Studies in Philology

Hardly anything is more fascinating than to pick up a volume of the printed Transcripts of the Stationers' Registers and to skim through the pages to see what our forefathers read. Here in a nutshell, as it were, the intellectual life of the sixteenth and seventeenth-century Englishman is revealed. And if the great names of English literature, like those of Spenser, Jonson, and Shakespeare, are not completely represented, this defect is partially atoned for by the very large number of entries of popular literature, especially of ballads and chap-books. During the first twenty or thirty years. in which the Registers were kept, ballads indeed made up the bulk of the entries; until 1640 they occupied perhaps greater space than books or plays. But from 1640 to 1655, thanks to civil war and restrictive laws, almost no ballads were registered at Stationers' Hall. A similar gap appears from 1656 (when some 165 ballads were entered) to 1675 (when some 175 were entered); and from 1676 to 1708/9-the date at which the Registers were discontinued -ballad-entries were rarely made.

It has long amused me to skim through these entries and to attempt to identify them.1 The results of this amusement (which,

Something of the sort was attempted for the years 1557-95 by J. P. Collier in his Extracts and in Notes and Queries (2nd S., XII; 3rd S., 1-III); but his work is so honeycombed with misstatements, forgery, and vague references as to be of little help. In my indexes, however, I have given full credit to Collier wherever such credit is deserved. A considerable number of the ballad-entries are listed in Hazlitt's various bibliographical works

by the way, has involved much dry, uninteresting labor) are now presented in the form of an index to all the ballad-entries made at Stationers' Hall during the years 1557-1709. The difficulty of arranging the index has been increased by the obvious necessity of serving two distinct purposes: (1) to enable the student who has the printed Transcripts before him immediately to find in my index a reference to the title he is consulting; (2) to enable the student who has a ballad before him to find out whether the ballad was registered and, if so, to refer him directly to the volume of the Transcript in which the registration is made. As a result, I have been forced to provide three indexes, the last two of which supplement, and as a matter of fact actually index, the first index. An index of printers was prepared but to economize space has been omitted.

INDEX I

aims to include the title of every ballad entered during the years. 1557-1709. Unfortunately, it has not always been possible to tell whether certain entries refer to a ballad, a prose broadside, or a book. It has seemed best, however, to err on the side of including too much rather than too little, so that in the index are included a considerable number of titles that probably were not those of ballads at all. (Cf. 1920.) In the case of epitaphs, most of the early titles are included, though many of them were certainly broadside poems, not genuine ballads. But every title which in the Registers is not expressly called a ballad is here marked with an asterisk (*), even though I know positively that a ballad was meant.

The clerks of the Stationers' Company were erratic in labelling ballads in their entries. Until March, 1588, however, fourpence was the license-fee charged for any broadside, sixpence for a book. For that reason I have included most of the titles for which fourpence was charged, omitting only those that are known, or are thought, to have been prose-works or poems of literary pretensions. After 1675 there is almost no distinction between ballads and other

but no attempt has been made there at identification. H. B. Wheatley, too, began an index of the ballad-entries (with almost no attempt at identification) down to 1640 and printed it through the letter g in The Bibliographer, VI (1884), 32-35, 77-82, 108-115, 140-143, 175-180.

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Studies in Philology, المجلد 21