Performing Resistance to the New Rural Order: An Unpublished Ballad Opera and the Green Song
Rent from DeepDyveThis paper explores the case for the "green ballad" in the eighteenth century, presenting not unmediated experience of the environment but intervention and involvement, as in the clamor that surrounded the widespread expropriation of common land at the time. While green studies are today still more familiar in the environmental and biological sciences than in oral and literary fields, their central concerns are clear: they imagine human beings as an integral part of, and not somehow "outside" nature; the role of living things in a production economy; and issues relating to ownership of the biosphere. Any assault on a natural habitat is represented as an injury to the self. Although the eighteenth century has been called "the liveliest time for folk song creation,"1 such themes are only infrequently found in the vernacular songs and popular entertainments of the time. "The Charnwood Opera," an unpublished dramatic entertainment from the middle of the century, is an extended representation in contemporary and traditional song of an act of popular protest against the enclosure of common land and the accompanying assault on customary rights.
Introduction
The new political and economic order set in place in England in the seventeenth century led in the eighteenth to the re-invention of the countryside. In particular, Acts of Enclosure were first passed, and later implemented, at a vastly increasing rate as the century progressed.2 As a result, in many contexts, the link between the natural and the human became disrupted: nature was now to be sought in "the 'unspoiled places,' plants and creatures other than man [sic]."3 However, at the same time nature was increasingly tied to production: the georgic took its place alongside, and partly displaced, the pastoral. The countryside, the working environment, was gradually invested with aesthetic [End Page 203] qualities as landscape and as an object of consumption for those who could afford to own it. Hunting woodland might be transformed into a landscaped park, often erasing whole communities in the process.4 In ecological terms, the relation to nature became instrumental, with nature often treated as an alien Other that could be shaped and used at will with no empathic or moral constraints.5
Nevertheless, very few songs during this period consider human activity to be in conflict with or opposition to nature. Instead, they continue to regard the natural world as an extension, or strictly a figuration, of the body, either as an erotic script or on the "all flesh is grass" principle. The land tends to be seen in terms of reproduction rather than production, and the cultivated landscape as a metaphor for the human body. At the same time, objects of material culture—the taring scythe, the plough, the millstone—become metaphors for human relationships. The broadside, now more closely aligned with its new consumers, who include the makers of traditional song, characteristically represents rural settings not as picturesque but as the arena for human experience:
It was one summer's morning on the fourteenth day of May,
I met a fair maid, she ask'd my trade, I made her this reply,
For by my occupation I ramble up and down,
With my taring scythe in order to mow the meadows down.
She said, my handsome young man, if a mower that you be,I'll find you some new employment if you will go with me,
For I have a little meadow long kept for you in store,
It was on the dew, I tell you true, it ne'er was cut before.6
Such a script clearly diverges from the conventional image of woman-as-landscape, where to be seen as "nature" was to be defined as nonagent and nonsubject, as background to the "foreground" achievements of reason or culture.7
In...
