is not explicit, but the reference must be to the 'When all was wrapt in dark midnight' variant identified above-perhaps to either a broadside copy or A Collection of Old Ballads. As framed here, the charge is scarcely one of plagiarism: Percy is simply making an observation about the style of what he terms Mallet's 'elegant production'.
In the third and fourth editions of Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, however, Percy added at the end of 'Margaret's Ghost' a note about a curious publication called The Friends (1773). (43) The Friends purports to reproduce a series of letter from a person now deceased (and apparently unidentified), one of which addresses the subject of 'William and Margaret' and explicitly levels the charge of plagiarism against Mallet. (44) The letter reproduces, supposedly from an old manuscript book of the writer's mother-'who had a line Taste for the beautiful Simplicity of the old English Poetry; and used to preserve all fugitive Pieces, of the Kind, that she happened to meet with, any where'-- the original poem that, so the writer claims, Mallet adapted and appropriated as his own. In fact, what is printed in The Friends is the Plain Dealer/Weekly journal text of 'William and Margaret', and presumably one of those publications was the source copied by the writer's mother-- if, indeed, her old manuscript book really did exist at all. The letter writer collates some of the main textual variants, with the intention of displaying the manifest inferiority of Mallet's 'copy' when compared with this 'original'.
Percy, however, was not persuaded: 'But the superior beauty and simplicity of the present copy [i.e. Mallet's 'Margaret's Ghost' as given in the Reliques], gives it so much more the air of an original, that it will rather be believed that some transcriber altered it [i.e. the text given in The Friends] from Mallet, and adapted the lines to his own taste; than which nothing is more common in popular songs and ballads.' Percy may or may not have been exactly right in his surmise--as outlined above, all the evidence points to Mallet as the author of the Plain Dealer/Weekly journal text, although it may have been altered by another hand--but whatever the demerits of 'Margaret's Ghost', the modern reader, too, is perhaps likely to prefer it to the even more florid version in The Plain Dealer, The Weekly journal, and The Friends. This letter in The Friends is really no more than a curiosity which sheds no light on the origins of 'William and Margaret'. Nevertheless, it marks what is perhaps the first explicit accusation of plagiarism against David Mallet. Shortly afterwards, in the preface to Captain Edward Thompson's edition of The Works of Andrew Marvell (1776), the accusation was made that 'William and Margaret' was written by Marvell in 1670 and subsequently plagiarized by Mallet. (45) Within a few years, the printer and writer John Nichols comprehensively dismissed Thompson's claim in the course of his Biographical and Literary Anecdotes (1782), (46) and it has never subsequently been taken seriously.
When, a century later, William Chappell came to level the same charge, he accused Mallet of having appropriated and adapted not the Plain Dealer/ Weekly Journal text but the When all was wrapt in dark midnight' variant, and, in particular, William and Margaret, An Old Ballad [ESTC T52506; British Library, 1876.f.1.(107.)]. (47) Chappell's argument depends on his attempt to show that the broadside pre-dated by some significant time the first known appearance of Mallet's 'William and Margaret' (in The Plain Dealer). Mallet, according to Chappell, must have bought a copy of the ballad from a Chapman in Scotland and, after changing the first lines and a few other details in order to avoid detection, passed it off as his own work to Allan Ramsay, who was not one who would scrutinize too closely a claim which would add to the reputation of one of his countrymen'. (48)
The main plink of Chappell's argument is the presence on the verso of William and Margaret, An Old Ballad [ESTC 152506; British Library, 1876.f.1.(107.)] of a halfpenny tax stamp hearing the motto of Queen Anne 'SEMPER EADIEM' and the number 435.[49] Chappell asserted that the Stamp Act of 1711 which imposed a duty on newspapers, pamphlets, etc. was not intended to apply to broadside ballads, and that they were speedily excepted from its operation, meaning that a copy stamped in this manner must therefore date from c.1711, well before the date of composition of Mallet's ballad. Tax stamps, however, can be found on publications well after the reign of Queen Anne and there is no evidence for Chappell's assertion regarding ballads in particular--and while the fact that this particular ballad was printed on stamped paper may be no more than fortuitous, the number of the stamp gives a rough indication of a date in the region of 1723/24. (50) Swaen's observation that there was a good deal of irregularity in the application of the newspaper registration stamp in the first quarter of the eighteenth century is readily believable, and Chappell's case remains altogether unproven. While the dates for the early broadsides suggested by ESTC, Foxon, and the British Library might have been influenced by the Mallet association, they are nonetheless most probably more or less correct.
Chappell made the further charge that Mallet could hardly be supposed to have read The Knight of the Burning Pestle in the early 1720s. Yet the author's letter printed in The Plain Dealer of 28 August 1724 (which Chappell probably did not know of) seems to confirm exactly that. Finally, Chappell was apparently convinced that the 'When all was wrapt in dark midnight' variant as manifest in the 1720s was nonetheless a ballad that was in circulation at the time of The Knight of the Burning Pestle, for he specifically states of the copy in A Collection of Old Ballads: 'It is, in fact, a reprint from the old ballad quoted by Fletcher, which was supposed to have been lost.' (51) Swaen is dismissive of this view, pointing out the 'evident eighteenth-century tone' of the broadside copy printed by Chappell. (52)
W. L. Phelps in an appendix to The Beginnings of the English Romantic Movement (1893) then went further. (53) In short, his argument runs as follows. The copy printed in The Plain Dealer in July 1724 was a 'disfigured version' (an adaptation by the editor of a pre-existing 'William and Margaret' ballad). Mallet saw this in print and noticed that the author had not been identified. Having 'the true copy in his possession (presumably in the form of a broadside), he altered the first line and made some further changes, 'trumped up a story of the circumstances that led him to compose the poem', and, 'taking care to withhold his name from the public', sent it to The Plain Dealer in August 1724. 'With great cunning he himself quoted the passage from the old drama [The Knight of the Burning Pestle], thus forestalling future criticisms on that score.' The editor of The Plain Dealer printed Mallet's letter but not his poem, 'probably because he liked his own improvements too well to have them superseded'. Then Mallet, wanting a publisher for his own work, passed it to Allan Ramsay, who published it, over the initials 'D.M.', in The Tea-Table Miscellany. When no one else came forward to claim authorship, Mallet eventually published it as his own work (though not, strictly speaking, in 1728, as Phelps states, since The Excursion does not carry its author's name).
Swaen rightly points out that Phelps has overlooked the fact that Allan Ramsay knew Mallet as the author of 'William and Margaret' as early as 1723. (54) Swaen's own considered conclusion (which appears nonetheless to have been in some degree swayed by Phelps) is as follows. (55) Mallet was familiar with the ballad from a broadside copy. This, with a few alterations of his own, he read and/or circulated among his friends and literary acquaintances, including Allan Ramsay, with the result that Mallet came to be known as its author. Meanwhile, the editor of The Plain Dealer had come across and printed a copy in which another hand (or perhaps the editor himself?) had made some alterations. Then Mallet, now resident in England, stepped in and claimed the ballad as his own work.
