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The Elizabethan popular theater was the product of a uniquely intense and creative encounter between literary art and traditional culture, and the plays of Christopher Marlowe offer as powerful an instance of this interaction as could be wished. (1) It is not so much that Marlowe's plays sometimes reflect or encompass folklore, as that in significant and intriguing ways, they are analogous to folklore. There is nothing romantic, arcane, or subversive in this, and no appeal will be made in what follows to distant origins, deep structures, or carnivalesque inversions. Rather, the plays meet many of the criteria by which folklore is defined, and in consequence they can legitimately and rewardingly be appreciated deploying methodologies and insights developed in the study of traditional culture.
No longer taken to be the remnants ("survivals") of primitive rites and superstitions, or (at least with regard to the premodern period) as the culture of the poor, (2) folklore is characterized, and as a matter of degree rather than kind, by constituting performances to be seen and heard, rather than artifacts to be read. The inevitable result of performance from, and transmission between performances in, the memory of the performer(s) is the production, and where recording has occurred, the availability, of multiple versions of any one work, representing different lines of transmission or different phases in a single line of transmission. This is a result both of inexact recall and of the natural tendency of performers to alter material whose verbal integrity is protected neither by the authority of a written text nor respect for the original utterance of a known author. (3)
Some of this of course applies to all forms of drama, which is a performance art whose texts are reconstructed from memory in performance, however brief the interval since the actor last glanced at the script. (4) But the Elizabethan popular stage, perhaps to a greater degree than any phase of theater history before or since, was peculiarly close to the mode of folklore in this matter of the transmission of texts and their consequent instability and variability. There were few of the restraints on textual change operative, directly or indirectly, in the medieval theater (due to the doctrinal sensitivity of religious drama), or in the modern theater (due to the prestige accorded to authors). Players would have had little compunction in making alterations, before or in performance, in any "book of the play" that they had purchased outright from that lowly creature, the poet. Complain he might, but not intervene, and an audience would not notice: individual plays were not "classics" to which spectators brought any knowledge or expectations beyond familiarity with generic conventions.
Conversely, the factors producing textual instability were many and powerful. Plays were subjected to change before first performance to meet not merely the demands of the authorities but the constraints imposed by resources (personnel, costumes, machinery) and the players' sense of what would be acceptable to an audience and consequently profitable. Deliberate changes between performances and in performance would again reflect the need to succeed in front of audiences who had paid to get what they thought they wanted. Changes would also reflect, perhaps above all, the sheer pressure on the memories of the players, most of whom doubled parts in a constantly evolving repertoire of a dozen or more different plays. (5) It is the intensity of these pressures that balances the short career-in-tradition of popular Elizabethan plays when measured by the yardstick of folk traditions. In a run of fifteen or so performances at the Rose, Doctor Faustus might have been subjected to the amount of textual stress suffered by "The Frog Prince" or "Little Musgrove" over fifteen or more decades of sporadic performances in alehouses and chimney corners. (6)
I
Faced with multiple variants of a single folktale or ballad, folklorists will generally not seek to reconstruct the original text from which the variants may be presumed to derive. It is recognized that the original is lost, and merely by coming first would anyway have no claim to aesthetic priority. Instead it is possible to rejoice in the rich differentiations of the variants, and to appreciate each in its own right, as a distinct product of its own place, time, and history. (7) Although learned elsewhere than at the knee of folklore, this approach does seem to have gained some ground in the appreciation of Elizabethan drama, witness the increasingly orthodox recognition that we have two distinct King Lear's, which should be approached separately rather than in some ahistorical, editorially constructed hybrid, and Leah Marcus's rewarding juxtaposition of variant versions of Shakespearean plays with their respective local auspices. (8) The trend is also reflected in the increasing availability of the variant texts themselves: the quarto and Folio texts of King Lear in the Oxford Shakespeare and its Norton derivative; a dual-text edition of Romeo and Juliet in a respected standard series; a set of "Shakespearean Originals"; not to mention a distinguished two-text edition of Doctor Faustus. (9) If and when the old debate on the "primacy" of the A- or B-text of Doctor Faustus finally determines which one gives us the play as written (if with a collaborator) by Marlowe, while the other reflects what happened to the play in subsequent revisions, in the theater or on the road, we may still ask if the "filthy play-maker" merits privileged attention for merely initiating the process. Both texts may be acknowledged as cultural achievements, the result, respectively, of individual and collective endeavours, through composition and transmission.
