Reliques Of Ancient English Poetry Research Articles

‘My name is Death/But be na' fley'd’: Bishop Percy and the Ghosting of Robert Burns in Ireland

Recent decades have seen much scholarly exploration of Robert Burns’s impact on Irish writers, particularly those connected with the province of Ulster. Less explored is the antagonistic and opportunistic response to Burns in Ireland by a number of poets, editors and patrons. This article will chart Thomas Percy (1729–1811) and his literary circle’s responses in the Dromore area of County Down to Burns’s roles as poet, song collector and literary celebrity. It will argue that Percy and his associates reacted to Burns’s work and literary afterlife with a two-pronged strategy. First, they sought to emulate Burns through publishing or providing financial assistance to a number of texts of poetry and song. Secondly, they sought to establish a network of patrons and authors who employed literature as a means to portray a stable and loyal Ireland after the Union of 1800/1. As well as a heavily revised edition of Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1795), the group created platforms for a variety of poets including Thomas Stott, Hugh Porter and Patrick Brontë. This strategy sought to invoke Burns directly as an influence, but also implicitly to exclude his legacy from shaping the writing of the circle. This article suggests that the strategy was not fully successful. Despite the generally good reception of Percy’s fourth edition of the Reliques, the other authors in the circle did not always receive praise for their work, and writers like Stott were criticised for their weak, sycophantic verse. It will claim that for some of this circle, such as Hugh Porter, Burns’s influence played a major role in shaping the promotion of their writing careers. However, for many, there was an attempt to manage the trajectory of the writer’s work and career that minimised the agency and reach of the author. Ultimately, notwithstanding the attempts to quell and minimise Robert Burns’s impact in County Down, his inspiration remained powerful and difficult to contain.

«En Ridder saa bold og en Frøken saa grand» – spøkelsesdikting i vers og på prosa

The publication of Thomas Percy’s anthology Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) not only marked a new interest in the old medieval ballads themselves, but provided contemporary writers with dramatic literary motifs. Especially erotic ghost stories became fashionable. One of the most prominent ghost story writers was Matthew Gregory Lewis. In 1796 he published what was to become one of the most influential Gothic novels at the time, The Monk, containing several ballads of Lewis’ own creation. One of these, «Alonzo the Brave», became a classic. Almost immediately it was translated to Swedish and Danish. In Sweden, the ballad about the bold warrior Alonzo and his fiance Imogine became immensely popular as a broadside ballad (skilling ballad). Later it was translated to Norwegian, where the text was shortened and in some ways simplified. It seems that the ballad collector Sophus Bugge was the first to come across the ballad in Norwegian oral tradition. This was in the 1860s, but probably the translation was made quite a few years before that. Furthermore, in some cases the ballad story was transformed to a prose tale. Especially the prose tale told by Inger Marie Fallet from Sørum is of high quality, showing that there was no unsurmountable distinction between tales in verse and prose.

Miscellaneous Spaces of Enlightenment: Dodsley, Percy, and the Midcentury Verse Miscellany

Using current scholarship on verse miscellanies to contextualize a comparison of Robert Dodsley's Collection of Poems by Several Hands (1748) and Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), this article considers how the verse miscellany was used to different purposes by editors in the middle decades of the eighteenth century. It was, variously, a space in which to preserve poetry, to test readers’ appetites for the unfamiliar, and to establish or challenge poetic taste. Most of all, however, the verse miscellany functioned as a virtual space of the Enlightenment that encouraged literary experimentation and innovation. Editors like Dodsley and Percy used paratext not only to justify their specific poetic choices, but also to establish identity of their collection. In Dodsley's case, obvious editorial interventions are absent and the typography is elegant, while for Percy, the paratext is busy and noisy, an alternative space in the miscellany through which the collection's antiquarian character is expressed. Both collections test their reader's willingness to engage with less well-known material. This article suggests that although the two poetic collections seem to have little in common, they are both concerned with ideas of literary preservation and loss, on the one hand, and cultural progress and decline, on the other, that helped to establish the poetic miscellany as a key print genre of the Enlightenment.