There is little doubt that the accusations of plagiarism leveled against Mallet owe a good deal to what has been perceived as his rather unsavoury personal and literary character.Y' He allegedly failed to write (or at least to publish) a life of the Duke of Marlborough for which he had already accepted a fee; he penned an attack on his deceased friend Pope at the behest of the politician Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke; he wrote a pamphlet defaming Admiral Byng for which he received money from a secret government fund; he is said to have made a false claim to have written the words to 'Rule, Britannia'. All the same, Samuel Johnson, not a sympathetic commentator, wrote in Lives of the Poets: 'His first production was William and Margaret; of which, though it contains nothing very striking or difficult, he has been envied the reputation; and plagiarism has been boldly charged, but never proved.' (57) So far as Mallet's subsequent literary reputation is concerned, Swaen argues that this is at least debatable and that Mallet should not be overlooked simply because his achievement is generally thought to rest on this single, youthful production; (58) while Jung makes a good case for Mallet's significance within his literary, historical, political, and social context.[59] The one thing that is beyond doubt is that if a 'William and Margaret' broadside (the most likely format) could be shown significantly to pre-date 1723, then Mallet's authorship could definitely be ruled out. But that is precisely the one thing that the available evidence does not endorse--and it is unlikely (though not, of course, impossible) that anything will turn up to confirm a pre-1723 date. But if Mallet did not plagiarize 'William and Margaret'. then the logical inference would be that he wrote it, subsequently revising the text several times.
Given this impasse over the authorship question, it is more fruitful to think of 'William and Margaret' as a whole--as a textual complex represented in various forms in the early broadsides and A Collection of Old Ballads, in The Plain Dealer and The Tea-Table Miscellany, in The Excursion and Mallet's Poems and Works, in Percy's Reliques and other anthologies, in various late eighteenth-/nineteenth-century chapbooks. 'William and Margaret' can be considered as a single 'work', not so much from the perspective of authorial intention, which has proven to be something of a dead end, but from a readerly perspective and a perspective of reception: From the editor's and reader's perspectives a work is represented more or less well and more or less completely by various physical forms, such as manuscripts, proofs, and hooks [or, in this instance, by different formats of physical publication--periodical, broadside, chapbook, anthology]. These forms often are not textually identical. From the receiver's perspective a work is the imagined whole implied by all differing forms of a text that we conceive as representing a single literary creation.' (60)
It should be no surprise that an eighteenth-century ballad can accommodate a degree of textual variance, and--while this remains necessarily a subjective judgement--close textual comparison offers little to negate the conception that these various texts are indeed all versions of the 'same' ballad, the same 'work' (see Appendix 1). The different opening lines have probably been something of a distraction, acquiring an exaggerated importance-perhaps inevitably because opening lines frequently serve as descriptors (for cataloguing purposes, for instance') and are often of more value than titles in distinguishing pieces that truly are different. But when someone paired Vincent Bourne's Latin rendering with 'When all was wrapt in dark midnight' in Miscellaneous Poems, by Several Hands and with "Twas at the silent, solemn hour' in Mallet's Poems and Works, they apparently had no conception of them as other than one and the same English work. William Thomson's pairing of different 'William and Margaret' texts with the tune in the different editions of Orpheus Caledon ills can be probably interpreted in the same way.
At the end of the century, Sir Joseph Mawbey published in the Gentleman's Magazine in 1791 an account of the life and literary opinions of Thomas 'Hesiod' Cooke (whose 1728 translation of Hesiod, the first into English, gave him his nickname), quoting from Cooke's commonplace book in which he had recorded in 1744 his highly critical opinions on David Mallet's Poems on Several Occasions. (51) Mawbey appears largely to have concurred with Cooke's poor opinion of 'William and Margaret' (Cooke called it 'extremely ill-wrote, and unharmonious'); but in 1792 another contributor to the Gentleman's Magazine, 'A.S.' , came to its defense (it has met, from readers of every description, a warmth, and universality of admiration, which it is the lot of few poetic compositions to attain'). (62) Both Mawbey and 'A.S.' comment on the revision of the first stanza from 'When all was wrapt in dark midnight / And all were fast asleep', etc. to "Twas at the silent solemn hour / When night and morning meet', etc., and both simply assume it was Mallet who made the revision. At this late date, these comments do not amount to evidence relevant to the authorship question, but they do amount to evidence about the later reception of the 'William and Margaret' complex.
A few years later, around 1795, texts of the Child ballad 'Fair Margaret and Sweet William' and of 'William and Margaret' were printed in different numbers of The Charms of Melody, published in Dublin, outside of the English and Scottish copyright domain. The charms of Melody comprises a series of 100 four-page chapbooks, containing predominantly English and Scottish ballads and songs (along with some Irish songs and translations from 'German and other languages), individually numbered but continuously paginated and indexed as one, which sold for a penny each. The intention was that the individual numbers should build up into a single anthology of ballads and songs. The two different texts of 'William and Margaret', beginning 'When all was wrapt in dark midnight' (titled 'William and Margaret') and "Twas at the silent solemn hour' (titled 'Margaret's Ghost'), were printed in different numbers of the serial anthology, and both were happily ascribed to Mallet. While it is not the case that no one in the eighteenth century was concerned about the authorship of 'William and Margaret'. it does seem that the equation of named authorship with textual uniformity could count for relatively little.
'William and Margaret' and the Popular Ballad
In his memoirs, the playwright and novelist Thomas Holcroft (1745-1809) recalled that, in his early years, 'the walls of cottages and little alehouses [...] had old English ballads, such as Death and the Lady, and Margaret's Ghost [...] occasionally pasted on them'. (63) The regular reprinting of 'William and Margaret' testifies to the enduring currency of the ballad throughout the eighteenth century.
While the ballad is mostly printed without music notation or tune direction, it was nonetheless set to a melody from an early date, as described above. In brief, the notation printed with William and Margaret, An Old Ballad [ESTC T52506; British Library, 1876.f.1.(107.)] does not seem to have been reprinted (Figure 2); but the 'Montrose's Lilt' named as an alternative is given as a setting in Orpheus Caledonius. 'Fair Rosamond', named on the Margaret and William, A Ballad [ESTC T4951] broadside, was certainly a widely used ballad tune. The melody most commonly associated with 'William and Margaret' in the eighteenth century, however, was that printed with William and Margaret, A New Ballad [British Library, G.315.(18.), G.315.(104.), H.1601.(521.)], William and Margaret, A Ballad [British Library, G.316.f.(95.)], William and Margaret, A Ballad [British Library, G.313.(76.)] (Figure 3). This is the tune printed in the Musical Miscellany (1729) and subsequently used in a couple of ballad operas, The Village Opera by Charles Johnson (1729), where it is named as 'Margaret's Ghost' (air xxxv), and The Devil to Pay by Charles Coffey (1731), named as 'When all was wrapt' (air xxv) (the accompanying texts are, of course, quite different). The same tune, without words, appears under the title 'William and Margaret' in Oswald's Caledonian Pocket Companion (c.1745). (64) It is presumably this tune that is indicated by the direction To the tune of William and Margaret' which is found with a number of other eighteenth-century ballads.
