"I Have a Yong Suster": Popular Song and the Middle English Lyric (review)

This book takes as its starting point a certain dissatisfaction with studies of Middle English literature that derive from "a modernist, essentially formalist notion of the selfconsciously artistic, autonomous work of art, the literary text" (p. 7). Such studies, like David C. Fowler's Literary History of the Popular Ballad (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1968), are essentially bound to courtly models and inevitably limit themselves to a fraction of what has survived. For example, Fowler's view that minstrels were the exclusive creators of the narrative ballad eliminated even the handful of pre-1600 texts that Child admitted into his collection. Karin Boklund-Lagopoulou takes a far more inclusive view. She finds the roots of the ballad (fortunately not laboring too long over yet another definition of that contentious word) in popular song, comic tales, and, above all, the religious and secular lyric. She emphasizes, for example, that medieval society was not by any means an illiterate one, that popular and oral are overlapping concepts, and that religious songs were important vehicles of popular expression.

As she herself admits, Boklund-Lagopoulou is not the first to find popular origins for manuscript poems deriving from monasteries and the court, but, for want of much evidence of performance, she finds evidence in the gaps and silences of the texts themselves. She bases her argument on the structural semantics of Greimas, which analyzes the semantic codes of a text and takes a syntactic approach to narrative structure. Like Propp, with whom he shares some similarities, Greimas sees narrative as basically comparable to a sentence, with the grammatical categories replaced by roles, or actants, such as the familiar Adversary, Helper and so forth. Applying this theory to a group of striking but apparently disparate and inconsequential lyrics from the fourteenth-century Rawlinson Manuscript and the fifteenth-century Sloane Manuscript, Boklund-Lagopoulou shows that they share "a semantic universe in which a code of nature vs culture is articulated with codes of space, time and the sexual/erotic code of male vs female in a manner designed to bring the human into harmony with the natural through the sexual union of man and woman" (p. 69).

This approach is unacceptably reductive. Structuralist methods have been used in folksong studies for more than forty years now (most notably in Roger deV. Renwick's English Folk Poetry: Structure and Meaning, London: Batsford, 1980), and Proppian functions have been with us much longer. These nature/culture and male/female binaries are no longer seen as stable, but are deferred in the play of signification from other (absent) meanings. This is obviously true of the largely uncontextual medieval lyric. Fortunately, Boklund-Lagopoulou's analyses of individual songs are more nuanced. In addition to a comprehensive survey of the Sloane and Rawlinson manuscripts, she studies the Robin Hood group of outlaw ballads, comic ballads, songs of enchantment, and the singular Judas. She concludes with an out-of-period study of the popular songs in Richard Hill's commonplace book from the early sixteenth century.

The greatest value of Boklund-Lagopoulou's book probably lies in its individual insights rather than in its Greimas-speak. She suggests that the relationship between "The Kyng and the Barker" and "King Edward and the Tanner" (Child 273) "could well result from imperfect memory of an oral performance, or more likely a whole series of performances" (p. 117), while "King John and the Bishop" (Child 45) is probably a case of a comic tale being transformed into a sung ballad (surprisingly, not a very common occurrence). She makes interesting links between, for example, the outlaw and comic ballads in their preoccupation with material wealth, although she draws no conclusions from this as to the assumed audience. To judge from the protagonists, clerks and carpenters, jugglers and potters, they seem to be those who were later to form the backbone of the readership of the broadsides.

All in all...