Shakespearean Ballads in Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry: Transition from Oral Songs to Printed Historical Documents

Thomas Percy’s ballad collection, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, marks a point of intersection between balladry and Shakespeareana, which both went through a transitional phase from vocal performance to literary undertaking in the eighteenth century. In the Reliques, ballads that had been orally transmitted by minstrels were changed into validated printed sources for a scholarly project. This transition helped eighteenth-century editors gain a historical understanding of Shakespeare and emend his traditionally received texts. These editors were persuaded to use the ballads in the Reliques as reliable sources for their emendation since they were printed as authoritative documents that were useful for their academic editions of Shakespeare. They gained easy textual access to the printed ballads in the Reliques to search for contextual or emendatory materials. A comparison of four Shakespeare-related ballads in the Reliques (“King Cophetua and the Beggar-Maid,” “Take Thy Old Cloak about Thee,” “Willow, Willow, Willow,” and “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”) to their counterparts in editions of Shakespeare reveals that the ballads that were printed as historical documents in the Reliques advanced the editors’ contextual illustration of Shakespeare and that they authorized the emendation of the textus receptus. This article focuses on the effect of the historical information provided by Percy’s printed ballads on George Steevens’s and Edmond Malone’s contextualization of Shakespeare and on their emendation of Shakespearean texts. In addition, it concentrates on the possibility that Edward Capell referred to Shakespearean ballads in Percy’s Reliques combined with old Quarto editions of Shakespeare’s works.

Romantic Women Writers and Arthurian Legend: The Quest for Knowledge by Katie Garner

Reviewed by: Romantic Women Writers and Arthurian Legend: The Quest for Knowledge by Katie Garner Roger Simpson katie garner, Romantic Women Writers and Arthurian Legend: The Quest for Knowledge. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Pp. 311, 3 b/w illus. isbn: 978–1–137–59711–3 (cloth), isbn: 978–1–137–59712–0 (eBook). $119.99 (cloth), $89 (eBook). Katie Garner’s Romantic Women Writers and Arthurian Legend is a meticulous study of the subject between 1770 and 1850 in Britain. It builds soundly on findings by previous bibliographers, and it incorporates a great range of research from the last thirty years [End Page 93] covering the Arthurian Revival, antiquarianism, the Gothic Revival, romanticism, readership, travel writing, Welsh studies, gender studies and women’s writing. The introductory chapter outlines the background. As this period witnessed ‘an unprecedented number’ (pp. 1–2) of women entering print, and as many of them wrote about Arthurian subjects, Garner focuses on the ways in which women accessed the Arthurian legend. The Arthurian Revival in the late eighteenth century had required a wider and more coherent knowledge of the Arthurian story than was current. As manuscripts of medieval literature were virtually unknown, and as Malory had been out of print since 1634, the Revival depended on research by modern antiquarians. These were men, who moved in male cultural circles, and their findings were often published by antiquarian book clubs which denied membership to women. Even though the British Library was open to women, few made use of it, presumably because of social constraints. Moreover, Arthurian material was widely considered ‘immoral’ and unsuitable for female readers. Despite, or because of, these obstacles, women found other ways of becoming familiar with the Arthurian story and created a ‘distinct form’ (p. 10) of female Arthuriana. Garner’s five chapters make an intricate analysis and balanced appraisal of these issues. Her second chapter (‘Arthuriana for the “Fair Sex”’) highlights the bowdlerization of reading matter for women, and their wish not to appear overly emotional, hence their shift to ‘history’ rather than ‘romance.’ Male scholarly domination was partially offset by three female historians. Radagunda Roberts, for example, contributed a series of articles about Queen Consorts in the The Lady’s Magazine (1775) and included Guinevere among their number. Although Roberts’ source was Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain (a key text at this time), she re-assesses Guinevere’s role in a far better light. Susannah Dobson’s Memoirs of Ancient Chivalry (1784) drew on untapped medieval French sources, especially the Vulgate. And Clara Reeve’s The Progress of Romance (1785) influenced surveys by Walter Scott, John Moore, and Anna Barbauld. Undoubtedly many women were heavily indebted to Bishop Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, which included six Arthurian poems and an essay on metrical romances, but his three-volume edition was expensive. An anonymous lady’s solution was Ancient Ballads (1807), which was cheaper but simpler (by omitting Percy’s footnotes) and also more ‘moral’—it was meant for ‘young ladies’ (p. 50)—by censoring ‘The Legend of King Arthur’ and omitting ‘The Boy and the Mantle.’ However, this edition was read profitably by Louisa Stuart Costello, prompting her poem ‘A Dream,’ a visionary glimpse of King Arthur, and thereby ‘highly symbolic of women’s compromised proximity to medieval texts’ (p. 53). But a key text, Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, would become cheaply available in two editions in 1816 (with a dearer one in 1817), and a close knowledge of Malory was revealed by Costello, Caroline Norton, and Charlotte M. Yonge. Yet Malory remained unread by most women, perhaps because it was considered ‘a re-assertion of masculinity’ (p. 56). Their Arthurian focus would lie instead in Gothic verse, travel narratives, and literary annuals. Chapter Three (‘Women’s Gothic Verse and King Arthur’) points to the connection between medieval and modern romance, citing Sarah Scudgell Wilkinson’s ‘Gothic [End Page 94] trash’ (p. 73) chapbook tale, Sorcerer’s Palace, whose hero, Sir Lybius, is a reworking of the medieval Libeaus Desconnus, which Wilkinson had taken from Percy’s ‘Essay on Metrical Romance.’ A male antiquarian inspiration for women’s verse was Thomas Warton’s...