In the Scots Musical Museum (c.1795?), 'William and Margaret' is given to a composed melody. (65) Christie's Traditional Ballad Airs (1876) prints an arrangement of a melody 'sung in Aberdeenshire', presumably in the nineteenth century. (66) Bronson is generally dismissive of the tunes for 'William and Margaret', stating that those on the early broadsides 'clearly have nothing popular in them', although he does concede that the Orpheus Caledonius tune may represent 'an early tradition that has failed to survive'. (67) Two copies collected by Gavin Greig in Scotland in the early twentieth century (only one of which has words, beginning 'When a' was wrapt in dark midnight') go to melodies placed by Bronson in his main group of 'Fair Margaret and Sweet William' tunes. (68) 'William and Margaret' has also (rarely) been collected in America, but without a melody, and the suspicion is that it might have been learned as a verse recitation. (69)
A range of imitations and parodies of 'William and Margaret' further testify to the ballad's currency during the eighteenth century. Examples include 'Watty and Madge, in imitation of William and Margaret', and Thomas Tickell's Lucy and Colin, A Song, written in imitation of William and Margaret (1725), both of which appeared in The Tea-Table Miscellany. A burlesque William and Margaret ballad, accompanied by a grotesque engraving, appeared in 1785. (70) Several satirical pieces reference 'William and Margaret', including G--e and D--y; or, The Injur'd Ghost, on George Fitzroy, Earl of Euston, and his wife Lady Dorothy (1743); S--s and J--l, A New Ballad, on Samuel Sandys's bill to repeal Sir Joseph Jekyll's gin act (1743); Wonder upon Wonder; or, The Cocoa Tree's Answer to the Surrey Oak; on the Newcastle administration (1756); and Pynsent's Ghost, on Pitt the elder (1766). In 1786 there appeared 'Dr Johnson's Ghost', a poem, 'by a Lady'. And Johnson himself, after Frances Reynolds (sister of Sir Joshua) had painted his portrait, wrote in a letter of 20 August 1783: 'I told her it was Johnson's grimly ghost.' (71)
There are numerous references, too, to 'William and Margaret' in the literature of the period, of which just a few examples will have to suffice. In Isaac Bickerstaff's highly successful comic opera Love in tillage (1762), as the plot resolves itself in a satisfactory and amusing way, one of the characters declares: 'we shall have ballads made of it within these two months [...] and it will be stuck up with Margret's Ghost, and the Spanish lady, against the walls of every cottage in the country' (act 3, scene 1). Betsy Blossom in Samuel Foote's comedy The Cozeners (1774), has the following dramatic outburst:
How! and have I a rival? perjured monster; but think not my death shall close our account; my shade, like Margaret's grimly ghost, shall pursue thee; haunt thee in dreams at midnight, shake thy curtains round thy guilty head, holloa in thy ear.
Bethink thee, Toby, of thy fault,
Thy pledge and broken oath;
And give me I ack my maiden's vow,
And give me back my troth. (act 2, scene 1)
(The ballad is accurately quoted but for the substitution of 'Toby' for 'William'.) Again, in John O'Keeffe's comedy Wild Oats (1791), Sir George Thunder complains: 'when my conduct to poor Amelia comes athwart my mind, it's a hurricane for that day, and when I turn in at night, the ballad William and Margaret's Ghost rings in my ear. "In glided Margaret's grimly Ghost"' (act 1, scene 1). There are examples, too, in prose fiction, including several references to 'Margaret's grimly Ghost' in the course of The History of Miss Clarinda Cathcart and Miss Fanny Renton (1766), by Jane Marshall. In The Precipitate Choice; or, The History of Lord Ossory and Miss Rivers (1772), an epistolary novel, 'By a Lady', Lady Ossory, spying on her husband, records: 'when all was hush, in glided, not Margaret's grimly ghost, but my good man' (vol. 2, letter 8).
The picture, then, is of two ballads--the Child ballad 'Fair Margaret and Sweet William' and the 'William and Margaret' complex connected with David Mallet--that were current during the eighteenth century and afterwards, and which both appear in the record rather suddenly in the 1720s. And yet, in order to explain the quotation(s) in The Knight of the Burning Pestle, presumably there has to be a direct connection for at least one of them back to the early seventeenth century. It is known that the survival rate for early broadsides was quite low, and certainly not all were entered by name in the Stationers' Register, but it is nonetheless not entirely satisfactory to have to invoke either missing broadsides or oral transmission in order to bridge a gap of more than a hundred years--although both are, of course, entirely possible.
In the absence of anything else, Swaen's observation about the 'eighteenth-century tone' of 'William and Margaret' must carry some weight, though interpretation of style is necessarily subjective and does not rule out the adaptation of something earlier. While the ballad echoes the stanza in The Knight of the Burning Pestle, the converse--that the stanza in The Knight of the Burning Pestle echoes (an earlier copy of) the ballad--does not follow. The ballad and song quotations in The Knight of the Burning Pestle are generally not exact when measured against roughly contemporaneous extant copies, and they can probably be thought of as quotations from memory, from snatches of song in oral and printed circulation, adapted where necessary to integrate them into the play text (for instance, through alteration of personal pronouns). (72) So it is as likely that Old Merrythought is alluding to 'Fair Margaret and Sweet William' as to 'William and Margaret'--more likely if it is allowed that the couple of lines later in the play ('You are no love for me Margret, I am no love for you') also echo the Child ballad.
The two ballads, as described above, represent different ways of handling their shared subject, 'Fair Margaret and Sweet William' tending towards narrative and the working out of a story, 'William and Margaret' towards lyric and the establishment of an atmosphere. The differences in diction are readily apparent. No doubt, these stylistic distinctions, as well as the consciousness of an authorial presence in the person of David Mallet, have helped cast the former as 'traditional' and the latter as 'literary'--to the latter's detriment, at least among ballad scholars. Bronson maintains the same sort of distinction in regard to the ballad tunes.
