The british literary ballad

Oscar Wilde's 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol' stands in the tradition of the British Literary Ballad. This section will show how this genre developed, points out its influence on British authors and takes a closer look on the topic of crime and criminals.



1.1 The word "ballad" and its most important traditions



Today, a ballad is a poem in which "the story is presented in a series of short, rhymed stanzas and, on the whole, in simple, straightforward language" (Laws, 1).

Etymologically, however, the word "ballad" means "dance song". In Romance countries the ballad was a short song with a stanzaic structure and a refrain. In the English tradition, the reference to dance is far more loose.

Here, it was more the folk-song, a form that was mostly orally transmitted and performed. Traditional ballads are folk-songs of a particular kind, namely short narrative ones. The commonest themes are "violent death, sex (expecially adultery) and the supernatural" (Barber, 153). From time to time folk-ballads have been written down so that we have a lot of written material today, some of it dating back up to the thirteenth century.

In the sixteenth century, the second major form of the ballad had already reached its zenith: the street-ballad, which can be compared to today's "yellow press", presented mainly moralising stories of murder, present-day events, gossip and the supernatural. This genuine urban form of literature featured mostly some political or religious subject and often had a satirical character. The street-ballad was either sung and recited or sold, printed on broadsheets, in the street, at the fair or in pubs. It was a quite profitable business.

In the course of time, there were a number of interrelations between the folk- and the street-ballad. Folk-ballads would be taken up by "ballad-mongers" (Müller, 12) and were adapted to fit the concept of the broadside; broadsides, on the other hand, would be turned into singable folk-ballads by ballad-singers. Soon the term "ballad" had become so ambiguous that one of the most important problems of the editors of folk-poetry at that time was the differentiation between song and ballad. The editor William Shenstone thought that a ballad "describes or implies some Action" whereas a song "contains only an Expression of Sentiment" (Both: Müller, 14). This idea was subsequently taken up by a number of contemporaries and was repeated again and again, just at the time when the literal public became interested in the ballad.



1.2 The influence of the ballad on British authors



In the later eighteenth century, literary people became interested in the popular ballad and a number of collections were published. Quite a few editors felt that they had to "polish up" and improve the ballads they published. One of the most influential books for the public and for British authors was without a doubt Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, which came out in 1765. It offered the early ballad writer examples of almost all the important ballad styles.

So literary balladists have been up to a certain degree dependent upon the taste of editors who selected certain examples from the vast amount of existing ballads and who also exercised considerably control over the style of their texts. But since the ballad was so popular from the early sixteenth century up to the late nineteenth, there was hardly any British poet who was unfamiliar with balladry. City poets would hear romantic or sensational broadsides sung or recited in the streets; poets from the countryside would get in touch with folk-ballads in inns, taverns and at fairs. Not all poets necessarily admired balladry; their attitude often depended on the type of balladry they got to know. But they "did everything but ignore the ballad" (Laws, 3).

The genre of oral literature, to which some types of the ballad belong, tends to use a diction with many stock phrases or formulae, just to make the piece of literature easier to remember. Many of the phrases in common folk-balldry can be found in other ballads, either in identical or in a very similar form. Many authors discovered that the simple ballad patterns contained a number of difficulties, they were highly afraid of the "pitfall of banality" (Laws, 4). But on the other hand the ballad form offered an excellent way of telling a short and dramatic story, it produced a direct emotional impact on the reader.

In general, poets did not have scholarly or folkloristic interests in the ballad; they just subordinated it to their artistic ideas and were free to select or reject whatever stylistic features they chose. The diversity of the different forms of ballad impacted on the poets' work and produced a number of different poems which showed in one way or another the influence of the ballad on "official literature" (Barber, 156). Poems based on folk-ballads show the typical "poetic and emotional intensity, elemental action, and conventionalized language" (Laws, 12); those based on broadside models frequently have adopted the "journalistic jargon of the age" (Laws, 13) and are realistic, contemporary, moralistic and subjective.



1.3 Ballads of Crime and Criminals



The most convenient way to classify literary balladry is to arrange it according to various types of story matter. G. M. Laws has combined and revised earlier classifications to produce a list of the main ballad types. Alongside "(a) Ballads of the Supernatural (b) of Tragedy (c) of Love [...] (e) of Scottish Border Life (f) of War and Adventure (g) of Miscellaneous Subjects, and (h) of Humor" he mentions "(d) of Crime and Criminals" (Both: Laws, 24), a category to which also 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol' belongs.

In Ballads of Crime and Criminals, both folk and broadside, the criminals are mostly treated sympathetically if they are not actually regarded as heroes. The oldest example of that kind is of course Robin Hood. Other ballads of that kind wanted to capitalise on the "bloody and sensational" (Laws, 46). They, however, have been quickly forgotten since the literary balladist looked for characters with who the readers could identify. Such identification could be achieved in the popular broadsheet-type "good-night" which consisted of the purpoted last words of a condemned man before his execution and was sold on the day of execution. The general tone is moral and sentimental. The criminal, who is presented rather pitiable than heroic, regrets his past and warns others against ending like him.

Oscar Wilde's poem 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol' also falls into this category, even if it differs substentially from the "good-night"-tradition in certain points, which will become clearer in the course of this paper.