Ambiguous Progress and its Poetic Correlatives: Percy’s Reliques and Stadial History

This article has two central contentions. The first is that the prefatory essays accompanying the second edition of Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1767) constitute an inadequately appreciated form of eighteenth-century historiography. The second is that, in mediating historical material in the form of oral verse artifacts, Thomas Percy was putting into editorial practice the ambivalences of the stadial historian. Both editor and historian were alive to the significance of writing as an index to human progress and, in his redaction of oral artifacts through prosodic crafting and the composition of errata, Percy was acting out the very same obsessions with verse’s historiographical roles that so captured historians such as Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, and David Hume. In late-Enlightenment history’s various ambiguities of progress and decline, the historian and the poet stand between a self-conscious modernity and an inability to vacate the invigorating permanence of man’s primitive spirit. By circumscribing in sophisticated descriptive terminology the corrective influence of the heroic and the primitive, both Percy and the stadial historians seem at all times aware of their dividedness from the vigor they evoke.

Voices from Kilbarchan: Two versions of “The Cruel Mother” from South-West Scotland, 1825

was not until the early decades of the nineteenth century that a concern for preserving variants of the same ballad was really taken seriously by collectors. Prior to this ballad editors had been content with documenting single illustrations of ballad types in their collections; that is, they gave only one version (and often a “conflated” or “amended” one at that), such as for instance Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry from 1765 and Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border from 1802. But with “the antiquarian’s quest for authenticity” (McAulay 2013:5) came the growing appreciation of the living ballad tradition and an interest in the singers themselves and their individual interpretations of the traditional material. From this point on attention was also given to different variations of the same ballad story, including documentation (however slight) of the ballads in their natural environment. William Motherwell (1797-1835) was one of the earliest ballad collectors to pursue this line of collecting, and he was very conscious of what this new approach would mean for a better understanding of the nature of an oral tradition. And as has been demonstrated elsewhere, Motherwell’s approach to ballad collecting had an immense impact on later collectors and editors (see also, Andersen 1994 and Brown 1997). In what follows I shall first give an outline of the earliest extensively documented singing community in the Anglo-Scottish ballad tradition, and then present a detailed analysis of two versions of the same ballad story (“The Cruel Mother”) taken down on the same day in 1825 from two singers from the same Scottish village. The fact that Motherwell’s material includes alternative performances of the same ballad story from the same area allows us to get one of the earliest glimpses into ballads as a living oral tradition. We may assess at close hand the degree of variability and multiformity that is characteristic of texts in oral tradition (Foley 1998:5), and thus gain an appreciation of the ballads as a living cultural phenomenon.

Thomas Percy's Chinese Miscellanies and the Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765)

Thomas Percy's collection Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) is widely recognized as one of the most important antiquarian publications of the mid-eighteenth century. Percy's pivotal role in revising how the British conceived of their national literary past, however, seldom has been critically linked to his contributions to popularizing Chinese literature in England. This essay proposes that Percy's Chinese books functioned as an important preparative for his theorization of a nonclassical, alternative English antiquity in the Reliques . Indeed, Hau Kiou Choaan and Miscellaneous Pieces shed important light on both the editorial and theoretical strategies that shaped the Reliques and enabled it to become a lasting literary landmark.