Nevertheless, and conversely, 'William and Margaret' can be cast as an influential literary precursor, an example avant la lettre, as Saintsbury would have it, of the style and substance of the romantic poetry of the later eighteenth century. Saintsbury did not say exactly what he meant - and in any case 'romanticism' certainly cannot be defined by any single set of criteria--but it is possible to identify in 'William and Margaret' the kind of uninhibited expression of strong emotion and rejection of self-restraint, the free play of the imagination and invocation of heightened terror--as The Plain Dealer has it: 'that Blood-curdling, chilling Influence, of Nature, working on our Passions (which Criticks call the Sublime)'--conveyed with a directness of diction indebted to the ballad mode, that together invite the description 'proto-romantic'. Likewise, the fantastic, supernatural, morbid, quasi-medieval subject matter prefigures the gothic literature of the mid-century, which similarly sets aside convention and restraint. So Margaret's 'grimly ghost' appears, with 'clay-cold' hand holding her 'sable shrowd', from her 'midnight grave', at a time of night when 'injur'd ghosts complain' and 'dreary graves give up their dead', to describe how she resides with the 'hungry worm' and wears her 'winding-sheet', all of which is designed to send William 'raving' from his bed. Even love itself has consumed her youth in a further simile of corruption and decay, 'like the canker worm'. The Plain Dealer dilates at length upon the perceived felicities of the piece, in what can itself be considered a sustained piece of proto-romantic criticism, concluding:
It is a plain and noble Masterpiece of the natural Way of Writing, without Turns, Points, Conceits, Flights, Raptures, or Affectation of what Kind soever. It shakes the Heart by the mere Effect of its own Strength and Passionateness: unassisted by those flaming Ornaments, which as often dazle, as display. in Poetry. This was owing to the Author's Native Force of Genius; For they, who conceive a Thought distinctly, will, of necessity, express it plainly, because, out of the Words which arise, and offer themselves to embody a shadow'd Meaning, they find no Use for the Superfluous, but to darken, and confound their Purpose.
The 'grimly ghost', of course, was there in The Knight (Dim Burning Pestle. Shakespeare also uses 'grimly'. The Oxford English Dictionary has several late medieval citations, (73) but between The Knight of the Burning Pestle and 'William and Margaret' the only citation comes from the ballad 'Sir Aldingar' (Child 59), in the Percy folio manuscript (c.1650) but possibly of earlier origin.
It is perhaps difficult to believe that a single ballad could actually have had such an influence, but the printed record is undeniable. In addition to references in the literature of the period, 'William and Margaret' was also cited in works of literary criticism. Thus The Art of Poetry on a New Plan (1762) observes: 'William and Margaret, written by Mr. Mallet, has many beauties of the tender and elegaic [sic] kind. The description of Margaret's ghost is very poetical, and the reflection on the power of death just and seasonable [...] And the manner in which she interrogates, and upbraids him for his inconstancy, is very pathetic.' (74) 'When all was wrapt in dark midnight' is reproduced in full (and attributed to Mallet) in John Aikin's Essays on Song-Writing (1772?), as an illustration to the 'Essay on Ballads and Pastoral Songs'. (75) Maria Edgeworth and Richard Lovell Edgeworth, in their critical/pedagogical tome Practical Education (1798), take a more circumspect view of the romantic taste for the sublime: 'When we hear of "Margaret's grimly ghost", or of "the dead still hour of night", a sort of awful tremour seizes us, partly from the effect of early associations, and partly from the solemn tone of the reader. The early associations which we perhaps have formed of terror, with the ideas of apparitions, and winding sheets, and sable shrowds, should be unknown to children. The silent solemn hour of midnight should not to them be an hour of terror.' (76)
All of this seems, on the face of it, to reinforce the separation between 'William and Margaret' and 'Fair Margaret and Sweet William' as examples of eighteenth-century balladry. Yet Hugh Shields has also charted the appearance of romantic/gothic elements in 'traditional' ballads, with particular reference to the revenant lover motif. (77) Although most of the examples stem from rather later than the 1720s, he notes that this kind of poetic matter is not restricted to the romantic period of the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century, with 'The Suffolk Miracle' (Child 272) as an example from the last quarter of the seventeenth century and 'The Grey Cock' (Child 248) from the mid-eighteenth. (78) It is certainly possible to adduce proto-gothic elements at an earlier date--the broadside 'Demon Lover' and 'Bateman's Tragedy' of the mid-seventeenth century come to mind--but the subject would benefit from further systematic investigation outside of the Child canon. It may be that 'William and Margaret' is just one instance of a changing sensibility that saw a tendency towards the gothic developing among ballads of various different styles. To cite just a handful of examples directly from the Child canon, it would pave the way for such things as the Demon Lover' of the Minstrelsy of' the Scottish Border, with its demonic, shape-shifting revenant (Child 243 F); the waking corpses of 'Proud Lady Margaret' (Child 47) and 'The Unquiet Grave' (Child 78); and some of the gothic excesses of the Anna Brown repertoire (Child .6, 32, 34, 35, 37, 42, 89, for example).
It is, of course, extremely difficult to attempt a consideration of the subject without the hindsight afforded by later folk song collecting, which has endorsed some ballads, such as 'Fair Margaret and Sweet William', as 'traditional' (or in Child's terminology, 'popular'), but not others, such as 'William and Margaret'. The eighteenth century, however, did not have that perspective, and the printed record offers little scope for clear distinction between the two. The Tea-Table Miscellany is often represented as having been directed towards the wives and daughters of the Edinburgh gentry, which may very well be true, but it is hard to imagine that they provided the only market for all those editions. (79) Both ballads are well represented on broadsides and in chapbooks, as well as in anthologies. It looks as though 'William and Margaret' probably did reach a slightly more elite audience than 'Fair Margaret and Sweet William', but the indications are that that would have been in addition to, rather than instead of, the presumed lower-status 'ballad audience'. The available evidence is at present simply not strong enough to support a confident distinction on social grounds, though further research into the reception of the various sorts of ballad publications in earlier centuries would be very welcome.
If the distinction between the 'traditional' ballad and (for want of a better term) the more literary ballad is purely an aesthetic one, then certainly it can be upheld. Probably few scholars today would wish to ride to the defence of 'William and Margaret' on aesthetic grounds. But otherwise, it is important that it should not be artificially ruled out of the ballad environment of the 1720s and afterwards. All the indications are that different styles of ballad coexisted in print. This translates into a very strong inference that they were read side by side, too--which would certainly mean reading out loud (note the reference to 'the solemn tone of the reader' in the quotation from the Edgeworths given above)--and only slightly less strong an inference that they were recited or sung side by side. That on occasion ballads of different kinds were passed on by oral means can also be inferred from their later history--'William and Margaret' did survive to be collected, albeit rarely. It might very well be that in the 1720s the distinctions of more recent ballad scholarship would simply have had no meaning.
Note: For the sake of clarity and consistency (but with some reluctance), the use of italics and small capitals in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sources is not reproduced here, and quotations are presented uniformly in a Roman font. Titles are italicized and standardized with regard to capitalization according to current conventions. In order help identify specific items, where possible English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) <estc.bl.uk/> numbers and/or British Library shelfmarks are provided within square brackets.
