This time around. we look at Shakespeare and Dylan once again by looking at part of an interview that I was reminded of after my book came out. It should really have been part of the chapter “Shakespeare in Dylan”, though it is much easier to present here than in the pages of a book. That is because what was said and what was printed diverge so significantly. My thanks to Harry Hew for doing the reminding and furnishing me with tape.

I shared a shorter version of this before, both on my old website and in a reply to a Dylantantes conversation. However, with Graley Herren recently highlighting the Cott interview an excellent piece on Bert Cartwright, and in keeping with a promise I made to Erin Callahan in an interview that comes out later this month, here is an expanded version.

What you have is:

1 What was printed in January 1978 from the December 1977 Dylan interview by Jonathon Cott.

2 Audio of what was actually said at that interview.

3 Transcription of said audio.

4 A visual representation of everything in one place: what was said but not printed, what was printed but not said, and what was said and printed.

5 What was said next in the interview, plus a parlour game for rainy afternoons.

1 What was printed

Note: Cott’s words are in bold (not Dylan’s) in the printed Rolling Stone interview. Despite seeing this as the wrong way around, I have maintained it here so as not to confuse matters if you pursue the links to the full interview at my article’s conclusion.


Strangely, the scene where the two women confront Renaldo reminds me of King Lear, in which each of the daughters has to say how much she loves her father.
You’re right. Renaldo sees himself as Cordelia.

I’ve always interpreted some of the Basement Tapes as being concerned with ideas from King Lear: “Too much of nothing/Can make a man abuse a king”; “Oh what dear daughter ‘neath the sun/Would treat a father so,/To wait upon him hand and foot/And always tell him, ‘No’?”
Exactly. In the later years it changed from “king” to “clown.”

King Lear had a fool around him, too, and when the fool leaves, Cordelia comes back. She takes his place, and he takes hers.
The roles are all interchangeable.

As in “Tangled Up in Blue” and as in your movie.
Yes it is.

Were you specifically influenced by King Lear when you wrote songs like “Tears of Rage”?
No, songs like that were based on the concept that one is one.

“… and all alone and ever more shall be so.”
Exactly. What comes is gone forever every time.

But one is difficult to deal with, so Christians gave us the Trinity.
The Christians didn’t bring in anything — it was the Greeks.

2 What was said

Note: As the interview begins, Dylan seems relaxed but also distracted, perhaps making sure a companion is comfortably seated,and that offhand manner towards the interviewer lingers through parts of the exchange. At certain moments, however, his tone sharpens, as in an emphatic “no” directed back at Cott. His repeated use of the word “exactly” functions, I would suggest, as a kind of defensive strategy

This recording only occasionally intersects with what was printed.

3 Transcript of the actual conversation

Cott: What interested me about that scene was that you actually put yourself in a position there were two women and you were trying to define…you had to decide how much you loved each of them. Now, in “King Lear”, by Shakespeare, Cordelia has to say how much she loves her father and the other two sisters say ‘ I love you 100%”. And the daughter, Cordelia says, ‘I love you as much as I should love you, considering I am your daughter. That to me is true love.’

Dylan: Right. What does Renaldo say?

Cott: Renaldo says the same thing as Cordelia.

Dylan: He says, ‘Do I love you like her?’ What does he say…

Cott: He says. ‘I love you differently’, basically. I love you and I love her - I don’t love you the same way. That time was like King Lear and the scene with the three sisters, three daughters.

Dylan: You’re right. Renaldo sees himself as King Lear. There’s a similarity to it…yeah

Cott: I knew there was something about it. You see, I interpreted some of the Basement Tapes as being concerned with ideas

from King Lear: “Too much of nothing /Can make a man abuse a king”.

Dylan: Exactly, exactly

Cott: I wrote a review of that once. I don’t know if you ever read it…

Dylan: I didn’t read it.

Cott – Just as well. But the idea of: “Oh what dear daughter ‘neath the sun/Would treat a father so,/To wait upon him hand and foot/And always tell him, ‘No’?” To me… is what “King Lear” is about to me.

Dylan: Exactly. In the later years it changed, father to mother.

Cott – whose later years, yours or his, King Lear’s?

Dylan: His

Cott: King Lear’s. He had a fool around, too,

Dylan: That’s true

Cott: and when the fool leaves..

Dylan: …he falls apart

Cott: …Cordelia comes back. Cordelia takes the place of the fool, clearly, you know he’s in-between…

Dylan: That’s exactly true, but the roles are all interchangeable.

Cott: It’s like your movie – it’s like “King Lear” a little bit, isn’t it?

Dylan: Yes, it is.

Cott: I didn’t know that you were interested in “King Lear”, particularly.

Dylan (pause) Mmmm.

Cott: I always thought you were but every time I read(wrote?) it, people thought it was pretentious, saying that. It’s interesting that….what about “Tears of Rage”? That’s a “King Lear” song”

Dylan: Exactly.

Cott: What about “Too Much of Nothing”? I mean, King Lear is a play in which something comes from nothing and your song is ‘nothing comes from nothing’ “Too much of nothing can make a man abuse a king.” Were you reading that play at the time or what?

Dylan (emphatically)No. It’s all based on the concept that one is one.

Cott: “…and all alone and ever more shall be so.” You know that line (rhyme?)

Dylan: Exactly.

Cott: I don’t understand that rhyme? Was it about God? It’s about God isn’t it?

4 All together, now

NOTE:

The parts in red are what was said but not printed, and the bits struck through were not spoken, but were printed, finally, the bits in normal, black text were said and printed as said.

Rewritings are revealing in what is added and what is omitted, as well as what is changed.

Just a reminder:
red = was said, not printed
strikethrough = not said, but printed
normal, black text = said and printed

The interview goes on from there to consider some religious topics. Interestingly, given what was to transpire later in the year of publication, Dylan can be heard repeatedly asserting “There weren’t any Christians” before insisting, “Jesus was a Jew”.

Those quotes do not appear in the published interview. A parlour game for a rainy afternoon would be to compare, again, the printed and the recorded versions and to see which parts of the spoken you can find in the in the printed interview, which is available here:

Rolling Stone 1978

Rolling Stone 1978, Part 2

If you were to play that parlour game on a rainy afternoon, then you would have to listen to this as your soundtrack. On the other hand, no-one could concentrate on anything else while listening to the ethereal beauty of Dylan, here;

On A Rainy Afternoon

Substack Outro

Nothing can follow that, and so fare thee well until the next time.

This post is dedicated to Roberta Rakove, who, in a conversation with Erin C. Callahan on Erin’s Substack, Infinity Goes Up on Trial, recalled Bruce Springsteen’s 1988 performance of Chimes of Freedom in what was then East Germany. You can hear her comments here:

However, the entire conversation is highly recommended and available here: "Chimes of Freedom Flashing"

In earlier drafts of my Dylan and Shakespeare book, I included Springsteen’s performance of Dylan’s masterful song in a chapter about authorities resisting theatre and rock music in their respective eras. That chapter also featured moments when Shakespeare’s or Dylan’s work intersected with history, such as Shakespeare’s company performing Richard II for the Earl of Essex’s doomed “rebellion”, or Dylan withdrawing from The Ed Sullivan Show.

Those earlier incarnations also included the use of “Chimes of Freedom” by Springsteen and Amnesty International. These were later reduced to two paragraphs and a brief note, respectively, before being dropped before publication as I had exceeded length guidelines and one reader remarked that “this is very interesting but I’m not sure why I am reading about it here.”

Roberta’s comments have prompted me to resurrect the paragraphs here and to round things off, I link to a chapter from my 2003 book, Troubadour on “Chimes of Freedom” which includes in its introduction a reference to another historical outing for the song, at the Clinton inauguration.

So, this time around, we have:

1 East Berlin 1988

2 Amnesty

3 Bill Clinton inauguration, January 1993

4 “Back to the starting point!” (Chapter from Troubadour)

***

1 East Berlin, July 1988

In July 1988, Bruce Springsteen played an extraordinary show in what was then East Berlin. Estimates of the crowd size range from 150,000 to nearly twice that, depending on whose figures you trust. Stasi police reports, released years later, confirmed what had long been part of local folklore: this concert played a significant role in the chain of events that culminated in the fall of the Berlin Wall the following year.

Pressure had been building among the young in the East for some time and not only in Berlin but across East Germany. The Springsteen concert provided a focal point for the ‘gathering of the tribes’ and trigged an explosive release of pent-up, communal tension. Which begs the question: why was the regime reckless enough to allow it to take place?

The answer lay in a miscalculated gamble in a desperate attempt to placate a growing tide of youth discontent. 1987 saw riot police battling with East Berliners who had gathered near the wall to hear concerts from David Bowie and the Eurythmics wafting over from the West, and to party the night away. Instead, they were met with truncheons and worse. Then, in 1988, when Michael Jackson and Pink Floyd played across the divide, soldiers were sent to force people back.

To avoid the prospect of tens of thousands gathering and the resultant risk of rebellious actions, the decision was taken to allow the staging of a Springsteen concert, strategically distant from the Wall. This risky policy was apparently based on the idea that, as Springsteen’s songs were of ‘the hard and unadorned and shady side of American reality’, they wouldn’t lead to anything dangerous. The huge crowd belting out the “I was born in the USA” chorus line seemed, unsurprisingly, unconcerned with that side of that song.

Immediately following that eruption of stage and crowd interchange, Springsteen introduced Dylan’s “Chimes of Freedom” to the vast, sprawling crowd. He read some words in German. He had been told not to mention “the Wall”, so he chose another word: “I've come to play rock'n'roll for you in the hope that one day all the barriers will be torn down," and he added "I bring you rock and roll with the hope that one day it will open the doors of freedom”. Then he and his band played “Chimes of Freedom”, with so many lines being pointedly apt:

Through the city's melted furnace, unexpectedly we watched
With faces hidden as the walls were tightening...

For the disrobed faceless forms of no position
Tolling for the tongues with no place to bring their thoughts...

An' for each unharmful, gentle soul misplaced inside a jail...

For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an' worse...

The concert had the opposite effect to the one on which the authorities had gambled it would have. There is a book detailing its role in the fall of the Berlin Wall, Rocking the Wall: Bruce Springsteen: The Berlin Concert That Changed the World by Erik Kirschbaum which is replete with quotes from all sides on the effect that show had on history. A history professor from Berlin, Gerd Dietrich, states simply that: “Springsteen's concert and speech certainly contributed in a large sense to the events leading up to the fall of the wall."

Here is Bruce performing the song after the short speech in German: East Berlin, 1988

This has been reported in the Guardian as: “ The highlight of Springsteen's four-hour concert, in which he played a total of 32 songs, was undoubtedly a passionate speech, delivered in a creaky but understandable German, that carried a subtle but clear political message. "I'm not here for any government. I've come to play rock'n'roll for you in the hope that one day all the barriers will be torn down," he said to a crowd that erupted, before he launched into Bob Dylan's Chimes of Freedom, whose lyrics – about the "city's melting furnace … with faces hidden while the walls were tightening" – could hardly have resonated more with his captive audience, many of whom waved homemade American flags.[i]

2 Amnesty 1988 (and 2012)

“Chimes of Freedom” was also chosen by Amnesty to lead its cause. Amnesty are fond of choosing Dylan songs, aptly enough, as they came into existence more or less co-terminus with the start of Dylan’s career. The 50th anniversary of Amnesty, in 2012, was marked by a 4-CD set of artists covering Dylan songs called: “Chimes of Freedom: The Songs of Bob Dylan Honoring 50 Years of Amnesty International.” (Dylan’s lugubrious comment on Amnesty selecting his 60s songs as their anthems was that he would have preferred them to choose “In the Garden” from his evangelical Christian phase.)