Thomas Percy's Antiquarian Alternative to Ossian

Thomas Percy’s anthology Five Pieces of Runic Poetry Translated from the Islandic Language (1763) has attracted significantly less critical commentary than his monumental Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765). Nonetheless, the two anthologies were conceived as part of the same national project. Percy offered his earlier anthology of Norse verse to a book market that saw increasing competition between national, ethnic and political identities. It is clear from the introduction to this work and letters Percy wrote that he conceived of Five Pieces as a direct response to the “translations” of Ossian. James Macpherson’s Fragments of Ancient Poetry (1760) was a publishing success and an intensely debated phenomenon, as well as a national milestone for Celtic Scotland. At a time before the discovery of Beowulf , Percy promoted the Norse poems of his collection as representative of what he believed Anglo-Saxon heroic verse to have been like. Five Pieces warrants attention for its partly emulative and partly antagonistic relationship to Macpherson’s Ossian project. Percy’s editorial choices, introduction, annotations, and not least the appendix of transcribed manuscript texts were responses, in various ways, to debates over Ossian. In particular, Percy’s emphasis on script-based and bibliographic culture presented a counter to the dubious status of Ossianic oral tradition.

Thomas Percy, China, and the Gothic

Thomas Percy, China, and the Gothic James Watt (bio) While assembling the materials that were to make up his influential collection Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), Thomas Percy issued the first translation of a Chinese novel in a European language, Hau Kiou Choaan, or, The Pleasing History (1761), and he produced a collection of (mainly translated) essays and extracts under the title of Miscellaneous Pieces Relating to the Chinese (1762). The first half of this article will examine these works as provocative interventions in long-standing debates about the prestige of Chinese civilization, and it will discuss the way that Percy positioned himself in relation to other available means of presenting "Chinese" material, as well as to the substantial body of Jesuit missionary sources that were at his disposal. In the remainder of this piece, I will be concerned to trace the continuity of Percy's preoccupations and editorial practices across his diverse publications of the 1760s, in order to suggest that The Pleasing History and Miscellaneous Pieces were also constitutive parts of his larger and much better-known project to recover and celebrate the integrity of a native and sometimes specifically Gothic genius. Briefly considering the wider field of late-eighteenth-century literary orientalisms, towards the close, I will go on to claim that Percy's writings of the 1760s set out a particular position in what was to become a contentious argument over the nature and origins of the stimuli that might rejuvenate British literary culture. It is not clear precisely how and when Percy's interest in China began, but we know that in February 1758 he borrowed a manuscript translation of the seventeenth-century Chinese novel Hau Kiou Choaan from a Captain Wilkinson, whose uncle, James Wilkinson, had first translated the work in 1719, probably as a form of language exercise while he was resident as a merchant in Canton. Percy later claimed to have pruned and refined Wilkinson's manuscript, and he also added a preface and an extensive apparatus of footnotes to his 1761 edition of the novel, as well as a series of addenda, including "The Argument or Story of a Chinese Play," "A Collection of Chinese Proverbs," [End Page 95] and "Fragments of Chinese Poetry." The fame at this time of Percy's publisher, Robert Dodsley, testified to the potentially broad appeal of works that claimed—either real or imaginary—Chinese origins. Dodsley was widely known not only as one of London's preeminent booksellers (he later published other works by Percy, including the Reliques), but also as the author of The Oeconomy of Human Life, a collection of general ethics that first appeared in 1750, and went through almost two hundred editions before the end of the century. Dodsley's work claimed to have been transmitted from China by an unnamed "English gentleman," who had caught on to the "great noise" made by a rare Indian manuscript that had been picked up by the Chinese imperial envoy on a mission to Tibet; offering a calculatedly broad and nondenominational appeal, The Oeconomy of Human Life assumed the appearance of an "ancient piece of eastern instruction," as a means of addressing abstract moral questions concerning the "Duties that relate to Man, considered as an individual."1 Although there is little available evidence on the basis of which to reconstruct Percy's negotiations with his publisher, it seems fair to suggest that Dodsley would have initially seen The Pleasing History as a means of further capitalizing on the great commercial success of The Oeconomy of Human Life, as well as of catering to the popular taste for things Chinese (the frontispiece to the novel's first volume, depicting a wedding procession, is in fact strongly reminiscent of a "chinoiserie" scene).2 One of the many striking things about Percy's edition of this Chinese novel, however, is that it eschews the generalized "eastern instruction" framework that had been employed by Dodsley's Oeconomy. Whatever their actual provenance, early and mid-eighteenth-century oriental fictions published in Britain tended to offer themselves to their readers as works that provided a combination of instruction and delight. Percy referred to the "moral tendency" of The Pleasing...