Select Bibliography
Items are listed in (roughly) chronological order. Where possible, a further identifier is provided in the form of an ESTC number and/or reference to a specific collection (Cambridge University Library, Madden Collection; Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland; London, British Library; Oxford, Bodleian Library). A small number of items that can be identified by title only from library catalogues are not included here.
'Fair Margaret and Sweet William' (Child 74)
* anthologies
[Thomas Percy], Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 3 vols (London: J. Dodesley, 1765), m, 121-25 [ESTC T849361]. + further edns.
[David Herd], The Ancient and Modern Scots Songs, Heroic Ballads. &c. (Edinburgh: Martin & Wotherspoon, 1769), pp. 295-97 [ESTC T78132]. + 2nd edn (1776).
[Joseph Ritson], A Select Collection of English Songs, 3 vols (London: J. Johnson, 1783), II, 190-94 [ESTC T145845]. + 2nd edn.
The Charms of Melody: or Siren Medley (Dublin: J. and J. Carrick, [1795?]), pp. 32, 340 [ESTC N69013].
* broadsides
fair Margaret's Misfortune ([London]: S. Bates, [1720?]) [ESTC N69850; Bodleian Library, Douce Ballads 1(72a)].
Fair Margaret's Misfortunes (London: William and Cluer Dicey. [1740?]) [ESTC N8158].
Fair Margaret's Misfortunes (London: Aldermary Churchyard, [1750?]) [ESTC N70816: Bodleian Library. Douce Ballads 3(27a)].
Fair Margaret's Misfortunes (Lo[n]don: Aldermary Churchyard, [1760?]) [ESTC T35165: British Library, Roxburghe Ballads 3.338-339, 3.342-343].
Fair Margaret's Misfortunes (London: Bow Churchyard, [1760?]) [ESTC N8156].
I. Fair Margaret's Misfortunes [...] II. The Auld Goodman; III. Roslin Castle, with the Answer; IV. The Young Damsel's Lamentation for the Loss of her Dearest Honey; V. The Number of Kisses ([Edinburgh?], 25 April 1776) [ESTC T35166].
* chapbooks
The Bonny Lass on Clyde-Water; to which is added, Fair Margaret's Misfortunes [...] A New Song on the Counterfeit Halfpence; Daphne and Myrtilla ([Glasgow?, 1800?]) [ESTC T183734]
The Lady's Advice to her Lover; to which are added, Fair Margaret's Misfortunes; Loch Eroch Side: The Lover's Petition: Lothario: Youth the Fittest Time for Love (Glasgow: J. & M. Robertson. 1800) [ESTC T37476].
The Frigate Well Mann'd; to which are added, Fair Margaret's Misfortunes [...] Weary Anthony; Why Did I Believe Him (Glasgow: J. and M. Robertson, 1802) [British Library, 11621.b.13.(11.)].
A Collection of Popular Songs, viz.; The Mug of Porter; Fair Margaret's Misfortunes; Johnny Bluster's Wife; The spinning Wheel (Edinburgh: printed for the booksellers, [1815?]).
Fair Margaret's Misfortunes; to which are added, A Cogie of Ale; The Wear Pund o'Tow; Song in Rosina (Edinburgh: printed for the booksellers, [1820?]) [British Library, 11621.b.9.(38.)].
Fair Margaret's Misfortunes; to which are added, A Cogie of Ale; The Weary Pund o' Tow; Song in Rosina (Stirling: W. Macnie, [1825?]) [British Library, 11601.aa.43.(11.)].
'William and Margaret' ('When all was wrapt in dark midnight')
* anthologies
The Hive, 3 vols (London: John Walthoe, 1724-25), I, 169-71 [ESTC T59216]. + further edns.
A Collection of Old Ballads. vol. III (London: J. Roberts, D. Leach, and J. Batley, 1725), pp. 218-20 [ESTC N940, N941]. + 2nd edn.
The Choice (London: J. Watson, 1729), pp. 201-03 [ESTC T59140]. + further edns.
The Muses Delight (Liverpool: John Sadler, 1754), p. 312 [ESTC T204033].
Apollo's Cabinet; or, The Muses Delight, 2 vols (Liverpool: John Sadler, 1756), II, 312 [ESTC T161814]. + further edns.
The Vocal Magazine, vol. I (London: J. Bew, 1778), pp. 82-83 [ESTC P6485] + further edns.
The Charms of Melody; or, Siren Medley (Dublin: J and J. Carrick, [1795?]), p. 48 [ESTC N69013].
* broadsides
William and Margaret, An Old Ballad ([London, 1723/24 or Edinburgh?, 1723?/1725?]) [ESTC T52506; British Library, 1876.f.1.(107.)]. with music notation.
William and Margaret, A New Ballad ([London, 1725?]) [British Library, G.315.(18.), G.315.(104.), H.1601.(521.)]. with music notation.
William and Margaret, A Ballad ([London. 1727?]) [British Library, G.316.f.(95.)]. with music notation.
Margaret and William, A Ballad ([Dublin, 1728?]) [ESTC 14951; British Library C.121.g.8.(115.)].
William and Margaret, A Ballad ([London, 1730?]) [British Library, G.313.(76.)]. with music notation.
A Lamentable Ballad of the Tragical Ends of William and Margaret (Northampton: William Dicey, [1750?]) [ESTC T37509].
A Lamentable Ballad of the Magical End of William and Margaret (London: Aldermary Churchyard, [1760?]) [ESTC T207025; Madden Collection, vol. 3, no. 853].
I. Fair Margaret's Misfortunes [...] II. The Auld Goodman; III. Roslin Castle, with the Answer; IV. The Youn Damsel's Lamentation for the Loss of her Dearest Honey; V. The Number of Kisses ([Edinburgh?], 25 April 1776) [ESTC T35166].
William and Margaret (Coventry: J. Turner, 1797-1846) [Bodleian Library, Harding B 5(57); madden Collection, vol. 3, no. 855].
A Lamentable Ballad: or The Tragical End of William and Margaret (Birmingham: D. Wrighton, [1811-13]) [Bodleian Library, Harding B 5(58); Madden Collection, vol. 3, no. 854].
* chapbooks
William and Margaret, An. Old Ballad ([Edinburgh?, 1723?, or 1730?]) [ESTC T2208; British Library, 11631.aaa.56.(10.)].
The Hive: A Choice Collection of New Songs (London: Bow Churchyard, [1760?]) [ESTC T226920].
The Linnet: A Choice Collection of New Songs (Worcester: J. Butler, [1780?]) [ESTC T41003].
Fire Excellent New Songs: I. The Tragical End of William and Margarat; II. Wolf's Lament, New Way; III. The Young Man's Petition; IV. The Nymph's Reply; V. Charge the Musket ([Glasgow?, 1785?]) [ESTC T178436].
Lay thy loof in mine lass! A Very Old Song: to which are added, that incomparably excellent song entitled Lord Thomas of Winsberry; also the Tragedy of William and Margaret; and A Drinking Song (Stirling: M. Randall, [1810?]) [British Library, 11621.11.12.(58.)].
