"Good Ladies Be Working": Singing at Work in Tudor Woman's Song

Early ballads provide evidence for a wide social range of female voices in lyric verse and song. The scene of speaking, or rather singing, in the ballad "Attend thee, go play thee" is of a young woman at work spinning and sewing for her mistress. The ballad therefore draws attention to the non-elite working woman's voice in performance, raising questions about how working subjectivities were fashioned through song. The trope of women singing at work can offer a way into conceptualizing working women's agency because it brings into play the complex interrelationships between gender, genre, voice, and embodiment in a figurative and material sense. "Attend thee, go play thee" is a remarkable ballad because it fictionalizes the conditions of its own performance, providing evidence for how and where it might have been voiced and heard. By attending to these questions of performance, it is possible to examine issues of historical agency in relation to women's writing. In "Voicing Text 1500–1700," ed. Jennifer Richards and Richard Wistreich, special issue, http://muse.jhu.edu/muse.jhu.edu/resolve/66.