"The purest english": Ballads and the English Literary Dialect

Sir, ballad-singer is higher man, for he does two things; he repeats and he sings: there is both recitation and musick in his performance.... --Samuel Johnson (1) Despite often being described as sister arts in the eighteenth century, the intimate relationship between poetry and music has been neglected by recent criticism in favor of text-based theories of interpretation. This paper investigates how noise defined the aesthetics of Englishness at the end of the eighteenth century and for the Romantic period, suggesting that is possible to trace sound patterns in literature and in prints, and thereby to reconstruct certain soundscapes. Although the following account is itself profoundly text-based, does attempt to consider how sounds, whether musical settings or background noise, can be articulated in literature, and how this noise may echo changing social conditions. My interpretation is underpinned by the poetics of Richard Shusterman, as elaborated for literary criticism by Ralph Pordzik. Pordzik's approach calls for an examination of the situational embedment of text: how literature functions as experience. (2) This is not merely investigating how literature affects our emotions, but is a method of recapturing dimension of the written text that appeals to our sense of more fully realized, sensual experience instead of our intellectual or analytical abilities. (3) Neopragmatist reading is not paraphrasing; it should be seen as literary practice that tries to be more adequate, more true, to the text's sensual import, one that brings us closer to achieving an internally more integrative experience of reading as 'collaboration' with the text. (4) For the purposes of the present paper, neo-pragmatist reading stresses the harmonic expectations of eighteenth-century readers confronted with ballad or song text, and argues that acoustic references in verse should not simply be considered as metaphorical, but as the traces of lost (and irrecoverable) physical reality. (5) Literature is, in other words, secret history of noise. Lines may allude to the voice and music, the natural sounds of birdsong, wind, and rain, the insistent hubbub of the city, and so forth. All of these sorts of sounds can be emphasized with acoustic effects such as alliteration, assonance, and rhyme, but there is also in writing secondary noise, like background ambience, which carries sounds more covertly or implicitly. This is almost inaudible to readers today, but would have been more noticeable to contemporaries. Popular folk melodies such as Packington's Pound or Derry Down, street cries, and even the unearthly strains of the Aeolian harp may no longer be familiar sounds today, but they were part of the phonic world of the eighteenth century. (6) They were not metaphorical sounds but actual experiences, and hence they whisper through the poetry of the period. I shall confine my discussion to one work: Thomas Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (popularly known as Percy's first published in 1765). My argument proposes that in eighteenth-century collections of old and in particular in Reliques, textual sound effects are deployed in order to exemplify an emerging English identity, and that this subsequently influenced the antiquarian editing of later ballad collections and the composition of verse. These activities also attempted to distance the English tradition from political balladeering and the rude sounds of rioting. The Reliques is collection of ballads, songs, romances, and historical poetry, liberally seasoned with literary-antiquarian annotation: there are traditional ballads, songs from Shakespeare, translations from the Moorish, Scottish songs, as well as popular and political verses from British history. Many of the pieces purportedly derived from folio MS, the seventeenth-century commonplace book he had famously rescued from being used as firelighter, but he also drew on many printed sources, including Thomas D'Urfey's Pills to Purge Melancholy (1719-20) and the 1723 Collection of Old Ballads, as well as archives such as the Pepys Library and his own collection of contemporary broadsides. …

The Typographical Gothic: A Cautionary Note on the Title Page to Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry

The “rise of the gothic” in the late eighteenth century is a truism and would seem to require less in the way of evidentiary support than mere confi rmation. While we may not all agree on precisely what “the gothic” or “the Gothic” is any more than we might agree on precisely what we mean by “the sublime,” we presume that the lack of precision in such terms does not invalidate them. After all, our use of the term gothic is not entirely arbitrary, since we fi nd that word used in the texts of the late eighteenth century we consider central to literary study: Richard Hurd’s Letters on Chivalry and Romance and Thomas Warton’s History of English Literature. The gothic is, and there’s an end on’t. It is not the purpose of this paper to off er a new defi nition of the gothic nor to critique those that already exist. Rather we will consider how material bibliographical evidence — features of particular books — been deployed in support of these terms. Is it legitimate, or advisable, to raise to the level of a text’s meaning those bibliographical and material features of the book, namely its format, layout, and typography, that until the late twentieth century were generally considered extra-textual? 1

A Cinderella Among the Muses: Barrett Browning and the Ballad Tradition

In their 1867 edition of Bishop Percy’s folio of ballads, John H. Hales and Frederick J. Furnivall picture the ballad before the Romantic revival as a ‘Cinderella’ among the Muses: She had never dared to think herself beautiful. No admiring eyes ever came near her in which she might mirror herself. She had never dared to think her voice sweet… She met with many enemies, who clamoured that the kitchen was her proper place, and vehemently opposed her admission into any higher room. The Prince was long in finding her out. The sisters put many an obstacle between him and her… But at last the Prince found her, and took her in all her simple sweetness to himself.1 Some readers might pause over the class- and gender-inflected assumptions in this ingenuous fairy story of a gallantly patronizing ‘Prince’ taking a low-born maiden ‘to himself’. But few would dispute the importance of the union Hales and Furnivall fancifully describe. Every student of Romantic poetry recognizes the profound significance of the ballad revival, reflected in Bishop Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), in Sir Walter Scott’s ‘minstrelsy’, and above all in the Lyrical Ballads published by Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1798.

The Medieval Fictions of Thomas Warton and Thomas Percy

The enthusiasm for the culture of the Middle Ages during the latter half of the eighteenth century finds various forms of expression. Yet the visitors who flocked to Walpole's Strawberry Hill instead of Glastonbury Abbey, the readers who purchased Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry instead of Joseph Ritson's scholarly editions, and the antiquarians who preferred Matthew Prior's prettified and sentimental version of 'The Nut-Brown Maid' to the original remind us that the pseudo-medieval was often more attrative than the genuine article. For the past was invested with a significance that might prove offensive to contemporary beliefs, tastes, and values: A medieval building carried an objectionable taint of Catholicism, and medieval poems wre considered to be ill-formed compositions of 'wild fancy' and 'rude meter.' These are but two of the qualities that offened an age which, as William Shenstone had repeatedly adivised Thomas Percy had little taste for 'unadulterated antiquity.' One writer expressed this predilection whe he declared that a'happy imitation is of much more value than a defective original.'

CONFUSED IDENTITIES IN RELIQUES OF ANCIENT ENGLISH POETRY

Journal Article CONFUSED IDENTITIES IN RELIQUES OF ANCIENT ENGLISH POETRY Get access YOSHITAKA SHIBATA YOSHITAKA SHIBATA Tohoku Gakuin UniversitySendai, Japan Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume 35, Issue 2, June 1988, Pages 193-b–195, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/35-2-193b Published: 01 June 1988

Genre and Authority: The Eighteenth-Century Creation of Chaucerian Burlesque

According to Warton, the late eighteenth-century reading of Sir Thopas is radically different from earlier readings. Although the earlier consensus Warton imagines (that Sir Thopas is a heroic narrative) is surely a fiction, Warton is essentially correct. The characterization of Sir Thopas as a form of literary criticism (discerning the improprieties in books) is not found before the work of Warton and his contemporaries Warburton, Percy, and Richard Hurd. Warton's language here actually conflates poet and critic: he has recreated the text in his own image. In sharp contrast to this now familiar reading of Sir Thopas is the eighteenth-century interpretation of the Squire's Tale, a tale many of us find equally critical of preceding works and thus equally parodic. Although Warton noted the elements in the Squire's Tale as early as 1754, neither Warton nor his contemporaries labelled it a burlesque work or a parody. The Squire's Tale was seen as the very grave heroic narrative Warton imagines Sir Thopas once to have been. In this paper, I shall consider the reasons for this double reception, and argue that Sir-Thopas-the-Burlesque is better characterized as an eighteenth-century creation than as an eighteenth-century critical discovery. Eighteenth-century scholars had recent access to the supposed targets of Chaucer's parody; they were described both in Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry and in Warton's History. More importantly, they had a new critical vocabulary, borrowed largely from the