* Latin translation
Miscellaneous Poems, by Several Hands (London: D. Lewis, 1726), pp. 38-47 [ESTC T117257].
[Vincent Bourne], Thyrsis & Chloe, William and Margaret; Votum [D.sup.ris] Gualteri Pope, The Old Man's Wish; & Corydon Querens, Colin's Complaint; Tres cantilence celebratioris nominis Latine redditce (London: B. Barker, 1728), pp. 1-5 [ESTC N135].
V[incent] Bourne, Poematia, Latine partim reddita, partim scripta (London: printed for the author, 1734), [9]-19 [ESTC T143849]. + further edns.
Vincent Bourne, Miscellaneous Poems, Consisting of Originals and Translations (London: W. Ginger, 1772), pp. 54-61 [ESTC T101991].
* musical setting
W. Thomson, Orpheus Caledonius (London; printed for the author, 1725), no. 49.
David Mallet, 'William and Margaret' (''Twas at the silent, solemn hour/fearful midnight hour')
* works of David Mallet
[David Mallet], The Excursion, A Poem, in Two Books (London: J. Walthoe, 1728), pp. 75-80 [ESTC T53836]. + 2nd edn.
Mr. Mallet, Poems on Several Occasions (London: A. Millar, 1743), pp. 211-21 [ESTC T100672]. Also as part of The Works of Mr. Mallet, Consisting of Plays and Poems (London: A. Millar, 1743) [ESTC N25865]. with Bourne's Latin translation.
The Works of David Mallet Esq., new edn, 3 vols (London: A. Millar; P. Vaillant, 1759), I, [2]-12 [ESTC T100650]. with Bourne's Latin translation.
* periodicals
The Plain Dealer, Friday, 24 July 1724 (no. 36); Friday, 28 August 1724 (no. 46). The Weekly Journal; or, British Gazetteer, Saturday, 25 July 1724, pp. 2927-28.
* anthologies
[Allan Ramsay], The Tea-Table Miscellany, vol. II (Edinburgh: Allan Ramsay, 1726) [microfilm copy, National Library of Scotland. Mf.2(5)]. pp. 61-65; [Allan Ramsay], The Tea-Table Miscellany, vol. II, 5th edn (Edinburgh: Allan Ramsay, 1729), pp. 61-65 [ESTC T179626]. Allan Ramsay, The Tea-Table Miscellany-numerous further edns.
[Allan Ramsay], A New Miscellany of Scots Sangs (London: A. Moore, 1727), pp, 148-51 [ESTC T62592].
The Hive: A Collection of the Most Celebrated Songs, 4th edn, 4 vols (London: J. Walthoe, 1732-33), I, 161-63 [ESTC T127157].
A Complete Collection of Old and New English and Scotch Songs, 4 vols (London: T. Boreman, 1735-36), II, 74-76 [ESTC N28609].
The Nightingale (London: J. Osborn. 1738), pp. 274-76 [ESTC T116636]. + further edns.
Philomel (London: M. Cooper, 1744), pp. 22-24 [ESTC T93811].
The Aviary (London: J. Mechell, [1745?]), pp. 538-39 [ESTC T143946, T184891]. + further edns.
The Charmer (Edinburgh: J. Yair, 1749), pp. 89-91 [ESTC T187927]. + further edns.
The New-Tea-Table Miscellany (Glasgow: James Knox, 1752), pp. 279-81 [ESTC T211463].
British Songs, sacred to Love and Virtue (Edinburgh, 1756), pp. 38-42 [ESTC T166800].
The American Mock Bird (New York: James Rivington, 1760), pp, 68-70 [ESTC W403].
A Choice Collection of Scotch and English Songs (Glasgow: printed for the booksellers, 1764), pp. 277-79 [ESTC T187951].
[Thomas Percy], Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 3 vols (London: J. Dodsley, 1765), III, 310-13 [ESTC T84936]. + further edns.
The Scots Blackbird (Aberdeen: for William Coke, Leith, 1766), pp. 75-77 [ESTC T172474]. + 2nd edn.
The Blackbird, 3rd edn (Edinburgh: for William Coke, Leith. 1771), pp, 68-69 [ESTC T125011]; new edn (Berwick: William Phorson; London: B. Law, 1783), pp. 74-76 [ESTC T184540].
A Collection of the Most Esteemed Pieces of Poetry (London: Richardson and Urquhart, 1767), pp. 77-80 [ESTC T124631]. + 2nd edn.
A Collection of One Hundred and Fifty Scots Songs (London: A. Millar, 1768), pp. 148-51 [ESTC T78044].
[David Herd], The Ancient and Modern Scots Songs, Heroic Ballads, &c. (Edinburgh: Martin Wotherspoon, 1769), pp. 192-94 [ESTC 178132]. + 2nd edn (1776).
The Charms of Melody; or Siren Medley (Dublin: J. and J. Carrick, [1795?]), p. 328 [ESTC N69013].
* musical settings
The Musical Miscellany, 6 vols (London: John Watts, 1729-31), 11,84-87 [ESTC T118842].
W. Thomson, Orpheus Caledonius, 2 vols (London: printed for the author, 1733), 1,109-12 (no. 49) [ESTC T167478]. + 2nd edn.
James Johnson, The Scots Musical Museum, 6 vols (Edinburgh: James Johnson, [1787-1803]), V, 554-55 (no. 536) [ESTC T122111]. + later edn.
* chapbooks (''T was at the silent, solemn hour/fearful midnight hour', etc.)
The Celebrated Ballad of William and Margaret; to which is added. Watty and Madge, a parody thereon (Glasgow: Brash & Reid, [1798]) [ESTC T28968].
The Tragical End of Wi1liam and Margaret; to which [are] added, A Love Song; and Jessie, the Flower o'Dumblain ([Stirling]: [M.] Randall, [1800?]) [British Library, 11621.b.7.(17.)].
Four Favourite Songs: William and Margaret; Go, Yarrow Flower; Robin and Anna: Could a Man Be Secure ([Glasgow?]: printed for the booksellers, [1830?]) (British Library, 1078.k.11.(10.), 1078.k.11,(34.)].
* chapbooks ('When Hope lay hush'd in silent night'-the Plain Dealer text)
Wi1liam and Margaret's Garland, containing three new songs: 1. William and Margaret; 2 Newmarket Horse-Race; 3. Melinda's Com[plaint] (Gloucester: M. Cook, [1785?]) [ESTC T52507; British Library, 11621.b.11(3.)].
A Garland of New Songs: William and Margaret; Mary's Dream; Roy's Wife of Aldivalloch; My Nannie, O; Death or Liberty (Newcastle upon Tyne: J. Marshall. [1800?]) [ESTC N71648].
