Annotated Bibliography Assignment

By Jessica C. Murphy, Visualization Project Team

1. Brown, Pamela Allen. Better a Shrew Than a Sheep: Women, Drama, and the Culture of Jest in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2003.

Brown examines “jesting literature,” a purposefully broad term, for evidence of female participation in order to get a sense for the position of woman as performer, audience for, and subject of comical moments in early modern drama. Reading dramatic works alongside the jesting literature allows Brown to develop a full picture of the kind of resistance she posits women’s laughter promotes. The texts Brown looks at range from the Tudor period through the Restoration in England. Most germane to this project is Brown’s chapter that treats domestic violence in broadside ballads, “’O such a rogue would be hang’d!’: Shrews versus Wife Beaters.” Early modern didactic literature for married women encouraged them to be chaste, silent, and obedient even in the face of an abusive husband. The popular literature that is the subject of this chapter, however, is in tension with those cultural prescriptions. In these ballads, the abusers are not heroes and usually are reformed by the end of the song. Brown is careful not to claim that this means the texts are themselves a resistance to oppression, but that they offer powerful “scripts” for women to emulate. These scripts are strengthened by the examples Brown provides in her last chapter, “Griselda the Fool,” in which the archetypal patient wife, not the shrewish wife, is the object of mockery.

2. Dugaw, Dianne. “Structural Analysis of the Female Warrior Ballads: The Landscape of the World Turned Upside Down.” Journal of Folklore Research 23.1 (1986): 23-42.

Dugaw argues for an underlying structure to the “female warrior” type in ballad literature who dresses as a male soldier and follows her beloved to war. Although this project is not specifically interested in female warriors, the article is helpful for thinking about ballads in a way that respects their underlying structure. Dugaw uses the structure she uncovers to reveal relationships between and among songs that may have otherwise gone unnoticed. Contrary to the way in which scholars read the female warrior, according to Dugaw, the character is a "complex heroine" (24). As Dugaw claims, "recognizing the pull of an underlying pattern can illuminate the relationship of a song, even an irregular one, to its traditional counterparts" (30). Dugaw’s insistence that readings of “irregular” songs benefit from an understanding of the traditional structure is especially useful because the texts I look at in this project share an underlying pattern of what feminine virtue is, but most are “irregular” in Dugaw’s sense.

3. TagCrowd.com

TagCrowd.com creates tag clouds of user-supplied texts by analyzing word frequencies and rendering words in alphabetical order as larger or smaller depending on their frequency. The visualization is thus twofold—the words are rearranged into alphabetical order and at the same time the words that occur more frequently are larger. Visualizing a text like this defamiliarizes it in a familiar way. Although tag clouds are typically used to allow people to click on frequent tags in a site, the designers of TagCrowd.com claim that there are many more uses for clouds. For example, “brand clouds” that show companies how their brands are perceived, and “data mining a text corpus.” This project adds literary analysis to the other uses for tag clouds. Particularly useful are the user-controlled parameters of the analysis. For example, a user can select whether she would like to display 50 or a 100 words, choose from a “stoplist” words that should be left out of the analysis, decide whether or not to show the number of occurrences next to the word (adding another layer of visualization), group similar words, and ignore common English words such as “the.” These options provide for a measure of control over the analysis. A note to users: Although TagCrowd.com does offer the opportunity to upload a Word Document, this is not advisable since the Word trash becomes part of the analysis. It is better to copy and paste text whenever possible. 

4.  Clark, Sandra. “The Broadside Ballad and the Woman’s Voice.” in Cristina Malcolmson and Mihoko Suzuki eds. Debating Gender in Early Modern England, 1500-1700. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. 103-120.

Clark examines ballads on the subject of marriage to prove the existence of a female audience for the songs. Ballads are her subject because “Their capacity to express and explore communal values was unique in the period; and it is worth remembering that these are the social values of the nonelite, which were characteristically secular, pragmatic, and mundane” (116). Although I disagree with her characterization of the value system of the nonelite as overly simplistic, Clark’s inclusion of a couple of the ballads I work with in the chapter as a whole in her analysis makes her essay relevant to my project. For example, she reads “The Carefull Wifes Good Counsel,” a ballad about the reformation of a husband because of his wife’s advice, as evidence of a woman’s voice in the ballad tradition. Drawing a parallel with actors who played female parts, Clark claims that a lack of evidence for female singers does not constitute a lack of female voices in ballad culture. Throughout the essay, Clark uses the term “interests” to denote the set of values and everyday objects that concern women. The term troubles her argument because of course, Clark must first assume a set of interests peculiar to women to show that ballads are aimed at women by representing those interests—there is not a sense in the essay that ballads could be involved in the construction of those interests. Clark argues convincingly for a female audience and points to the possibilities of our acknowledgement of this audience at the end of her essay: “the directness of this appeal to women, as one target group, is worth consideration” (116).

5. “The Pepys Ballad Archive” at English Broadside Ballad Archive. University of California Santa Barbara. Accessed 13 February 2008. <http://emc.english.ucsb.edu/ballad_project/index.asp>

“The Pepys Ballad Archive” houses digitized versions of the ballads collected by Samuel Pepys in the 17th and early 18th centuries. In addition to the facsimile images of the ballads, the site also offers transcriptions of the blackletter in what they call “facsimile transcriptions.”  The images of broadside ballads are essential to a full reading; however, as my main interest at this stage is the words themselves and their relationships to each other, I will be using the transcriptions of the ballads for text analysis. The ten ballads I have chosen from the search results for “advice” are: Pepys numbers 1.230-231, 1.234-235, 1.382-383, 1.390-391, 2.22, 2.66-67, 3.50, 3.82, 3.100, 4.85.  Because the majority of these ballads are unlikely to be familiar, I give a brief summary of each below.

•    “A new Song of a Young mans opinion, of the difference betweene good and bad Women” (1.230-231) gives the qualities of “good women” and the vices of “bad women.”

•    “A Quip for a scornfull Lasse Or, Three slips for a Tester” (1.234-235) is sung by a scorned lover.

•     “Nobody his Counsaile to chuse a Wife: Or, The difference betweene Widdowes and Maydes” (1.382-383) claims that all women are bad, but if you have to marry, do it with a widow.

•   “A constant Wife a kinde Wife A loving Wife and a fine Wife Which gives content unto a man’s life” (1.390-391) advises men to be nice to their sweetheart.

•    “A Caveat for Young Men Or, the Bad Husband turn’d Thrifty” (2.22) claims that husbands should be more thrifty and be nicer to their wives.

•    “Pride’s Fall” (2.66-67) tells the story of a monstrous birth because of the woman’s vanity.

•    “The Maids Chastity that is troubled in mind, Against young-men’s inconstancy, who proveth unkind” (3.50) is sung by a maiden who warns other women to stay away from false men.

•    “The Innocent Maid Deceiv’d by a Dissembling Batchelor: OR, The Mothers Advice to her Wanton Daughter” (3.82) tells the story of a young woman who gets pregnant and her mother is mad, but then advises that she marry her old sweetheart and maybe he will not realize that the baby is not his. While the ballad worries that he will be very mad if he figures it out, everything goes ahead according to the mother’s plan.

•   “Doctor Experience’s excellent Advice to the Virgins: Or, An Infallible way to get good Husbands” (3.100) advises that a woman be coy and not give a man any physical love without a promise.

•   “Advice to the Ladies of London In the Choice of Husbands” (4.85), after mocking all different kinds of young men, recommends marrying an old man for his money.