As a result, Springsteen kept the “Chimes” flame flying for Amnesty that year, too. In Stockholm, in July, he prefaced the song by announcing:

“Earlier today Amnesty International announced a worldwide tour to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Declaration of Human Rights. The Declaration Of Human Rights is a document that was signed by every government in the world 40 years ago recognizing the existence of certain inalienable human rights for everyone regardless of your race, your colour, your sex, your religion, your political opinion or the type of government that you're living under.

I was glad to be asked to participate and I'm proud to join Sting and Peter Gabriel, Youssou N'Dour, Tracy Chapman in a tour that's gonna begin in early September and is gonna run for about six weeks.

So, I'd like to get a... dedicate this next song to the people at Amnesty International and their idea. So, when we come to your town, come on out, support the tour, support human rights for everyone now and let freedom reign:

Well, far between sundown's finish and midnight's broken toll
We ducked inside the doorway, thunder crashing
As majestic bells of bolts struck shadows in the sound
Seeming to be the chimes of freedom crashing…”

You can listen to that, here: Chimes of Freedom (Live at Stockholm’s Olympiastadion, Stockholm, SE - July 1988)

Springsteen also featured Dylan’s song in his own “Tunnel of Love” tour of the time. Slightly earlier than Stockholm, in a show in Copenhagen, he opted for a perfect one-line introduction: This is one of the greatest songs about human freedom ever written.

Play: Copenhagen, 1988

Note: see links in “Substack Outro” for further reading on all of the above.

3 Bill Clinton inauguration, January 1993

This performance is discussed in the foreword to the following chapter:

4 “Back to the starting point!”

The original album version: Chimes', from 'Another Side...'

Here’s a link to my chapter on “Chimes” from Troubadour, incorporating a take that originally appeared in my first fanzine, Homer, the slut which allows me to answer The Joker and the Thief’s earlier request for some of my back pages to appear here.[ii]

From Troubadour: Early & Late Songs of Bob Dylan chapter 4 on “Chimes of Freedom”:

Troubadour Chimes Extract

90.1KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

And, to end with, live from sixty-one years ago: Live, 1964

Substack Outro

Here’s some further reading on the first part of this posting for those wishing to delve deeper into it.

On the East Berlin show:

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20130626-how-springsteen-rocked-the-wall

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/jul/05/bruce-springsteen-east-germany-berlin-wall

On Amnesty:

Chimes of Freedom | Amnesty International USA 2012 - 50-year anniversary

And here is some info on the EP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimes_of_Freedom_(EP)

Finally, a major piece on all the elements, from “The Avid Listener”, Springsteen and Human Rights: “Chimes of Freedom”: https://theavidlistenerblogcom.wordpress.com/2021/03/08/springsteen-and-human-rights-chimes-of-freedom/

[i] https://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/jul/05/bruce-springsteen-east-germany-berlin-wall

[ii] See: The Joker and the Thief | Substack

Bob is now very generously allowing me to share one of his chapters here; I am immensely pleased and privileged to present his chapter on “Floater (Too Much To Ask)”. Official song audio:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ak8Vmwwgvb8

Floater (Too Much to Ask)

Dylan’s Jack the Lad By Bob Jope

A lot of time has been spent delving into sources for ‘Floater’ from ‘Love and Theft’, and it’s not my intention to continue excavating, though it might be helpful here and there to notice the impact of allusions as noticed in, for example, Andy Muir’s study of Shakespeare and Dylan. (1)

What interests me is the way in which Dylan’s collage of images, citations, reflections and apparent recollections amounts to another strikingly realised dramatic monologue, a coastline voice that in some ways anticipates the wandering mind of the ancient mariner at the bar in ‘Key West’, as we’ll see. A lackadaisical Huckleberry Finn, his is a voice that expresses a certain brashness, knowing and self-assured, but where the bravado might be seen, as bravado often is, as an expression of insecurity. Careless or carefree one moment, less so the next, he affects a kind of nonchalance that at times seems closer to lazy indifference, while artfully dodging hard work when it’s ‘Too Much to Ask’, the song’s original title (2), happy to go fishing instead. In short, in UK slang, something of a Jack the Lad, a confident, often irresponsible, and pleasure-seeking young man.

The original ‘Jack the Lad’ - Jack Sheppard in Newgate Prison

It's certainly an intriguing song, jump-cutting from mood to mood, from one memory or wry observation to another, but the impact is, I think, coherent, almost despite itself, as suggested by a neat summary in the on-line Untold Dylan:

The narrator, presumably a floater, an odd-jobber perhaps, is on his way to an unpleasant task; he is going to kick someone out. His reluctance makes him susceptible to distraction; on the way, light, smells, sounds and images seduce him to flee into reminiscing. (3)

The notion of being ‘susceptible to distraction’ and fleeing into ‘reminiscing’ captures the monologue’s mood and manner, a stream - of- consciousness daydream, as the voice we hear wanders from moment to remembered moment. A series of dreams, in fact, flitting or floating from one to another.

That hazily dream-like mood is there at once as the voice, the ‘Floater’, sets his early morning scene, hymning the dawn:

Down over the window
Comes the dazzling sunlit rays
Through the back alleys—through the blinds
Another one of them endless days

Honey bees are buzzin’
Leaves begin to stir…

It's at once an aubade and another Arcadia, its prosopopoeia celebrating each delightful and delighting detail precisely imagined, or remembered: its ‘buzzin’’ bees and waking leaves beginning ‘to stir’ are a paradisal echo of an earlier song, ‘Lay Down Your Weary Tune’ with, for example, its river’s ‘winding strum…[running] like a hymn’.

John Donne’s ‘The Sun Rising’ comes to mind, too, opening with another evocation of a ‘dazzling’ sunrise, though in his case there’s anger at the sun’s nosiness, a ‘busy old fool’ disturbing him and his lover. The Floater’s response, by contrast, is an easeful, relaxed one, enjoying the busily buzzing bees and the ‘busy’ sun working its way through town’s back alleys and ‘though the blinds’, like Donne’s sun peeking ‘through windows, and through curtains’.

A young ‘Jack’ Donne, never afraid to pose

Where Donne (who, coincidentally referred to his younger self as ‘Jack’) is comically petulant, his mock-aubade wanting the sun, a ‘saucy, pedantic wretch’, to shift its gaze elsewhere, Dylan’s speaker here looks forward to ‘Another one of them endless days’ as he settles into his monologue, reminding us of that wished-for escape, catching rainbow trout at the end of ‘Sign on the Window’:

From the boat I fish for bullheads
I catch a lot, sometimes too many

Donne’s happy in bed, not wanting the sun’s interference, while our ‘Floater’ finds himself contentedly reflecting on his love-life, though how contentedly it’s not easy to say:

I’m in love with my second cousin
I tell myself I could be happy forever with her (4)

That ‘I tell myself’ is revealing. While ‘could’ suggests possibility rather than certainty, ‘I tell myself’ comes close to trying to sound confident, and though the way it’s sung has nothing of the quiet desperation of the last lines of ‘Sign on the Window’, there’s an undercurrent here that’s at odds with the breezy tone.

I wouldn’t want to push the comparison any further, except to say that it’s the unsureness here, the shaky confidence that lends the monologue life and even a kind of vulnerability, just as - as John Carey argues in his study of Donne - it’s in part the contradictoriness of Donne’s poems that lends them such energy, such dynamism. By the end of ‘The Sun Rising’, for example, Donne, realising that he can’t win and the sun won’t move away, patronisingly gives it permission to stay. As Carey writes:

This shift in the poem’s demeanour prevents it from settling into a piece of dead bravado. It has the instability of a living thing. (5)

That ‘instability’ comparably unsettles the floater’s apparent ease, his ‘bravado’, even as he settles into his story:

I keep listenin’ for footsteps
But I ain’t hearing any
From the boat I fish for bullheads
I catch a lot, sometimes too many

A summer breeze is blowing
A squall is settin’ in
Sometimes it’s just plain stupid
To get into any kind of wind

A peaceful early morning’s fishing but those footsteps disturb the mood, as does his insistent listening for them – he keeps listening - creating an unease that’s picked up on a few lines later when he tells us about his boss’s hangers-on .That unease is reinforced here by a sudden, ominous change in the weather: a summer breeze becomes a ‘squall’, a sudden, localised violent gust of wind or storm, especially one bringing rain, sleet or snow, one that’s ‘settin’ in’, close in sound to ‘settling in’, here to stay for a while. Time, then, to move on, just as the restless Floater does, telling himself in no-nonsense terms that it would be ‘plain stupid’ to stay put.

He floats, in fact, to a reflection on life as it is, the life he leads, as if to turn his thoughts away from the storm on the horizon, thinking instead about stormy relationships, first between young and old, then between workers and bosses:

The old men ’round here, sometimes they get
On bad terms with the younger men
But old, young, age don’t carry weight
It doesn’t matter in the end

That stoical shrug in the fourth line anticipates his seemingly more confident assertion in the next lines that he’s not cowered by the boss’s ‘hangers on’ who call ‘at times you least expect’, probably the foot-steps he’s always listening for, and who ‘Try to bully ya — strong-arm you — inspire you with fear...’ The briefest of pauses in the album’s version at that enjambement is followed by a wry, dropped tone, that bravado again:

It has the opposite effect

We can’t help but wonder why he’s so insistently listening for their footsteps if he’s so carefree, so dismissively smug, with a hint of swagger, about the boss’s bullies who, we can assume, might catch him not working but fishing – or daydreaming. Again, a brave front, bravado masking insecurity, anticipating the end of the monologue.

Roughly half-way through his observations and reflections, and perhaps to step away from thoughts of bullying ‘hangers-on’, the Floater turns attention to a seemingly random topic, timber to burn, but it’s one that gives him another opportunity to claim a kind of shrug-of-the-shoulders indifference. The hard times of ‘North Country Blues’ were deathly and desolating but here there’s again that pose of defiance:

It don’t bother me—times are hard everywhere
We’ll just have to see how it goes

The hard times, like the boss’s bullies don’t bother him, he claims, reminding us, and himself, that his ‘old man’ is something of a ‘feudal lord’ with ‘more lives than a cat’, something or someone he can fall back on, perhaps, when things get too tough, when times get too hard.

It’s that comforting thought that lets him or even encourages him to drift still further away, prompted by the burning pinewood and a remembrance of the school bell, back to school days where, he claims ‘You…Gotta get up near the teacher if you can If you wanna learn anything’. That Proustian escape into nostalgia, its fond remembrance of perhaps simpler, innocent times, prompts a comical pastiche of Romeo and Juliet, something Andy Muir investigates.(6) Perhaps, too, there’s a grouchily cynical jab at the play, an adolescent mocking the very idea of tragically star-crossed lovers – who are only teenage kids like him, after all.

What’s going on here? As I read it, our lackadaisical Jack the Lad is recalling school where he and like-minded friends sat at the back of the class, quietly amongst themselves mocking the keener students who actually wanted to learn, who took their studies seriously. The comical re-write of Shakespeare then, expresses a kind of juvenile superiority, laughing at those who wanted to get on. As so often, though, as we’ve seen, that kind of bravado is often a sign of insecurity, the laughter a kind of defence mechanism.