A Garland of New Songs: William and Margaret; Death or Liberty; Roy's Wye of Aldivalloch; The jubilee (Newcastle upon Tyne: J. Marshall, [1810?]) [British Library, T.C.6.a,18.(13.)].
Notes
(1) Sheldon P. Zitner, ed., The Knight of the Burning Pestle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), pp. 8-10, ascribes the play primarily to Beaumont; some of the earlier sources quoted here refer to it as Fletcher's play. For the date, see pp. 10-12.
(2) The Knight of the Burning Pestle (London: Walter Burre, 1613), sig. E3r [ESTC S1045531 (act 2, lines 438-41, in Zitner's edition).
(3) [Thomas Percy], Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 3 vols (London: J, Dodsley, 1765), in, 121 IESTC T84936].
(4) Francis James Child, ed., The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 5 vols (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1882-98, ii, 199 [hereafter ESPB] .
(5) Note that in Child 74 A the fourth line of this stanza is emended to correspond with The Knight of the Burning Pestle (ESPB, 11, 203).
(6) The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1613), sig. G4v (act 3, lines 569-70).
(7) Zitner, ed., The Knight of the Burning Pestle. pp. 173-83.
(8) Child dated this broadside c.1685 (ESPB, 11. 203), following Chappell's suggested date for Sarah Bates in Wm. Chappell and J. Woodfall Ebsworth, eds, The Roxhurghe Ballads, 9 vols (London and Hertford: Ballad Society, 1869-1991), I, xvii. However, the British Book Trade Index gives a more reliable date range for Sarah Bates of before 1719-after 1735 <www.bbti.bham.ac.uk> [accessed 20 March 20131.
(9) Percy, Reliques (1765), in, 121.
(10) ESPB, II, 200.
(11) Lowry Charles Wimberly, Folklore in the English & Scottish Ballads (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1928), pp. 258-60.
(12) A. W. Ward and A. R. Waller, eds, The Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. 9: From Steele and Addison to Pope and Swift (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1912), pp. 185-86.
(13) Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, with critical observations on their works, 4 vols (London: C. Bathurst, et al., 1781), iv, 435-45 [Esn: T1467341.
(14) David Mallet, Ballads and Songs, ed. Frederick Dinsdale (London: Bell and Daldy, 1857); Sandro Jung, David Mallet, Anglo-Scot: Poetry, Patronage, and Politics in the Age of Union (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2008); Sandro Jung, '"Staging" an Anglo-Scottish Identity: The Early Career of David Mallet, Poet and Playwright in London', in Scots in London in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Stana Nenadic (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. 2010), pp. 73-90. See also James Sambrook, 'Mallet [formerly Malloch], David (1701/2?-1705)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography <www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/17888> [accessed 29 March 2012].
(15) Roxburghe Ballads, in, 667-76.
(16) A. E. H. Swaen, 'Fair Margaret and Sweet William'. Archie fur das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, 136 (n.s. 36) (1917), 40-71.
(17) Fair Margaret's Misfortunes is listed in the Dicey firm's catalogues of 1754 (p. 48) [ESTC T1881721 and 1764 (p. 89) [ESTC T1625941, the latter reproduced at <www.diceyandmarshall.bham.ac.uk/> [accessed 20 March 2013].
(18) [Thomas Percy], Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 2nd edn, 3 vols (London: J. Dodsley, 1767), 119 [ESIC 1837351.
(19) Bertrand Harris Bronson, The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads, with their texts, according to the extant records of Great Britain and America, 4 vols (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959-72), ti, 155 (see also 1, 39).
(20) A Collection of Old Ballads, vol. In (London: J. Roberts, D. Leach, and J. Batley, 1725), p. 211 [ESTC N940, N941].
(21) William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 345,501.
(22) Roxburghe Ballads, 111, 671-73.
(23) Claude M. Simpson, The British Broadside Ballad and its Music (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1966), p. 785.
(24) Roxburghe Ballads, in, 669.
(25) D. F. Foxon, English Verse 1701-1750: A Catalogue of Separately Printed Poems with notes on contemporary collected editions, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 1, 444 (M60).
(26) Simpson. The British Broadside Ballad and its Music, p. 787.
(27) Foxon, English Verse 1701-1750, 1, 444 (M59); Allan Ramsay, Jrnny and Meggy, A Pastoral, being a sequel to Patie and Roger (Edinburgh: printed for the author, 1723) [ESTC T2227].
(28) Simpson, The British Broadside Ballad and its Music. p. 787.
(29) Simpson, The British Broadside Ballad and its Music, p. 788.
(30) William and Margaret is listed in the Dicey firm's catalogues of 1754 (p. 56) and 1761 (p. 96).
(31) Allan Ramsay, Poems, vol. ii (Edinburgh: Thomas Ruddiman for the author. 1728), pp. 27-59 IESTC T1549031.
(32) Robert Halsband. ed., The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wonky Montagu, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1965-67). it, 28. The stanza in the letter reads: 'So must the fairest face appear / When Youth and years are flown, / So sinks the pride 01 the Parterre / When something over blown. The first two lines echo the third stanza of 'William and Margaret'. It is difficult to know whether the stanza is meant to be parodic or not. The editor suggests Montagu might have seen a manuscript copy of 'William and Margaret'.
(33) Alan Dugald McKillop. ed., James Thomson (7700-1748): Letters and Documents (Lawrence, KS: I University of Kansas Press. 1958), p. 10.
(34) James Thomson. Winter. A Poem. 2nd edn (London: J, Milian, 1726), p. 19 [ESTC N252.151.
(35) Richard Savage. Miscellaneous Poems and Translations, by Several Hands (London: Samuel Chapman, 1726), p. 306 [ESTC T127363, T154710].
(36) The Tea-Table Miscellany. vol. 11 (1726) exists in a seemingly unique copy and is not listed in FSTC. My thanks to the National Library of Scotland for supplying the relevant pages from their microfilm copy. The typographical setting of 'William and Margaret' in this 1-26 edition and the next identified edition of vol. 11, that of 1729, looks to be identical.
(37) This publication corresponds in large part with The Tea-Table Miscellany and, according to ESTC, carries a misleading imprint.
(38) Christine Gerrard, 'Hill, Aaron (1685-1750)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edn <www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/13264> [accessed 22 March 2013]; James Sambrook. 'Bond, William (c.1675-1735)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edn <www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/2835> [accessed 22 March 2013].
(39) Barbara White, 'Salisbury [nee Pridden], Sarah (1690x92-1724)', Oxfbrd Dictionary of National Biography, online edn <www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/67088> [accessed 22 March 2013]. The stanza quoted in The Plain Dealer is closely paralleled in the first song in Sally Slisbury's [sic] Garland, containing four excellent new songs: I Sally Salishury Farewel to her Sister in Drug-Lane; II. Caelia's Complaint against Damon's Unconstalicy; III. Damon;s Constancy; or, An Answer to the Irish Howl; IV. A Dialogrte between Two Lovers (Liverpool: [W, Nevett?, 1780?]), pp. 2-3 [ESTC T182531].
