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Mary Hamilton; the Group Authorship of Ballads

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Extract

The interesting ballad “Mary Hamilton” appears in Child's collection in 22 full versions and six fragments. The heroine is usually represented to be one of the four Maries attending upon Mary Stuart. Hence it was natural to suppose that a certain known case of child-murder at the court of Queen Mary, ending in the execution of the unhappy mother, was the source of this ballad presenting a similar story. On December 21, 1563, Thomas Randolph, an agent of the English government in Scotland, wrote to Cecil as follows: The Queen's apothecary got one of her maidens, a French woman, with child. Thinking to have covered his fault with medicine, the child was slain. They are both in prison, and she [i. e., Queen Mary] is so much offended that it is thought they shall both die.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1927

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References

1 Child, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, V, 298.

2 A Ballad Book etc. Reprinted from the original edition of 1824, Edinburgh, 1883; Child, III, 382.

3 Child, III, 382.

4 Child, III, 383.

5 “The Mystery of ‘The Queen's Marie,‘” pp. 381-390.

6 See the admirable article by Professor Gordon Hall Gerould on “The Making of Ballads,” Modern Philology, August, 1923, 15-28.

7 1921, pp. 116, 198.

8 “The Term: ‘Communal,‘” P.M.L.A., XXXIX (1924), 451.

9 Child, IV, 509.

10 Child, IV, 507 n.

11 V, 298-299.

12 Mod. Lang. Rev. XI (1916), 391.

13 The Literary Review, Jan. 14, 1923.

14 Northern Ute Music, p. 26. Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 75.

15 Harvard University Press, 1924.

16 F. B. Gummere, The Popular Ballad, Boston, 1907, and elsewhere; G. L. Kittredge, Introduction to the Cambridge edition of Child's collection, 1904.