Certainly there’s a change of tone or manner here, prompted by that memory of schooldays, a bitterness far removed from the song’s opening, relaxed and looking lazily forward to ‘another one of them endless days’:

The ones he’s recalling feeling superior to, the ones who really got on, not only did that but ‘got out of here any way they could’. That warm Arcadian mood at the start of the song has – and again the weather plays its part – turned into shiver-inducing ‘cold rain’. Rather than free-and-easy, the tone here is, I think, resentful, envious even: all the others moved on, escaped, but the Floater is trapped, ‘back in the rain’ hence, I think, the aggressive swagger towards the closing stages of the monologue:

If you ever try to interfere with me or cross my path again
You do so at the peril of your own life
I’m not quite as cool or forgiving as I sound
I’ve seen enough heartaches and strife

Just as laughter can be a defence mechanism, so, of course, can hostility, a tough guy stance, just what we’re seeing here: not afraid, he claims, of the boss’s bullies’ strong-arm tactics, unbothered by ‘hard times’, he’s here at his most violently assertive, wanting to remind us that though he might seem ‘cool or forgiving’ – not that we’ve seen much sign of either – he’s not someone to cross, adding rather tellingly, that he’s ‘seen enough heartaches and strife’, an admission that ‘hard times’ have indeed taken their toll.

The contradiction here is a manifestation of that instability I talked about earlier and, again, it’s, as John Carey has it, something that in its very contradictoriness prevents the monologue from being ‘a piece of dead bravado. It has the instability of a living thing.’

That instability remains the case to the very end as we’re given another self-reassuring reminder of the floater’s pedigree, as it were. He may have failed at school, he may resent others who ‘got out of here’, he may spend his lazy days ‘listenin’ for footsteps’, but:

My grandfather was a duck trapper
He could do it with just dragnets and ropes
My grandmother could sew new dresses out of old cloth

That familial, in some ways rather pathetic, even childish boast is immediately undercut by a poignant, bathetic admission, sung on the album as a downbeat addendum:

I don’t know if they had any dreams or hopes
I had ’em once though, I suppose, to go along
With all the ring dancin’ Christmas carols on all of the Christmas Eves
I left all my dreams and hopes
Buried under tobacco leaves

It’s a tremendous falling off after the song’s quietly celebratory opening lines and their optimistic expectation of ‘Another one of them endless days.’ It’s a shift from innocence to experience, a melancholy resignation to things as they really are, made sadder still, I think, by that slipped-in ‘I suppose’: just as he doesn’t know whether his grandparents had any, he can’t even be sure about his own ‘dreams and hopes’, only ruefully admitting that whatever they may have been they were left ‘Buried under tobacco leaves’.

The contrast here with a tantalisingly brief flashback to childhood Dickensian Christmases, like Scrooge confronted with happier times, is a painful one, and he quickly escapes from it with an attempt at pulling himself together and jumping up-to-date:

It’s not always easy kicking someone out
Gotta wait a while—it can be an unpleasant task
Sometimes somebody wants you to give something up
And tears or not, it’s too much to ask

At this last minute, a revelation that puts into context much of what we’ve heard so far, a glimpse into how our easy-going, seemingly indifferent and detached Jack the Lad has to – reluctantly – earn his living, and who ‘the boss’ might be. No more than a henchman at the mercy of a local boss and his ‘hangers on’ (he’s clearly way down in the hierarchy), he does the dirty work, including kicking out whoever he’s told to.

On the other hand, there’s uncertainty here in these ambiguous last lines. For example, might it be the Floater himself who has had to give up any possible future, oppressed by his background, his father and his small town? If that’s the case, the ‘endless days’ at the start of the song take on a darker significance, calling to mind the ‘same old rat race, life in the same old cage’, in Time Out of Mind’s ‘Highlands’. Being in love with a ‘second-cousin’, then, would be another sign of just how enclosed this community is: not exactly in-breeding but suggestive of an inward-looking world that keeps outsiders at bay, that keeps itself to itself, listening out for strangers’ footsteps: endlessly imprisoning, small towns and small lives.

I said at the outset that it wasn’t my intention to delve into the song’s roots and references but it’s hard to resist at this point recalling a key source for a good deal of its language, Confessions Of A Yakuza by Dr. Junichi Saga, the biography of one of the last traditional ‘yakuza’, or gangsters, in Japan. There’s a sad irony here: offering us his confession Dylan’s ‘Floater’ is no yakuza, not even one of his ‘hangers-on’, but a part-time goon employed when needed to carry out the lowliest of tasks. (7)

In some ways foreshadowing Dylan’s guilt-driven speaker in ‘Nettie Moore’ or his Philosopher Pirate in ‘Key West’, the eponymous Floater has ‘something to confess’, but that something only slips out at the end of his dramatic monologue. Until then, floating lackadaisically along he dips in and out of reflections and recollections, of assertions and wry observations. That floating doesn’t disguise, though the song’s descent, its dispiriting arc, as we move from the opening’s confident aubade and its echoes of Donne mockingly hymning the rising sun, through a series of mood-changes, to a life carrying out ‘unpleasant task[s]…tears or not’, one where ‘dreams and hopes’ were long buried. A Jack the Lad whose upbeat chirpiness belies a sadness, even a bitterness.

1. Andrew Muir Bob Dylan & William Shakespeare: The True Performing of It Red Planet (2019 and 2020)

2. Clinton Heylin, The Double Life of Bob Dylan, Volume 2, p 598

3. Untold Dylan, https://bob-dylan.org.uk/archives/10206

4. Coincidentally, Jerry Lee Lewis caused scandal, certainly here in the UK, when married his second cousin, Myra Gale Brown: 13 years old while he was 22, so perhaps it was the age that caused much of the shock.

5. John Donne: Life Art and Mind, Faber, 1981, pp108-110

6. Andrew Muir, op cit, pp 146-7

7. And, of course, we need to be aware of the Southern location here. We could think of the small southern towns in films like In the Heat of the Night, or Erskine Caldwell's novel Tobacco Road, about sharecroppers in Georgia. It seems to me that one of the things that the song does is begin by building on the pastoral ideal of much Southern literature, yet as the song unfolds the timeless nature of the southern pastoral starts to look nightmarish. These happy peasants, fishing and hunting in the fertile land, turn out to be violent and pretty unsavoury.

© Bob Jope, 2025

This round up of loose ends and a look at the ballad-jigs that ended plays in the 1590s-1612 brings to a close, for now at least, my foray into ballads, Bob and Will being an offshoot form my book, Bob Dylan & William Shakespeare: The True Performing of It.

There are three “it’s all been done before” segments, plus a neat coincidence in the use of the word “conscience” and then an exploration of the hugely popular jigs and a look at Shakespeare’s clowns, especially Robert Armin.

A) It’s all been done before; it’s all been written in….German

Reader Paul Sutcliffe, in reply to article number 4 in this series: Voices of the People, wrote: “Recommended for those who can read German. Heinrich Detering's 'Bob Dylans Mysterienspiele', München 2016 and then even more helpfully added: “Full title is "Die Stimmen aus der Unterwelt: Bob Dylans Mysterienspiele'. He looks at the possible influences of a whole range of earlier genres/concepts and works, which include mystery plays, Shakespeare, minstrelsy, danse macabre, courtly love, mysticism, and both epic and heroic poetry.” So, the hunt was on to obtain The Voices from the Underworld: Bob Dylan's Mystery Games, to give its title in English.[i]

My lack of German means this was always going to be frustrating, but below I follow up Paul’s lead as best as I have been able to, thus far.

In the second post in this series, “She Died Singing It”, I noted that: “From “Pretty Polly” to “Murder Most Foul”, 59 years later and arguably on through Shadow Kingdom and The Philosophy of Modern Song, (see outro to last post), murder ballads feature throughout Dylan’s canon. From Time Out Of Mind onwards, though, the emphasis has been on those ‘sickos disguised as Romeos’. For lengthy explorations of these, see my In The True Performing of It[v] and Graley Herren’s Dreams and Dialogues[vi]. In my book, I concentrate on “Moonlight” and “Soon After Midnight” in the context of looking at Shakespeare and Dylan together.”

Detering traces the actions of a male slayer of women in isolated spots in the latter of these two. Detering has no doubt at all that this character would fit as one in the series of killers disguised as lovers. An “unmistakable serial killer” (or similar phrase) is how Detering refers to the narrator of “Soon After Midnight.” As previously noted, I am not one of those who can read German, sadly, and so I am going on partial information here.

Detering’s book is listed on JSTOR (the digital storage service for academic journals), but, most unusually, has proved inaccessible even in attempts from the libraries of Cambridge and Harvard Universities. JSTOR does provide chapter introductions, however, and the automatic browser translation of the chapter entitled: “Prospero's Nightmare, Shakespeare's Blues: Tempest”[ii] goes as follows, (referring initially, I think, though the interview to which Mr. Deterring refers is not fully clear on this, to “Beyond Here Lies Nothing”):

“The ego of his role monologues, Dylan wanted to impress on the astonished Bill Flanagan, is his own, not that of a "character" as in drama. It is not a film hero or villain, and "not a serial killer". That was in 2008. Just four years later, Dylan lets a monologuing self have its say in a song that is unmistakably just that: "a serial killer". Only one notices it gradually, and with macabre pleasure. Because the sugar-sweet languishing lover, who can't wait for the longed-for rendezvous on Tempest’s (2012), “Soon After Midnight”, seems to be only looking for the expected one.”

I apologise for using no-doubt poorly written translation, but it is all I can give you as a representation and it does contain the core point of our convergence.

Taking the song’s imagery, setting and atmosphere as “pop-Shakespeare”, Detering seemingly goes on to investigate further Dylan and Shakespeare parallels. Again, like Herren and myself, he traces the blackface elements, in Masked and Anonymous as well as in various songs, especially on “Love And Theft”. A far as I am aware, Richard Jobes was the first to provide an in-depth exploration of this connection in Judas #3[iii]. Scott Warmuth then contributed specifically on the links with George Griffin’s Othello: A Burlesque in his usual precisely detailed and ever-helpful manner.

I built on both of these[iv] and it seems, from my attempts to glean what I can from the German text and references that Warmuth pointed Detering on the route for his exploration of Dylan’s Po’ Boy, highlighting how Dylan’s lyrics, like minstrel performances, play with exaggeration and distortion, and potentially also on the recurring theme of artists and entertainers throughout history transforming originals into something new, yet connected.

Richard Jobes’s timely and brilliant depiction of how Shakespeare’s plays circulated in popular adaptations such as George Griffin’s - and how these, in turn, influenced Dylan’s work - established, over twenty years ago, the thread that runs from Jobes to Warmuth to myself, and from Warmuth to Heinrich Detering (presuming I am reading all this correctly). Scott’s work may have arisen completely independently of Jobes’s, which makes it all the more impressive, given his remarkable track record of uncovering fruitful sources.

Whichever backstory is the complete one, both Deterring and I refer to Warmuth, and I would have loved to have been in contact with him ten years ago. There was a long period of writing for me, about Shakespeare and Dylan, followed by a protracted phase of publishing a book that swung from academic to popular, before settling somewhere in between. In 2014 -2015 I wrote a book on an outdoor annual Shakespeare Festival, “Shakespeare in Cambridge”. As I had just finished the updated book on Dylan’s live performing, One More Night, the two subjects fused in my mind. Inevitably, as I was writing the Shakespeare book, I kept taking notes of Dylan echoes. I wrote two early prefigurations of my eventual book around this time. One was put on my then active website and another version appeared in ISIS.