(40) Ballads and Songs, ed. Dinsdale p. 87.
(41) [David Mallet), The Excursion, A Poem. in Two Books (London: J, Walthoe, 1728), p. iv [ESTC T53836).
(42) Percy, Reliques (1765), 111, 310.
(43) [Thomas Percy], Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. 3rd edn, 3 vols (London: J. Dodsley, 1775), 111, 334 [ESTC T82693]; [Thomas Percy], Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 4th edn, 3 vols (London: F. and C. Rivington, 1794), 111, 336 [ESTC T81998].
(44) The Friends; or, Original Letters of a Person Deceased, now first published from the manuscripts in his correspondent's hands, 2 vols (London: J. Bell: York: C. Etherington, 1773), 1. 67-76 [ESTC T121492]. The background to and authorship of this work are unknown.
(45) Capt. Edward Thompson, [ed.], The Works of Andrew Marvell. Esq., Poetical, Controversial, and Political, 3 vols (London: printed for the editor, 1776), 1, xx-xxiv [ESIC T81073].
(46) John Nichols, Biographical and Literary Anecdotes of William Bowyer, Printer F.S.A., and of many of his learned friends (London: printed by and for the author, 1782), p. 363 [ESTC. T58716].
(47) Chappell addressed this subject several times: Roxburgbe Ballads, in, 667-76; The Antiquary. 1 (January 1880), 8-9; and in the course of an extended discussion which also covered other matters in Notes and Queries, 7th ser., 2 (1886), 4, 132-33, 410-11, 490.
(48) Roxhurgbe Ballads, in, 668-69, 673. Russell Martin, '"Wrapt in Dark Midnight"; Ghosts of "Margaret" and David Mallet in a Virginia Ballad', Folklore and Folklife in Virginia, 4 (1988), 50-58, with rather more caution, reaches an essentially similar conclusion.
(49) Roxburgbe Ballads, 111, 667-68.
(50) Swaen 'Fair Margaret and Sweet William', p. 56; Foxon, English Verve 1701-1750, 1, 444 (M60); Gordon F. Sleigh, 'The Authorship of William and Margaret', The Library, 511i ser., 8 (1953), 121-23. In the same collection, The Rae of Courtezans and their Enamorato's, A New Ballad (London: F. Cook, 1735) [ESTC T35436; British Library, 1876.f.1.(109.)], also carries a tax stamp, numbered 492.
(51) Roxburghe Ballads, 111, 668.
(52) Swaen, 'Fair Margaret and Sweet William', pp. 55-56.
(53) William Lyon Phelps, The Beginnings of the English Romantic Movement: A Study in. Eighteenth Century Literature (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1893), pp. 177-82.
(54) Swaen, 'Fair Margaret and Sweet William', p. 68 n. 3.
(55) Swaen, 'Fair Margaret and Sweet William', p. 69.
(56) Swaen. 'Fair Margaret and Sweet William'. p. 69.
(57) Johnson. Lives of the Poets, iv, 436-37.
(58) Swaen. 'Fair Margart and Sweet William', p. 70.
(59) Jung, David Mallet, Anghi-Scot, esp. pp. 167-68.
(60) Peter L. Shillingsburg, Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age: Theory and Practice. 3rd edn (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), p. 43.
(61) Joseph Mawbey, [Anecdotes of Hesiod Cooke], Gentleman's Magazine, 61, pt 2 (December 1791), 1090-94, 118-85 (comments on Mallet, pp. 1180-831.
(62) A.S., [Reply to Mawbey], Gentleman's Magazine, 62, pt 1 (March 1792).198-200.
(63) Memoirs of the Late Thomas Holcroft, 3 vols (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1816), 1,135.
(64) James Oswald, Caledonian Pocket Companion, Book 1 (London: printed for the author. [c. 1745]), p. 9.
(65) James Johnson, The Scar Musical Museum, 6 vols (Edinburgh: James Johnson, 1787-1803). v, 554-55 (no. 536) [ESTC T122111].
(66) W. Christie, ed., Traditional Ballad Airs [...] from copies procured in the counties of Aberdeen. Banff and Moray, by W. Christie, M.A., and the Law Wm. Christie, Mompthitter, 2 vols (Edinburgh: Edmonston & Douglas, 1876; David Douglas, 18811, 1, 118.
(67) Bronson, Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads, 11. 115.
(68) Patrick Shuldham-Shaw, Emily B. Lyle, et al., eds, The Greig-Duncan Folk Song Collection, 8 vols (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press; Edinburgh: Mercat Press, for the University of Aberdeen in association with the School of Scottish Studies, University of Edinburgh, 1981-2002). 11, 494 (no. 337); Bronson, Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads, 11, 182-83 (nos. 65, 66).
(69) Martin, 'Wrapt in Dark Midnight', p. 54. See also Charles Neely, 'Four British Ballads in Southern Illinois', Journal of American Folklore, 52 (1939), 75-81 (pp. 80-81).
(70) William and Margaret ([London]: S. Watts. [1785]) [ESIC N71590].
(71) George Birkbeck Hill, ed., Letters of Samuel Johnson, LLD., 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, (892), 11, 327.
(72) Zimer, ed. The Knight of the Burning Pestle, pp. 173-83.
(73) Oxford English Dictionary, grimly adj. <www.oed.com/> [accessed 25 March 2013].
(74) The Art of Poetry on a New Plan, 2 vols (London: J. Newbery, 1762), 11, 47 [ESTC T56146].
(75) [John Aikin], Essays on Song-Writing (London: Joseph Johnson, [1772?]), pp. 59-62 [ESTC T95749].
(76) Maria Edgeworth and Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Practical Education, 2 vols (London: J. Johnson, 1798), ii. 611-12 [ESTC T137068].
(77 )Hugh Shields, The Dead Lover's Return in Modern English Ballad Tradition', Jahrhuch fur Volksliedforschung, 17 (1972), 98-114.
(78) Hugh Shields, '"The Grey Cock": Dawn Song or Revenant Ballad?'. in Ballad Studies, ed. E. B. Lyle (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer; Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield. for the Folklore Society, 1976), pp. 67-92.
(79) Alexander Law, The First Edition of' The Tea-Table Miscellany', The Bibliotheck, 5 (1967-70), 198-203 (p. 203); Sigrid Rieuwerts, 'Allan Ramsay and the Scottish Balllads', Aberdeen University Review, 58 (1999), 29-41 (p. 32-33). More generally. see the chapter on 'Ramsay the Antiquary' in Alexander M. Kinghom and Alexander Law, eds. The Works of Allan Ramsay, vol. iv, Scottish Text Society, 4th ser., vol. 6 (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood & Sons, for the Society, 1970), pp. 128-48.