Winsome Period Pieces: The Poetry of Howard Pyle

Winsome Period Pieces:The Poetry of Howard Pyle Alethea Helbig (bio) Howard Pyle stands among the most influential illustrators in the history of literature for the young in America, and he is remembered also for his retellings from oral tradition, literary fairy tales, novels, and numerous essays. Few people recall, however, that Pyle also wrote poems intended for children. Yet he produced some four dozen poems for the young and it was through a poem for children that he first broke into print. After Pyle's school years were over and he had entered the family leather business, he spent many happy hours writing and sketching for his own enjoyment. One of these products of his leisure time was a short, amusing, story poem called "The Magic Pill," which his mother, an intelligent, well-read woman, thought had possibilities for publication. To the Pyles' delight, the poem was accepted, and in July of 1876, "The Magic Pill" appeared in the "Bric-à-Brac" section of Scribner's Monthly, together with the skillful sketches that Pyle had fashioned to go along with it. No literary giant nor even a gem, "The Magic Pill" is a momentarily intriguing story in verse, with a clever twist in plot and an underlying shot at human frailty. The poem tells how Parson Cook "in New England a long time ago" attends a dying, old woman, who is rumored to be a witch. She gives him a pill that will grant one wish. That night, while sitting by the fireside with his wife, the Parson reflects on the discomforts of growing old: He fingered the pill, and he sighed, and said he, "There is something quite wrong in our poor mortal life. If I had arranged it, it surely would be, That age should not have all the bitterest strife. Ah me!" sighed the Parson; "I wish I were young;" And the little round pill glided over his tongue. (446). Since Parson Cook fails to indicate how young he chooses to become, he decreases steadily in age as the poem progresses, turning into a mischievous and disagreeable boy, and finally into an equally unlovable baby, who, mercifully for those with whom he lives, expires in a fit of colic. In spite of technical faults like padded lines, unnecessary inversions, clichés, and too deliberate archaicisms, the poem proceeds with a buoyancy and an affection for subject, audience, and life that offset its awkwardness and its underlying [End Page 28] didacticism. As a youth, Pyle had read, among others, the tales of the Brothers Grimm, the stories of King Arthur, Joseph Ritson's ballads, and Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. In "The Magic Pill," he gives evidence of responding to the spirit of these old, orginally oral stories. In fact, "The Magic Pill" reveals qualities that are to appear over and over again in his subsequent poems: the reliance on old stories for ideas; the ability to tell a good story well and with clarity, the ability to paint pictures with words; careful attention to details; the use of the medieval and early American periods for settings; technical shortcomings that result in verse rather than true poetry; and the inability to resist taking advantage of the opportunity to moralize or at least give gentle advice. Already in "The Magic Pill," Pyle shows the felicitous combination of romanticism and realism that his biographers, Abbott, Nesbitt, and Pitz, find so striking in his prose work.1 Pyle's ability to create that same happy combination in his poems gives the best of them great charm, and draws attention away from their technical limitations and lack of orginality. Over the next few years, Pyle published several poems in Harper's Weekly and in Harper's New Monthly. These are mostly full-page, hand-lettered productions, upon which Pyle no doubt lavished many hours of painstaking effort. Four of them are set in the out-of-doors, drawing their inspiration from nature. The musical, static "The Sea-Gull's Song" depends upon the accompanying illustration for much of its meaning and effect. A young woman sits alone by the seashore, pensively watching a sea gull soaring overhead, and wonders...

A Standard Dictionary of English Folktales

AbstractThe publication of Dr. Katharine M. Briggs's four volumes A Dictionary of British Folk-Tales in the English Language is a major event in the field of folktale studies in England, and both the author and publishers are to be most heartily congratulated. The need for such a comprehensive collection of English folktales from literary and oral sources, old and new, was paramount. For far too long the folktale has been the Cinderella of English scholars. Ever since Bishop Percy published his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry in 1765, it is the ballad rather than the folktale that has proved England's stength and joy. In Victorian England, and especially following the formation of the Folklore Society in 1878, folklore flowered as a living study in almost all its aspects except the folktale and it developed into an acknowledged science, although its main emphasis was on folk customs. It is true that much popular interest was also taken in folktales, and this is hardly surprising when one remembers that...