Bob Dylan - Soon After Midnight (Official Audio)

Mr Detering would already have written on “Soon After Midnight” by this point, and he easily preceded me into book format on the subject. I sincerely hope that one day I can read an English. The whole book looks fascinating and, along with Shakespeare, the Homeric allusions so wonderfully written about by Richard Thomas catch the eye as exciting avenues of interpretation. For example, Jstor, and the patchy automatic web translation again, gives us for chapter 5:

“5. The Mysteries of the Minstrels: Masked and Anonymous (pp. 131-168)

https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1168g0s.7

Minstrel show and mystery play, world literature and the tradition of popular American music: what the song poetry of Workingman's Blues #2, the great Tempest ballad or the Homeric Lennon epitaph inventively unfolds, Dylan first had – and starting with the title – in 2001 in the album "Love And Theft" formulated. Here he had let the voices from the underworld speak through and with each other in all their fullness and heterogeneity, here he had made them audible anew in his own voice. Far less well known was an attempt made only a year and a half later to provide the poetological program for practice, so to speak – albeit only 'to a certain extent', because...”

Even in this garbled form, it certainly whets one’s appetite and picking my way through the German and typing portions in for online translation just whets it even further.

B) It’s all been done before; it’s all been written in….Germany

In searching around for a translation of Detering, I came across another useful discovery and one which frequently mentions Detering, perhaps unsurprisingly, as it is entitled:

Come gather ‘round people, Bob Dylan and the Street Ballad: Diplomarbeit from zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades eines Magisters der Philosophie an der Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz.

This was submitted by 2David SAMITSCH at the Institute of English Studies, reviewer: Ao. Univ. Prof. Mag. Dr. phil. Hugo Keiper Graz, 2018” and can be downloaded here. Come gather 'round People: Bob Dylan and the Street Ballad.

I had intended, were this series to become a book, to investigate Dylan’s use of rhetorical ballad techniques, and the comparative ways Shakespeare employed similar devices in his plays. However, Mr Samitsch has already done this work on the Dylan side. His academic thesis begins by detailing the history, forms, and stylistic features of traditional and broadside ballads, including their oral composition and common themes.

As I do in this series, he draws on the fine work of Alan Bold, but, understandably for his academic submission, Samitsch goes deeper and wider in his source material. Consequently, if you want more on the evolution of broadside, street, and traditional ballads, then you will find much to interest you here.

The paper then explores Dylan's immersion in American folk music, which drew heavily from the ballad traditions already described. This is where I was going next, but there is little point now that you can read it all here. Samitch has already demonstrated how Dylan’s ballads directly reference, or incorporate, the themes, and stylistic elements of traditional and street ballads and you can read all about that here, too.

C. It’s All Been Done Before; It’s All Been…. Said In A Lecture

I keep coming across more and more useful material. Just the other day I stumbled on this talk-performance, which is well worth sharing:

broadside ballads of 17th century england lucie skeaping gresham college lectures 240p - YouTube

Here you can hear more on broadside ballads and how they functioned as both pop songs and tabloid news and provide insight into the daily lives, attitudes, politics, and social customs of the 17^th Century. Shakespeare’s era is only in the first part of the talk, but it remains fascinating throughout and, naturally, Dylan resonances do not end with the passing of The Bard. Tales of itinerant peddlers and broadsheet production are retold here and close attention is paid to the music to which these ballads were set, highlighting the challenges of identifying tunes from titles alone. When I first envisaged this series as a book, it was going to include the eighteenth century, Robert Burns, plus the rise of literacy leading to the eventual decline of broadsides as printing techniques evolved and new forms of entertainment emerged. This lecture moves in that direction as it approaches its conclusion.

D. An incidental aside, worth noting.

I meant to include this in the last posting. One of those coincidences that appeals to me, and which naturally occur to you when you are working on two artists at the same time.

I quoted Stephen Scobie writing about the conclusion to “Visions of Johanna.” Stephen also wrote that: “And so, at the climax of the song, the singer’s ‘conscience explodes.’” Conscience is used here, surely, as in Hamlet’s soliloquy, in its sense as “consciousness”, “rather than as ‘moral guide’.” I initially heard the word in “Visions of Johanna” the same way as Scobie, but now hear it as containing both meanings, albeit with “consciousness” predominating.

The coincidence that struck me, however, was that Shakespeare and his contemporaries used the word “conscience” for both modern meanings, and so the pun was almost in-built, as it were. Act V of Richard III is one of various places you can find this happening. There are well over a hundred uses of the word “conscience” in Shakespeare, but not a single use of “conscious”, far less “consciousness”. The word “conscious” only began to emerge in its own right at the time Shakespeare’s career was first taking off, and was yet to become commonly used. Due to this, “conscience” could convey either or both meanings at that time.

There are a number of uses of “conscience” in Hamlet alone (and Richard III for that matter), mostly unambiguous. An example of this occurs in the famous lines: “The play’s the thing/ Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King which clearly utilises the “moral guide” sense.

In Shakespeare’s time “conscience”, was carrying two connected but distinct meanings, for which we now use “conscience” and “consciousness”. This allowed Shakespeare to almost effortlessly employ the word in such a way that both meanings could resonate simultaneously, as Dylan, it seems to me, does so adroitly at the close of “Visions of Johanna”.

(Dylan singing the closing lines to “Visions of Johanna” in 1966)

E. Always end with a jig, at least until they are banned.

In this series of articles, I have drawn your attention to the closely interwoven world of ballads and plays in Shakespeare’s time. I have saved to the end, appropriately enough, the most prominent, consistent and direct irruptions of ballads into plays as staged in that era – that is, the production closing “jigs”.

To produce these alone, far less songs which might be interwoven with the dramatic action and interludes planned, or suddenly necessary as the play unfolded, each company had to have its own resident balladeer. Most commonly this was the clown/fool who were incredibly popular and famous in their day. Shakespeare had two contrasting stars in this role in his time with the Lord Chamberlain’s, later King’s, Men companies: William Kempe (often referred to as Will Kemp) and Robert Armin.

As I wrote in In The True Performing of It: “Much has been read into the original clown Will Kempe leaving the company and his improvised tom-foolery being replaced by the sophisticated and witty Robert Armin. Critical orthodoxy holds that Shakespeare had tired of Kempe taking centre stage with improvised tomfoolery and extensive ad-libbing. Certainly the comic turn was the big attraction for many. It was the clown’s name that appeared on cover of the first, pirated, printings of Shakespeare’s plays, not the playwright’s. Their on-stage dynamic when Shakespeare acted alongside him must have been compelling viewing.”[v] Shakespeare has prince Hamlet air some of dramatists’ ongoing dissatisfaction with their clowns:

Hamlet: And let those that play
your clowns speak no more than is set down for
them, for there be of them that will themselves
laugh, to set on some quantity of barren spectators
to laugh too, though in the meantime some necessary
question of the play be then to be considered.
That’s villainous and shows a most pitiful ambition
in the fool that uses it. Go make you ready.[vi]

Hamlet Act II scene ii

In an effort to contain the runaway improvisations of the clowns during the drama itself, dramatists gave the coveted closing slot in the evening’s entertainment wholly over to them. The idea being that the clowns, who many in the audience had specifically come to see, would save their own work for those slots and concentrate on the author’s words while acting in the play itself. These afternoon ending “jigs” grew to feature not just music and dance, but also comic dialogue, sketch-like acting, and even acrobatics. A large part of their appeal lay in their frank embrace of bawdry; they were often spectacularly rude.

Though often overlooked in literary analyses, the jigs were more than mere epilogues or musical afterthoughts, these comic, bawdy, and often improvisational segments played a central role in shaping how audiences received and remembered the drama they had just witnessed. Typically set to familiar ballad tunes, jigs forged an immediate link between playhouses and the broader ballad culture of the streets. They recalled the dance origins of ballads themselves, blurring the line between performance and popular entertainment.

As John Astington put it: “Training in improvisation is something of a contradiction in terms; one must absorb the principles, but then be original. The famous Elizabethan fools, it seems, did so on their own account during their formative years, turning to the stage as creative adults. A great deal of developmental activity must have gone on in the teens of Tarlton and Armin in particular, but a good part of it must have depended on their contact with the popular culture of London, which surrounded them, including song, dance, ballad making, and singing, as well as common forms of social humor: jokes, mockery, and irony, both sweet and bitter. The fool's training was rooted in vernacular and communal life, and partly ‘picked up on a street.’ ”[vii]

Crucially, even after the most harrowing tragedies, the jig sent audiences home laughing; restoring a sense of festivity and communal levity that counterbalanced the emotional weight of the preceding play.

As the jigs developed into something more than a mere addendum, they grew in popularity and subsequently put the dramatists and theatre-lovers’ noses out of joint once more. A trend developed where audiences turned up at the end of plays to catch the jigs, missing out the main action altogether. This trend kept growing and tensions over this came to a head in 1612, near the end of Shakespeare’s career and only four years before his death, when an official act was passed to suppress such jigs, a clear indication of their vitality, popularity and disruptive nature.

To return to Shakespeare, his two clowns were Kemp, for approximately his first decade, and Armin for the following decade plus a few more years. There are often misappraisals of Kemp, because he suffers by comparison to his even more talented successor. However, like Armin Kemp was also a writer and his, too often now disdained, physical prowess had led him to performing on the continent, an invaluable experience that he could later share with Shakespeare. One wonders what he told Shakespeare of his travels, especially performing for the Danish King in Elsinore. Like Armin, who is much praised for this, Kemp came with an existing persona that crowds were used to and responded to with great enthusiasm.

Nonetheless, Armin was a more sophisticated, complex character and even more of a writer in his own right. His influence on the development of Shakespeare’s art was profound; the Bard recognised in Armin, talents and perceptions that he could integrate into his own creations, raising them to an even higher level of expression. This reached an apex in the figure of the Fool in King Lear whose attitude and forms of expression cleave closely to an Armin model. The roles of all the “intelligent fools” in Shakespeare from around 1600 onwards were played by Armin and as such he sang the majority of the songs in Shakespeare’s plays in these years. Armin was a “song and dance man” par excellence and he brings Dylan to mind in many other ways.

I wrote in the previous article in this series of the ballad-selling Autolycus from The Winter’s Tale and his similarities to Bob Dylan. The art of Autolycus was written for, and played by, Armin. To add to those shared characteristics, I have collected a list of comments taken from reports and appraisals of Shakespeare’s second “clown”, who was far more than what that word conveys todays. I list these below, inviting you to see how many would be applicable not just to Robert Armin, but also to Robert Allen Zimmerman:

The ability to improvise in verse

An aptitude for verbal wit and inventiveness

Robert, diminutive but dominates the stage

Balladeer

Caustic

Trickery was his constant pursuit

Constantly challenges audiences

Sang in a variety of voices

Coruscating paradoxical humour

An uneasy mixture of the wise and nonsensical

Relentless quibbling and disputation

Sing (in) different voices and accents

To varying degrees wise, witty and cynical

The sardonic, witty air of the diminutive Armin

Cruelty, insanity, and absurdist poetry would—with increasing complexity—become an element in the drama that Shakespeare produced

The Fool would be a role unlike any Shakespeare ever wrote before or after – witty, pathetic, lonely, angry and prophetic in turn, a part rich in quips and snippets of ballads and the kind of sharp exchanges for which Armin was famous. [viii]

A pervasive mood of dark comedy, paradox, and purgative judgment

Armin’s range was extraordinary

it strikes me that the answer is: “all of them apply”.