But how can we tell which is which? Given two variant texts of a play (Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Doctor Faustus), how are we to determine which is the individual achievement which the collective; which is the original text, which the derivative? It may be that folklore can go further than conventional literary and bibliographical approaches toward providing a "convincing demonstration that a single reading in one version must, beyond any possibility of alternative explanation, have preceded the reading in the other" (10) But with regard to the various ways in which textual change can be introduced, folkloristics is no better than orthodox philology at detecting censorship, theatrical revision, or typographical incompetence. What it can diagnose is the type of change introduced by the performers while they are the bearers of the living verbal tradition, consciously or more likely unconsciously, under the pressure of reconstructing a text from memory in the stress and confusion of live performance before an audience who are under no obligation to remain respectful or attentive. This is what happens--if more slowly and over a longer period--to folktales and ballads. The impact of these processes is not haphazard and leaves quite distinct symptoms. In the case of folk ballads, such symptoms can be convincingly identified, and when the same symptoms occur in the text of a play, it is reasonable to conclude that it has been subjected to similar processes.
Common sense, anecdotal evidence, and strict theorizing can, in ballad studies as in Shakespearean philology, suggest what is likely to happen to orally transmitted texts: omissions, garblings, anticipations, and improvisations. (11) But to prove anything we need to compare two texts, one of which is known to be an oral derivative (at one or more removes) of the other. The differences, particularly if repeated in analogous experiments with other text-pairs, are the result, and so symptoms, of transmission. Something close to ideal, almost laboratory conditions is feasible given the availability of two dated performances of a particular song from a single singer, or from two singers who are consecutive links in the chain of transmission (e.g., a mother and a daughter who learned the ballad from her). Results of such analyses are uniquely accurate, but suffer the disadvantage of covering too short a segment of tradition for larger-scale processes to be revealed. It is also typical that such circumstances obtain at a fairly recent phase in tradition, when singers have been more affected by ambient literacy, the mass media, or even celebrity on the folk circuit. (12)
The approach applied here uncovers a longer and earlier segment of tradition, by comparing versions of a song from oral tradition with the broadside ballad, decades or centuries earlier, from which they derive. To avoid the danger of taking as benchmark a broadside ballad that has itself been culled from tradition, journalistic "news" ballads dealing with recent events are selected, so that any later oral variant must be a derivative. (13) As a result of such comparisons it can be asserted with unusual confidence that the oral transmission of narrative song has the following impact on texts:
1. The subtraction of material inessential for the immediate purpose of the performance (in this case the progress of the narrative, so typically, descriptions, commentary, transitions, setting of scene and concluding business)
2. The transfer of material from one point in the text to another, either at some distance from, or adjacent to, each other (= reversing the order of two text segments)
3. External contamination, that is the addition of, or the substitution of original wording by:
a. verbal material introduced from other songs
b. verbal formulas (stock phrases) common to the tradition as a whole
4. Internal contamination, that is, the substituting or supplementing of original wording by verbal material borrowed from elsewhere in the song, producing verbal repetition between:
a. adjacent segments of text (e.g., question and answer)
b. segments at a distance from each other, covering similar or related matter (e.g. two journeys)
Several of these processes can be illustrated by the news broadside, evidently published shortly after the events it narrates, "The Lamentation of W. Warner T. Ward and T. Williams, who were executed at Warwick, August 14, 1818, for highway robbery" (printed by T. Bloomer of Birmingham). One hundred and sixty years later (February 1978), uniquely and miraculously, it was recovered from oral tradition by Mike Yates, as sung by a gypsy, Danny Brazil, in Gloucester. (14) A simple, predictable account of crime, arrest, trial and repentance, its story, as much as is necessary, will become apparent in what follows. As usual the inessential material lost in transmission includes the opening statement of the subject and its character (whose original function was essentially to advertise the song to would-be purchasers):
Printed Original Oral Derivative 1. It's melancholy to relate -- Of three young men who met their fate Cut of [sic] just in the bloom of day, For robbing in the king's highway.
and part of the concluding valediction to the listeners (the moral justification for disseminating often violent and unseemly narratives):
Printed...
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