The Study of Folklore in Finland

THE STUDY of folklore in Finland is older than the country itself and of considerable importance for its development as a nation. Though in their search for antique origins there are scholars who will point to Michael Agricola's comments about runic songs in his sixteenth-century vernacular Psalter as the genesis of Finnish folklore studies, no true scholarship of any importance existed before the last half of the eighteenth century. At that time, however, ideas conceived as a result of the influence of Bishop Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry and James Macpherson's Ossianic writings were to bear immediate fruit in semiliterary works, and these, in turn, were to serve as the seed for the flowering of romantic nationalism and true folkloristic studies in the next century. Driven to chauvinism through the unwise administration of their land and its peasant population by Sweden and Russia and following the lead of equally nationalistic Englishmen and Germans, certain scholars in Turku (Abo) and later in Helsinki (Helsingfors) determined to show the genius of the Finnish people. This genius they found in the oral literature, the customs, and the beliefs of a peasantry remarkably uninfluenced by exterior forces. On the foundation of this oral literature, of these customs and beliefs, expressed as they were in a language remote from that of administrating officials and neighboring countries, patriotic scholars built so strong an idea of a nation that it was able to take advantage of the disruption of world affairs in 1917 and come into actual existence. And even as the Finnish nation was conceived of and born in folklore, so Finnish scholars, in spite of the fact that their language is little known, have from the very first exerted a significant influence upon folklore studies throughout western Europe, parts of Asia, and those portions of the world influenced in turn by Europe and eastern Asia. The history of Finnish folklore scholarship can be divided into three periods: the period before 1835 when Elias Lnnrot published the Kalevala, the period of Kalevala studies, and the post-Kalevala period. The first was an age of foreign influence and national discovery, the second was a period of romantic nationalism and introspection, and the last has been a period of expanding interest and broadening influence. The work of Elias Lonnrot, which brought the folklore of Finland to the eyes of the world, would have been far slower in development had it not been for the studies published by four scholars connected directly or indirectly with the city of Turku which until 1828 was the seat of the national university. The earliest book about any element of Finnish folklore in the Finnish language appears to have been Wanhain Suomalaisten Tawaliset ja Suloiset Sanan-lascut (Ordinary and Charming Proverbs of the Old Finns) which was published by Henricus Matthiae Florinus in 1702; but it was not until the years 1766 to 1778 that folklore achieved respectability with the appearance of Dissertationis de Poesi Fennica by Henrik Gabriel Porthan, the father of Finnish history.

The First Draft of Percy's Reliques

Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) was early recognized as a prime mover of the revolution in literary taste that occurred in the later eighteenth century. The compilation had stimulated, according to Jeffrey, the “first revulsion” to the older literature. Wordsworth did not think there was “an able writer in verse of the present day” who would not willingly acknowledge his obligations to the Reliques. It had “absolutely redeemed” English poetry. Of Percy's enormous contribution to ballad scholarship proper, one need hardly quote testimony. It is no wonder, then, that literary scholars have gone to such inordinate pains to unravel the complicated editorial history of this (for its time) ambitious work. Since the publication in 1867-68 of Percy's principal source, the precious Folio MS., almost too much has been written about Percy's textual manipulations. Curiosity has been no less lively as to Percy's criteria for admitting ballads and songs to his collection, the guiding purpose behind his arrangement, and the sources of the scholarly data that went into his able headnotes and essays. Excellent hints on these matters abound in Percy's correspondence with the syndicate of scholars that assisted him during the years he was putting together his ballad book—Edward Lye, Thomas Astle, James Grainger, William Shenstone, Dr. Johnson, Richard Farmer, Thomas Warton, Sir David Dalrymple; and though otherwise undistinguished, these letters have been making their way into print for over a hundred years, until they now constitute a shelf of sober volumes. “Shenstone's billets,” the slips on which Percy's most influential mentor rated the contents of earlier poetical miscellanies, were edited twice in two years; no less than five recent studies have been devoted to the cancels and late alterations in the first edition of the Reliques.