Robert Armin was apparently missing from Shakespeare's last play, Henry VIII (All is True) in 1613. This would have been one of only two plays of Shakespeare’s, both co-written with John Fletcher, after the edict to ban the closing jigs and it features only one song. The missing Armin’s popularity was such that an apology for his absence appears in the prologue via a description of his distinctive coat:

That come to hear a merry, bawdy play,
A noise of targets, or to see a fellow
In a long motley coat guarded with yellow,
Will be deceived.[ix]

A fitting tribute to an extraordinary man.

With thanks to Richard Thomas.

© Andrew Muir, 2025

Substack Outro

That’s All Folks, as they say as far as this series goes. I hope it has been informative and entertaining.

There will be another post next week on an entirely different matter. As with my first Substack post, this will concentrate on one Dylan song, though not written by me, this time, and from some forty years after The Ballad of Donald White.

After that? Well, we will see what happens in the fullness of time.

[i] Detering, Heinrich Die Stimmen aus der Unterwelt: Bob Dylans Mysterienspiele. C. H. Beck, 2016

[ii] https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1168g0s.5

[iii] Jobes, Richard “Po’ Boy Dressed in Black” Judas 3 Text.qxd pp 29-46.

[iv] From,Muir, Andrew Muir, Andrew Bob Dylan & William Shakespeare: The True Performing of It Red Planet (2019 and 2020) (the original text includes full footnotes to this passage, as you would expect. I’ve not reproduced them here as footnotes within footnotes might trigger rebellion in my readership):

“There is also a hint in this passage of Dylan having already noticed that referencing more than one play, explicitly or implicitly, cheek by jowl, can have impressive effects. It is something he knows all about from an

earlier strand of American popular song, minstrelsy, as is made clear in his 2001 album, “Love and Theft”. Dylan commented on minstrel shows in an interview just before the album came out:

“...And ‘Desolation Row’? That’s a minstrel song through and through. I saw some ragtag minstrel show in blackface at the carnivals when I was growing up, and it had an effect on me, just as much as seeing the lady with four legs.”

And the album title, enclosed by quotation marks, appears to be alluding to a 1993 book by university professor Eric Lott, about minstrelsy, entitled: Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. The connections of minstrelsy to “Love And Theft” is an extensive subject which myself and others have pursued elsewhere, but here we are focussing on the Shakespearean connections to both.

One of these is evidenced in ‘Po’ Boy’ where the poisoned wine appears to come straight from the last scene of Hamlet to appear in a rewritten Othello where killer and victim are reversed:

Othello told Desdemona, “I’m cold, cover me with a blanket,
By the way, what happened to that poisoned wine?”

She said, “I gave it to you, you drank it.”

Drinking poisoned wine is how Gertrude dies in Hamlet, while Desdemona is choked to death by Othello. The writers of the burlesques knew this but enjoyed conflating more than one Shakespeare scenario with another, and Dylan enjoys doing the same. In these short lines, with a deft twist, the slain women here emerge in triumph. Romeo also dies from drinking poison, and Juliet attempts to do so before stabbing herself. Those star-crossed lovers also appear in another song, ‘Floater (Too Much To Ask)’ on “Love and Theft”, where we have the marvellously colloquial:

Romeo, he said to Juliet, “You got a poor complexion
It doesn’t give your appearance a very youthful touch!”
Juliet said back to Romeo, “Why don’t you just shove off
If it bothers you so much”

There is a rich musical and dramatic history to the blending of Shakespeare and blackface minstrelsy and one that is also steeped in the history of America, of ‘the South’ and the tortuous and tortured Afro-American experience. Writing on ‘Po Boy’, Richard Jobes stated that:

“The same song borrows its opening verse directly from an 1866 minstrel performance of Othello, written by George Griffin. ‘If for my wife – your daughter – you are looking,’ Othello says to Brabantio, ‘you’ll find her in the kitchen busy cooking.’ Dylan takes these lines, and with very little variation, transports them into ‘Po’ Boy’ … Productions of Othello were highly popular amongst blackface minstrelsy’s audience, unsurprisingly because of the play’s racial themes. Jobes also quotes relevant passages from William J. Mahar: “Having transformed the dramatic elements into comic situations, Griffin replaced Shakespeare’s text with the rhyming couplets typical of popular verse and introduced every scene or action with melodies borrowed from contemporary American and Irish song.” And: “ Rather than transforming the principal characters of Othello, Hamlet, or Macbeth into plantation workers or urban characters living in social margins, the Ethiopian sketch writers reduced royalty to common folk and translated the grand tragedies of life into short sketches about courtship, mixed-race marriages, or conventional domestic life. Minstrel shows were mass entertainment and were ‘America’s first new form of non-elite culture.’”

Scott Warmuth follows the same trail as Richard Jobes and adds, regarding George Griffin’s Othello: a Burlesque, that “The full play, and other Shakespearean parodies, can be found in the book, This Grotesque Essence: Plays from the American Minstrel Stage.” This, I discovered, is also available online and noted, among other things, that for Act 1 scene ii the characters enter to the melody of “Dixie” which Dylan performs in his film, Masked and Anonymous. The lyrics they sing to this are a burlesque of Shakespeare’s Othello. I reproduce them here, with a warning that the language of the time is most offensive to today’s eyes and ears. However, they give you an important taste of how Shakespeare’s scripts were re-cast in these extraordinary blackface minstrel shows that form one of the many tributaries that contribute to the mighty river of song that is “Love and Theft”.

The opening scene ends with Desdemona’s father moaning: “Just as I tink dat Barnum would take her/Dis n****r comes, and mit her runs away.” Then Scene 2 begins like this:

SCENE 2. A Room.

Enter OTHELLO and DESDEMONA, L., singing and dancing a walk

around.—Air, “ Dixie.”

I love you and you love me,

And all our lives we’ll merry be.—Away, away, &c. With you I’ll sport my figure, away, away—

I’ll love you dearly all my life,

Although you are a n*****r.—Away, away, &c.

You can hear a snatch of this segment, on a radio documentary that Scott Warmuth also tracked down and quotes, in the opening minute or so, the ‘looking/cooking’ couplet with which Dylan kicks off his song. As Warmuth writes:

“The radio documentary “Shakespeare in American Life” includes an episode by Richard Paul on the African-American experience with Shakespeare called “Shakespeare In Black and White.” It asks the question “Who ‘owns’ Shakespeare?” and Paul begins his piece by contrasting a straight reading of Othello with actors doing the very same lines from Othello: a Burlesque that Dylan uses in “Love and Theft”. This is a

rewarding listen and is of relevance to both Dylan and Shakespeare scholars as well as to anyone interested in the social history of the United States.”

[v] Muir, Andrew Bob Dylan & William Shakespeare: The True Performing of It Red Planet (2019 and 2020)

[vi] Hamlet - Entire Play | Folger Shakespeare Library

[vii] Astington, John H Actors and Acting in Shakespeare's Time: The Art of Stage Playing Stage and Picture in the English Renaissance: The Mirror up to Nature. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2017

[viii] Shapiro ,James The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606 Faber & Faber, London 2015

[ix] Henry VIII - Entire Play | Folger Shakespeare Library

Part one provides a very quick recap up to the point that Autolycus, the focus of the remainder of this article, makes his entrance. What follows are descriptions of Autolycus and his parallels with Bob Dylan; a consideration of the peddler figure in The Winter’s Tale and Visions of Johanna and an examination of the credo “to live outside the law you must be honest”.

A quick summary of The Winter’s Tale

King Leontes of Sicilia wrongly suspects his wife Hermione of having an affair with his friend King Polixenes. Consumed by delusional jealousy, Leontes loses contact with reality. He imprisons Hermione, orders their newborn daughter (Perdita) to be abandoned and left for dead. During this traumatic time, his young son dies. The Oracle pronounces Hermione innocent, but by the time Leontes believes it, she has collapsed and is presumed dead. Wracked with guilt, Leontes vows lifelong penance. Perdita is found and raised by shepherds in Bohemia. Sixteen years pass, (yes sixteen years and there are desperate men, desperate women and good shepherds), a passage of time resonant in myth and numerology.[i] Perdita, now on the cusp of adulthood, stands at the symbolic threshold between girlhood and womanhood, innocence and maturity, a living symbol of the theme of lost and recovered identity.

When Act IV begins, the world of the play shifts from tragedy to pastoral comedy when, in scene three, Autolycus, a comic rogue and peddler of wares, takes to the stage, singing as he enters. His arrival marks a tonal transformation, as the play enters its comedic and restorative phase. Autolycus roams the countryside tricking people out of their money. As his antics become entangled with the romantic subplot between the now-grown Perdita and Florizel (the son of Polixenes), so his relevance and bearing on Shakespeare’s profound themes develop apace.

It is noteworthy that the trickster figure of Autolycus enters singing. He ushers in the play’s new tone and setting, that of comic-romantic pastoral, in song.

Scene 3
Enter Autolycus singing.

AUTOLYCUS
When daffodils begin to peer,
With heigh, the doxy over the dale,
Why, then comes in the sweet o’ the year,
For the red blood reigns in the winter’s pale.

His first appearance, is framed in music as the balladmonger roams the countryside. You can listen to here:

In between the songs, which bracket this first appearance, Autolycus first deceives, then robs, the Shepherd’s son.

Autolycus, meaning “very wolf-like”, was also the name of a Greek demigod, the son of Hermes (Mercury in Roman times) and the grandfather to the legendary Odysseus (Ulysses.) Hermes was the god of trade, thieves, and trickery as well as being the swift messenger from the Olympian Gods, and Shakespeare’s Autolycus is cut from the same cloth. The balladmonger and con-man immediately introduces himself by announcing his lineage: “My father named me Autolycus, who, being, as I am, littered under Mercury, was likewise a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles.” That last phrase is a lovely insight into his character. A disarming description, deflecting the plain truth of one prime part of his roguery, theft.

“If I was a master thief / Perhaps I’d rob them” sings Dylan in “Positively 4th Street”; well, Shakespeare’s Autolycus is indeed a master thief and like the Autolycus of classical myth, he has inherited many other skills from his father Hermes, namely: trickery, disguise, a chameleon-like shape shifting ability. Additionally, and very pertinently for us, he was also blessed with exceptional skill on the guitar-like lyre and had a mesmeric power as a singer of songs. So, like Dylan, Autolycus reached his audience through the popular appeal of ballads and singing. Like Dylan, too, he is a master of masks, and, like Dylan again, he is a teller of tall tales and fantastic stories, especially regarding his own background and identity.

Another similarity to Dylan comes in speed. The servant announcing Autolycus’s arrival tells us that; “He sings several tunes faster than you’ll tell money. He utters them as he had eaten ballads and all men’s ears grew to his tunes.” Dylan tells us in Chronicles that “I did everything fast. Thought fast, ate fast, talked fast and walked fast. I even sang my songs fast”. Both singers, then, are associated with a rapid-fire delivery of songs that highlighted the ubiquity and captivating nature of ballads. The servant goes on to claim of Autolycus that, in a further parallel to Dylan, “He hath songs for man or woman, of all sizes.”

A final resemblance between the invented character of Autolycus and, you could say, the invented character of Bob Dylan, is the concept of living honestly outside the law and their ballads featuring the likes of the Robin Hood and Pretty Boy Floyd ballad trope of outlaws who perform just and kind acts.

The archetype of the trickster thief has been extensively written about in Dylan studies, sparked in part by those frequently discussed themes of borrowing, appropriation, and imitatio, which involve digesting and transforming source material.^[ii] Partly also by Dylan’s self-identification with the thief in his writing, as in the sublime “Tears of Rage” when he pleadingly asks, “Why must I always be the thief”. Autolycus embodies Dylan’s famous line, “to live outside the law you must be honest.” He believes the time for such a philosophy has arrived: “I see this is the time that the unjust man doth thrive. ” In Dylan & Shakespeare: In The True Performing Of It, I wrote of how: “The poet Allen Ginsberg, while teaching a course on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, told his class that, in a telephone call with Dylan in the Sixties, Bob had remarked that “to live outside the law you must be honest” was the favourite of his own lines. Dylan had described it as his “supreme Shakespeare shot”.

Ginsberg linked the paradox in the Dylan line with Shakespeare’s characteristic mode of expression. He brought it up while discussing Shakespeare’s “constructions of paradoxical phrasing” and the “polarity of opposites”, which Ginsberg describes as an “automatic poetry” of “yoking opposites” together but which have “got to make sense, though”. This prompted Ginsberg to quote the famous Dylan line and recount the telephone call. Ginsberg then said of Dylan’s line: “The contradiction is so apt, so perfect, so simple – it’s the simplicity that does it.””[iii]

Autolycus is introduced as a vagrant, a former servant now heartily embracing a life of duplicity and petty theft alongside his ballad-selling. His roguish nature aligns with the potential for deception inherent in the ballad trade, where, in tabloid fashion, sensationalist sheets often eschewed any pretence at accuracy. At the same time, however, we recall that in the traditional ballads, the impossible-sounding wonders would speak to a deeper truth, as in Dylan’s “all those songs about roses growing out of people's brains and lovers who are really geese and swans that turn into angels”.[iv]

Autolycus, it is universally agreed, is a charming rogue. Every production has to decide how much emphasis to place on each half of that description. However that balance is weighted, he remains an unrepentant thief and liar. However, against his “better” instincts (i.e. those of knavery and deceit) Autolycus ends up bringing about the play’s miraculous ending, one of the many paradoxes the last two scenes so keenly explore, often through this beguiling character.

Just as Shakespeare brings a peddler into his The Winter’s Tale, so, too, does Dylan bring one into his “Visions of Johanna”: The peddler now speaks to the countess who’s pretending to care for him. Stephen Scobie[v], when writing on the song, remarks that: ““Peddler” suggests a vagabond, someone out on the road with something to sell…”. This reminds us of other Dylan songs from the time, such as: The vagabond who’s rapping at your door from “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” and Miss Lonely in “Like A Rolling Stone” who once “threw the bums a dime” when in her “prime”.

All of which brings us back, as does Autolycus’s vagrancy, to the history of minstrels and travelling players -and Dylan’s early days and the wandering musicians he sought to emulate - as documented in part 4 of this series, “Voices of the People. It is worth noting, in passing, that the social contrast in the characters in Dylan’s songs, especially ‘peddler/countess’, is a key component of the latter part of Shakespeare’s play where Autolycus dons the disguise of a nobleman.

On Blonde on Blonde’s, “Visions of Johanna”, then, we hear of the peddler who speaks and of the fiddler who now “steps to the road”.

The peddler now speaks to the countess who’s pretending to care for him

And Madonna, she still has not showed
We see this empty cage now corrode
Where her cape of the stage once had flowed
The fiddler, he now steps to the road
He writes ev’rything’s been returned which was owed
On the back of the fish truck that loads
While my conscience explodes

It was not always this way; in two earlier versions from 1965, boasting alternate titles, the characters fiddler/peddler characters were flipped around from the Blonde on Blonde incarnation. You can hear the studio “Seems Like A Freeze-Out” here, with the following lyrics:

The peddler now speaks to the countess who pretends that she cares for him

And Madonna, she still has not showed
We see this empty cage now corrode
Where her cape of the stage once had flowed
The fiddler, he now steps to the road
Knowing everything’s gone which was owed
He examines the nightingale’s code
Still left on the fish truck that loads
My conscience explodes

Additionally, the first known live recording, “Alcatraz to the 9^th Power Revisited”, Dec 5^th 1965, has:

The fiddler now speaks to the countess who’s pretending to care for him

And Madonna, she still has not showed
We see this empty cage now corrode
Where her cape of the stage once had flowed
The peddler, he now steps to the road
Everything’s been returned which was owed
He examines the nightingale’s code
Still left on the fish truck that loads
My conscience explodes

The extra line these share, regarding “nightingale’s code” has been the subject of much analysis and debate, but my concern here is with who speaks to the countess and who steps to the road, the latter being what old minstrels, travelling players and balladmongers did, just as Woody, Cisco, Lead Belly and company did, and a certain touring musician does to this day, even at the age of 84.

Does it matter which way round the peddler and the fiddler appear? Not really, they both relate to itinerant folk musicians (fiddles being very portable, peddlers hawking ballads) and they both have dodgy connotations: “peddling lies” and “fiddling the figures”. Thomas Nashe, you may recall in a tirade against balladeers used “fiddler” as one of his string of insults: "stitcher, weaver, spendthrift or fiddler [who] hath shuffled or slubber’d up a few ragged rimes."

The very word peddler is etymologically confusing and contentious. What was long assumed to be the later spelling, “pedlar”, was possibly an earlier spelling, too. In Scots, it’s clearly derived from from “pedalare” with the emphasis “ped”, from the Latin for foot and via many middle-English derivatives. A peddler (traditional Scots spelling, modern American spelling) travels by foot, selling all manner of trinkets along with broadside ballads. So, I would, given the choice, prefer it to be him and not the fiddler who was “steps to the road”. My own slight preference in the matter is, however, of no consequence. As Stephen Scobie goes on to suggest, the terms peddler/fiddler refer to the same person, whom he interprets as Dylan himself.

A foreshadow of Dylan’s peddler/countess contrast is seen with Autolycus representing what was seen as a lower form of popular culture. The educated elite tended to relate what they saw as the ballad's literary inferiority directly to the vagabond status of the bal­lad seller and ballad writer. As previously noted, there was a law passed in 1572 that made a clear distinction between official acting companies and ballad singers and this instigated a hierarchy of players where ballad sellers and "wandering minstrels" were placed lower than established theatre groups and professional musicians with noble patronage.

Shakespeare is then, undoubtedly poking some fun at the balladmongers’ expense for his theatre audiences; but at the same time he acknowledges, by the play’s conclusion, the close affinities of the two mass entertainments of the age, springing from oral, folk roots and blossoming in this new time of print.

Autolycus is primarily a balladmonger though he has other strings to his bow; Dylan is a ballad monger to a significant extent, though he has many other areas of artistic expression; Shakespeare, I have hopefully made clear, was a balladmonger to a larger extent than is commonly assumed (small though it be amidst his larger enterprises.) If he could not find a ballad to suit the needs of his play, he would simply write one himself, as is presumed to be the case in this very play. No problem: he was Shakespeare, after all.

Part Two: To Live Outside the Law You Must Be Honest

Autolycus’s second appearance shows us a balladmonger at work on Shakespeare’s stage. Through him, Shakespeare raises questions over the relationships between print and truth, art and artifice, legitimacy and illegitimacy. In linking to the final act it also questions wonder and belief, language and reality, knowledge and storytelling.

You can listen to it here:

Autolycus’s second appearance presents us, this time in a rural setting, the kind of exchange that Ophelia mimics in Hamlet, as described here. The scene where Autolycus sings (and sells) "Get you Hence for I must Go" shows him teaching the ballad tune to the shepherd’s son and his girlfriend, Mopsa. The actor playing Autolycus is simultaneously teaching the theatre audience the tune, too, presumably hoping they too will want to buy it. One suspects it would not be difficult for them to locate a copy when in the environs of the Globe or Blackfriars’ theatres. As the previous posting in this series explored, such exploitation of customers for both the theatre and the printed ballad were not uncommon.

Due to his earlier theft, Autolycus is disguised. He is, in fact, an actor playing a balladmonger disguised as a balladmonger. His ballad mongering is soon in action:

SHEPHERD’S SON What hast here? Ballads?

MOPSA Pray now, buy some. I love a ballad in print alife, for then we are sure they are true.

AUTOLYCUS Here’s one to a very doleful tune, how a usurer’s wife was brought to bed of twenty moneybags at a burden, and how she longed to eat adders’ heads and toads carbonadoed.

MOPSA Is it true, think you?

AUTOLYCUS Very true, and but a month old.

DORCAS Bless me from marrying a usurer!

AUTOLYCUS Here’s the midwife’s name to ’t, one Mistress Taleporter, and five or six honest wives that were present. Why should I carry lies abroad?

The ballads Autolycus offers for sale are clearly parodies of the sensational and often unbelievable content found in contemporary street ballads. However, Shakespeare – like Dylan after him (remembering: “all those songs about roses growing out of people's brains and lovers who are really geese and swans that turn into angels”) – is also well aware of the wondrous nature of authentic, traditional ballads and their store of unbelievable action and figures whose magic holds a deeper truth. Shakespeare play will then turn this into a profound examination of nature and art, language and reality.

For now, we listen to Autolycus reel in his country prey with tales of "how a usurer's wife was brought to bed of twenty money-bags at a burthen and how she longed to eat adders' heads and toads carbonadoed". He is soon upping the ante in his tall tale telling:

AUTOLYCUS Here’s another ballad, of a fish that appeared upon the coast on Wednesday the fourscore of April, forty thousand fathom above water, and sung this ballad against the hard hearts of maids. It was thought she was a woman, and was turned into a cold fish for she would not exchange flesh with one that loved her. The ballad is very pitiful, and as true.

DORCAS Is it true too, think you?

AUTOLYCUS Five justices’ hands at it, and witnesses more than my pack will hold.

Notice Autolycus’s various claims to factual truth through purportedly real (and pointed) names, "Mistress Taleporter", plus the assertion that his narrative is, "but a month old" (and so no time to grow “arms and legs”) and backed by the authority of "Five justices' hands at it, and witnesses more than my pack will hold". Shakespeare is satirising the gullibility of Autolycus’s audience on one level, but the theatre audience laughing at their naivety will soon find themselves witnessing another scene where belief in the seemingly unbelievable plays a central role The reach of print ballads across the nation through society was clearly of interest to Shakespeare, as we have seen throughout this series, and nowhere more so than here in The Winter’s Tale. Shakespeare, as you would expect, has a heightened perception of popular faith in the printed word, however incredible its claims may appear.

The perception of printed ballads as inherently "true,", as expressed by Mopsa: “I love a ballat in print, a-life, for then we are sure they are true” may sound silly to us, especially given the examples we hear. However, remembering that broadsheets were not just for ballads, but also trafficked in gossip, slander, news of all shades of authenticity and falsehood. it is clear that they were the popular media of their time: that is, the sensationalist press, the X, the TikTok of its day. Consequently, it is not so very dissimilar to being told nowadays: “I read it in the ’paper, it must be true”, or even less reliably, but still held by many to be factual, “it is doing the rounds on WhatsApp” or the dreaded “I saw it on Facebook” and so forth.

It may be risible, yes, but Shakespeare is having fun with an early version of the same phenomenon. And, just as today’s laughter at “fake news” is often tinged with unease, so too is the audience’s amusement here shadowed by a contemporary anxiety over the social consequences of print’s rapid proliferation.

These anxieties were well-founded. Print was escaping the control of church and state authorities; it was no longer confined to official pamphlets or authorised propaganda. As Aaron Kitch[vi] and other commentators have illuminated, The Winter’s Tale’s themes of legitimacy and bastardry are also entangled with the idea of print culture. Autolycus’s trade in printed ballads, which mix truth with fiction, reflects the play’s anxieties about uncontrolled reproduction, whether of people, stories, or meaning. Just as Leontes suspects his wife’s fidelity and questions the paternity of Perdita, printed texts raise similar concerns about authorship, authenticity, and the boundaries of truth Furthermore, Autolycus’s ballad description featuring a woman birthing money-bags conflates unnatural reproduction with the artificial generativity of print and finance, illustrating a world where forms of “copying” proliferate without clear origin or legitimacy.

This metaphor of print as a standard for both biological and textual reproduction occurs throughout the play. Paulina defends Perdita's legitimacy in this language: “copy”, "mould," and "print "as if the child were a printed text whose source could be verified as though it would be “true” if it could be seen printed on a newspaper “sheet”. Leontes’s craves the “purity and whiteness of my sheets" (paper/bedclothes) - reminding us of Othello in chapter 2 of this series - before they are sullied by ink, and posits paternity as something as clear and unambiguous as a printed page. Yet, as Kitch demonstrates, the very act of printing, like procreation, resists such control. There is even a ‘bastard typeface’, batârde, with its cursive, gothic appearance which was seen as a kind of illegitimate print. In this way, the play reveals a deep-seated cultural unease with both biological and textual reproduction where every child, like every printed word, bears the risk of being a copy without a legitimate origin. This lack of proven legitimacy was a dagger in the heart of a political, religious and financial societal system so utterly predicated on the shaky premise of patrilineal rights.

While concern over widely held belief in the printed word is highlighted, Shakespeare also acknowledges a positive aspect of such belief, both in his own work and that of the balladeer, which he explores fully in the play’s final act.

Furthermore, Autolycus' ballads existed in a space between the printed word and oral tradition. While they were printed and sold, their life extended through being sung, retold, and changed in performance. Autolycus embodies the tension between the permanence of print and the adaptability of oral storytelling, a point central to all my writings on Dylan and Shakespeare. It is only natural that Shakespeare would display such a nuanced and perceptive understanding of the ballad world. As Tiffany Stern puts it:

“Ballads may have seemed, then, a model for what plays could be: they sold excellently both as performance and print, without letting the one ever fully give way to the other.”^[vii]

In considering this, and other parallels between balladry and theatre craft, Shakespeare is inspired to answer, or, rather, transcend the questions earlier posed regarding fact and fiction, reality and fantasy, belief in the seemingly impossible .

The final act: It is required / You do awake your faith.

The climactic action centres on a seemingly miraculous reanimation of a statue of the presumed long-dead queen, Hermione. As such, it is, unsurprisingly, presented in terms of wonder and in which Shakespeare takes extraordinary care in framing theories and questions regarding faith, disbelief, art, and reality.

Furthermore, the parallels with the preceding act are made crystal clear. The story is reported by a “second gentleman” explicitly making the link to Autolycus and his main trade: “The oracle is fulfilled: the King’s daughter is found! Such a deal of wonder is broken out within this hour that ballad makers cannot be able to express it” (Act V scene ii). Just as Autolycus peddles unbelievable tales to an audience eager to accept them as true, so Paulina composes an incredible spectacle that her courtly audience is just as keen to embrace. The audience in the theatre suddenly find themselves in the same place as both Autolycus’s and Paulina’s onstage ones and it is no coincidence that it is music which reawakens Hermione to life.

“Tales are false” is the repeated message: Mistress Tale-porter is by her own naming, a carrier of them, Autolycus, in a life dedicated to falsehood, is a peddler of fanciful tales. Shakespeare, too, is a tale teller (as is Dylan, of course). On first viewing, the theatre audience holds its breath and feels the call to “awaken faith” just as Paulina’s onstage audience so. Even when seeing it later, if you witness even a competent, far less a high-quality, production of The Winter’s Tale, the sense of wonder is still palpable as the extraordinary scene unfolds, even when you know the background narrative. Perdita’s instructions to the onstage audience to awaken their faith in the story she is presenting, apply to all audiences of all art and entertainment.

So, Hermione is not resurrected but is simply a human who has aged, as we all do, and has been there all the time. In the context of the play, that truth is itself a wonder, a natural wonder, yes, though a natural wonder rendered by Shakespeare’s art. Hermione, after all, is a character created by Shakespeare and portrayed then by a boy actor. Is it a triumph of nature, or a triumph of art over nature? And is this Shakespeare demonstrating that his art outdoes even the balladmongers grandest wonders, that he can present that which “ballad makers cannot”? Questions beget more questions; one of Shakespeare’s and Dylan’s greatest gifts to us is that they prompt us to ask the important ones.

The fear of “fake news” is brought back into the conversation, by the “third gentleman’s” rejoinder to the second’s above: “This news which is called true is so like an old tale that the verity of it is in strong suspicion.” This line is characteristic of a play that consciously, and repeatedly, calls attention to its inherently unbelievable status; and it does so by linking itself to ballads and "old tales" which as it continually points out are incredible and cannot be accepted as “true”. Yet, the story's conclusion of Hermione's wondrous transformation from a statue, requires just such a belief in the unbelievable from its courtly audience as Autolycus’s grotesque births and transformations do of his rural dupes. Shakespeare, unlike a ballad writer, can present his miraculous transformation through a visually demonstrable reality (albeit a theatrical one), rather than a purely verbal story, thus trumping the unreliable popular ballads he had staged in the preceding act.

Due to the transforming power of performance art, the impossible, incredible, and unbelievable ultimately reveal a deeper truth. As Dylan puts it, in Chronicles, “it was so real…it was life magnified”:

“I had already landed in a parallel universe, anyway, with more archaic principles and values; one where actions and virtues were old style and judgmental things came falling out on their heads. A culture with outlaw women, super thugs, demon lovers and gospel truths . . . streets and valleys, rich peaty swamps, with landowners and oilmen, Stagger Lees, Pretty Pollys and John Henrys-an invisible world that towered overhead with walls of gleaming corridors. It was all there and it was clear-ideal and God-fearing-but you had to go find it. It didn’t come served on a paper plate. Folk music was a reality of a more brilliant dimension. It exceeded all human understanding, and if it called out to you, you could disappear and be sucked into it. I felt right at home in this mythical realm made up not with individuals so much as archetypes, vividly drawn archetypes of humanity, metaphysical in shape, each rugged soul filled with natural knowing and inner wisdom. Each demanding a degree of respect. I could believe in the full spectrum of it and sing about it. It was so real, so more true to life than life itself. It was life magnified. ”[viii]

The climax to the play is a daring thing in the climate of the times. The word “magic” is never far away and it feeds into Catholic/Protestant divisions of belief and bluntly put, belief in such was against the law and such miracles were regarded as belonging to the older, Catholic faith.[ix]

Paulina defends herself before her “show” begins: .

But then you’ll think—
Which I protest against—I am assisted
By wicked powers.

And continues:

It is required
You do awake your faith. Then all stand still—
Or those that think it is unlawful business
I am about, let them depart.

(Act V Scene iii)

Shakespeare here protects himself by insisting that the magic invoked is “lawful” and then we discover the “magic” itself not “real” in a literal sense, but instead only a clever deception. The magic remains very real in a figurative sense and that wonder is felt throughout the audience, The play, as a whole, conveys a love of the marvel and magic of old winters’ tales to tell or sing by the fireside. It is in the wonders of these non-factual narratives, songs and performances that the profoundest truths are to be found. As a consequence, just as the country yokels give themselves up to the extravagant claims of Autolycus’s ballads, so the court in the final scene chooses to believe in the "magic" of Hermione's reanimation. As Leontes, brought at last to full understanding of the human condition, exclaims;

If this be magic, let it be an art
Lawful as eating.

(Act V Scene iii)

Substack Outro:

This brings me almost to the end, for now, of my further exploration of ballads in the works of Shakespeare and parallels that can be drawn with Dylan. There is still a roundup of odds and ends and a description of what was to have been the next chapter (and why it is not appearing here) to go, and a hint of what remains left for potential future expansion. Thanks, to all of who have done so, for sticking with it thus far. For now, I give the last words here to Louis MacNeice’s, from his description of that “loveable rogue”, Autolycus:

“ … — Watch your pockets when
That rogue comes round the corner, he can slit
Purse-strings as quickly as his maker's pen
Will try your heartstrings in the name of mirth.

Brooches, pomanders, broadsheets and what-have-you,
Who hawk such entertainment but rook your client
And leave him brooding, why should we forgive you
Did we not know that, though more self-reliant
Than we, you too were born and grew up in a fix?”

©Andrew Muir, 2025 With thanks to Rowland Wymer.

Acknowledgements and Bibliography

All quotations from the play are from: The Winter’s Tale Edited by Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine with Michael Poston and Rebecca Niles. Folger Shakespeare Library: https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/the-winters-tale/

Play listening excerpts are from: Shakespeare: The Complete Works: Argo Classics Audible Audiobook performed by the Marlowe Dramatic Society and Professional Players. Full details and purchase, here: Shakespeare: The Complete Works: Argo Classics (Audio Download): William Shakespeare, Ian McKellen, Derek Jacobi, Diana Rigg, Roy Dotrice, Prunella Scales, Timothy West, full cast, Argo Classics: Amazon.co.uk: Audible Books & Originals

Bibliography:

Brown, Mary Ellen: “Placed, Replaced, or Misplaced?: The Ballads' Progress”, Ballads and Songs in the Eighteenth Century (SUMMER/FALL 2006), Vol. 47, No. 2/3pp. 115-129

Cox, Lee Sheridan: “The Role of Autolycus in The Winter's Tale” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 , Spring, 1969, Vol. 9, No. 2, Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama (Spring, 1969), pp. 283-301

Kitch, Aaron: Bastards and Broadsides in "The Winter's Tale Renaissance Drama , 1999-2001, New Series, Vol. 30, Institutions of the Text (1999-2001), pp. 43-71

Pafford, J. H. P: Music, and the Songs in The Winter's Tale in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 10, No. 2 (Spring, 1959), pp. 161-175 Oxford University Press

Stern, Tiffany: “Shakespeare, The Balladmonger?” Bloomsbury Collections - Rethinking Theatrical Documents in Shakespeare’s England.

Stern, Tiffany F. W. Bateson Memorial Lecture Ballads and Product Placement in the Time of Shakespeare cgac023.pdf

[i] “16 years” is used also in Shakespeare’s first of his four late romances, Pericles, where the lost royal daughter there, Marina, is also is found again at that age, like Perdita, neither child nor fully adult; at what was seen as an acceptable age for royal women to be courted or married. Perdita, as a "princess" raised among shepherds, fits this mould, see also Miranda in The Tempest, in addition to Marina in Pericles.
Also, in numerology, it is significant in that it is 4 x 4, with 4 representing stability and reliability, but here is not the place to pursue such roads, though it is worth noting that both Shakespeare and Dylan show interest in and knowledge of this field in their respective works.

[ii] See Muir, Andrew Dylan & Shakespeare: In The True Performing Of It…..for a detailed investigation into all these areas.

[iii] Muir, Andrew, Ibid .and http://www.openculture.com/2014/03/hear-allen-ginsbergs-short-free-course-on-shakespeares-play-the-tempest-1980.html Accessed March 28, 2018

[iv] Dylan, Bob: interviewed by Nat Hentoff for Playboy February 1966.

[v] Scobie, Stephen: Alias Bob Dylan Revisited Red Deer press, US, 200 (pp270)

[vi] Kitch, Aaron: Bastards and Broadsides in "The Winter's Tale, Renaissance Drama , 1999-2001, New Series, Vol. 30, Institutions of the Text (1999-2001), pp. 43-71

[vii] “Shakespeare, The Balladmonger?” Bloomsbury Collections - Rethinking Theatrical Documents in Shakespeare’s England.

[viii] Dylan, Bob Chronicles Simon & Schuster, UK, 2005

[ix] This is a vast and complex topic. As such, generalisations are insufficient to give a true picture here. It is worth remembering, though, that belief in magic was fairly widespread even as scientific advances heralded a more modern mindset. The King himself, head of the Protestant Church, was intensely interested in witchcraft, so ambiguities and uncertainties were commonplace. Plus, of course, many clung to the older Catholic beliefs, though it was wise to be circumspect about this, and would have taken to a miraculous resurrection in a private chapel quite readily, but that made it all the more imperative that Shakespeare trod carefully in the scene.

In the last article in this series, we examined the distinct, albeit overlapping, traditions of "street ballads" (often akin to "protest songs") and traditional ballads. Dylan emerged onto the Greenwich Village folk scene and rapidly established himself as a master of both. It appears that, due to his subsequent achievements in the mid-1960s, this earlier period of the 1960s has been increasingly downplayed. For instance, The Times They Are a-Changin' is frequently derided, dismissed, or neglected; however, upon listening, the album reveals magnificent songs, performed with brilliance. It will be interesting to see if the recent biopic and, if it is released, the long-rumoured “Villager” box-set lead to a critical reappraisal.

Amongst other gems, the album features superb songs about relationships, such as "One Too Many Mornings" and "Boots of Spanish Leather". Then there is the anthemic title song, which rallies the young against the old, and arguably the finest of all so-called protest songs, "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll". Other "street ballads" include both first- and third-person narratives, as seen in "North Country Blues" and "The Ballad of Hollis Brown".

I discussed "North Country Blues" in Dylan and Shakespeare: In The True Performing of It (hereafter, True Performing), when exploring the unique qualities of bards: “Burns and Dylan also display this ability. Being Bards, they too can adopt the voice and persona of others in an utterly convincing manner. Consider Burns as a young man known for his promiscuous lifestyle, putting into words and song, adapted from a luridly bawdy folk source, the touching view of a wife looking back on a long, faithful marriage and towards a joint ending of life in “Jon Anderson, My Jo”; or the young man, Bob Dylan, putting into words and song, again based on a folk source, the pitiful lament of the abandoned wife and soon to be abandoned mother of ‘North Country Blues” ”.[i]

"North Country Blues," as the title suggests, does not adhere to the ballad form, but it shares its opening and content with the socially critical 16th-century street ballad tradition. The song begins with the classic balladmonger's call for attention: "Come gather 'round friends," mirroring the album's opening line: "Come gather 'round people." Unlike the opening track, this is not an anthem, but a narrative of the despairing plight of common folk. Dylan embodies the persona of a woman who has "seen her whole life go down," as he sings elsewhere. She has lost her parents and her brother and will lose her husband, her children, and her entire town to abject poverty, its consequences, and the devastation wrought by a monetary system controlled by distant and indifferent figures. In this way, the song presents the "friends gathered 'round" with a tale of social distress akin to those lamented by balladeers of old. Here, he introduces it as a song about an iron-ore mine in an iron-ore town:

Bob Dylan - North Country Blues (Live At Newport Folk Festival - 1963) - 4K Restoration

Dylan has always excelled in performing traditional ballads, here is an early “Barbara Allen”, to go along with the one from 1988 I posted in an earlier episode of this series:

While it is true that Dylan went on to even greater achievements, we should not forget or underplay what was glorious in the period prior to the sublime albums of 1965 and 1966.

Money, Money, Money

The debate surrounding commercialism in popular music – the very "pop" in "pop music" – has led to some peculiar situations. The centrality of "selling out" (to commercialism) in the narrative of Dylan's "Judas" moment was something entirely overlooked in the film A Complete Unknown. One presumes that at two hours, and aiming for box office success ("sellouts!"), it was too vast a topic to address adequately. The late and much-missed C.P. Lee's Like The Night (Revisited): Bob Dylan and the Road to the Manchester Free Trade Hall is highly recommended for those interested in the background to this period. This phenomenon led to the outraged fans depicted in Eat The Document, and it was this that prompted the comment that Dylan was "crawling in the gutter". The fan was not annoyed that Dylan was playing an electric guitar per se, but rather that he was making money from doing so: "crawling through the bloody gutter, just making a pile out of it: yeah, he’s making a pile out of people he pretends he’s for." [ii]

I discuss the relationship between commerce and artwork in True Performing: "Dylan and Shakespeare’s work is grounded in popular entertainment and in pleasing audience. That ‘work’ is both business and artistic. Genius can exist, they prove, alongside commercial acumen and the highest artistry is not incompatible with widespread popularity and live shows.

We have established that Shakespeare was first and foremost a jobbing dramatist. He was a writer, actor, collaborator and editor of texts whose purpose was to be acted on stage and to prove popular enough to keep audiences coming back to pay for more. His business was that of pleasing audiences to increase the company’s cash flow. Genius and commerce are not always separate despite our romantic myths of starving artists in tiny garrets. Dylan remarked to biographer Robert Shelton, in 1978: “…the myth of the starving artist is just that – a myth”. Genius can also be at the beck and call of the need for cold, hard cash. One thinks of Dostoyevsky producing the most extraordinary series of novels in order to settle debts, and of Charles Dickens’ mass-marketed outpouring of the most beautiful quality prose, at a time when it was valued by quantity, and paid by the wordage. As Samuel Johnson prosaically put it: “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.” Both Shakespeare and Dylan prove to be canny operators in the world of commerce. William Burroughs remembered meeting a young Dylan who described himself as having “a knack for writing lyrics” and that he “expected to make a lot of money”.

Shakespeare and Dickens, now so justly academically revered, earned their living by producing hits for all of society. They did not write just for the privileged or especially educated elite. They were paid because they kept their audiences engaged and entertained. In this regard, it is clear that Bob Dylan has followed in their footsteps." [iii]

In "Shakespeare the Balladmonger?" [iv], her detailed and comprehensive overview of Shakespeare's intersection with the ballad world, Tiffany Stern investigates whether Shakespeare actively fostered links between theatres and balladmongers or simply utilised existing connections between these two most popular forms of popular culture. Her research points strongly to the former being the correct answer. Stern focuses on three main connections: marketing within plays, play ballads, and theatres as venues for ballad-hawkers to sell their wares. The combination of all the possibilities these afford suggests strong commercial links between the two popular entertainment spheres.

Noting that his contemporary, Ben Jonson, had ballads from his plays and masques printed as Broadsides, Stern describes Shakespeare seemingly engaged in what could be interpreted as marketing ballads within his plays. Potential examples suggesting this include Bottom's desire in A Midsummer Night's Dream to have a ballad written about his dream and sung at the end of the play (perhaps it was, and was also on sale at the end, either inside or outside the Globe, or both). Falstaff's jest in Henry IV Part 2, about having his exploits printed in a ballad, would certainly generate interest in purchasing such a ballad if one were on sale. Less persuasively, Cleopatra’s talk in Antony and Cleopatra of: "scald rhymers" who will "Ballad us out o' tune" might just do the same.

Stern’s finest example of this comes from The Tempest, where she uncovers a direct allusion to a ballad that was currently on sale:

“In one play, Shakespeare even drew attention to the same ballad publisher referred to by Ben Jonson: John Trundle. In The Tempest, Stephano starts drunkenly singing ‘Flout ’em, and scout ’em’, but Trinculo complains ‘that’s not the tune’ (TLN 1477-80). The spirit Ariel then enters and plays the correct tune ‘on a Tabor and Pipe’. But Ariel is, in the fiction, invisible – meaning that Stephano and Trinculo do not know where this sudden music has come from:

Ste. What is this same?

Trin. This is the tune of our Catch, plaid by the picture of No-body.

What is telling here, however, is that Trinculo does not straightforwardly refer to Ariel’s invisibility, ‘No-body’, but to ‘the picture of No-body’ (italics mine). That has a special meaning, for on 8 January 1606 the publisher John Trundle entered ‘The picture of No bodye’ in the Stationers’ Register; three months later, on 12 March 1605/6, he registered the anonymous play No-body and Some-body which, when printed, featured the picture of ‘No-body’ on its title page. He even started trading, as the title page of No-body and Some-body indicates in the colophon, at ‘the signe of No-body’. The reason for his fascination with the picture was, presumably, the fact that it was a visual joke: No-Body, has no body – just breeches up to his neck.

The Tempest’s reference to the picture of No-body, then, is simultaneously an acknowledgement that Ariel is invisible and a direct reference to John Trundle, presumably printer of the ballad being performed on stage. That makes Ariel, in this instance, the ballad-monger, and reveals a Shakespeare who used ballads to promote his play’s reach over time (any-one humming the tune is re-reminded of the play), in form (a paper ballad now doubles as a material souvenir of the production), and in cash (someone, Shakespeare, or Trundle, or the theatre, or a ballad-singer, perhaps all of them, will make money from this additional sale).”[v]

No-body, and Some-body title page (Printed for John Trundle and are to be sold at his shop in the Barbican, at the signe of No-body, 1606). A displayed here.

Play Ballads

Although Elizabethan London was exceptionally large for its time, it was small compared to modern cities. Both the theatre and printing communities, though booming, were small and tightly knit. A Venn diagram would illustrate a significant overlap between the two. Printers published the two primary subjects of my series of articles - plays and ballads - and, furthermore, the same printers would publish the playbills that advertised upcoming performances, alongside what Tiffany Stern describes as "play ballads":

“..one that told the story of the play. There is, for instance, an entrance on the Stationers’ Register on 6 August 1596 for ‘A newe ballad of Romeo and Juliett’. Though that ballad is lost, it was presumably inspired by Shakespeare’s … Romeo and Juliet, in performance at the time, but not published as a playbook until the following year. By design or circumstance, the ballad of Romeo and Juliett will have advertised the play in performance, and potentially constituted one of its mementos. Ballads might equally advertise books. There is a double entrance on the Stationers’ Register of 6 February 1594 for John Danter who records not just ‘a booke intituled a Noble Roman Historye of TYTUS ANDRONICUS’ –Shakespeare’s play – but ‘the ballad thereof’. He intends to publish both together, apparently expecting playbook and ballad to co-advertise one another. That gives evidence, then, of ballads printed apparently to advertise (or batten on) performance; and ballads printed to advertise (or batten on) a printed text.”[vi]

The survival of multiple versions of a ballad for Titus Andronicus, some featuring woodcuts depicting scenes from the play and even a London theatre, suggests that these ballads served as advertisements, plot summaries, or souvenirs of a Globe performance:

“In its top right- hand corner is a depiction of a city which has, as its focal point, a large round theatre with its flag raised for performance. This picture seems, then, to refer not so much to Rome, the fictional city in which Titus Andronicus is located, as the factual city in which Titus can be seen as a play, London.”[vii]

Shakespeare was exceptional in being an actor, author, and sharer in his acting company (first The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, then later The King’s Men), remaining with the same company of actors throughout his career. The artistic benefits accrued from this were enormous, and his settled and profitable status perhaps also afforded many opportunities for self-advancement. Tiffany Stern continues by speculating that: “These examples may show Shakespeare, individual in so many other ways, having a private, individual relationship with ballad publishers and/or singers, that involved channelling work to them – which he had sometimes also written – himself. Alternatively, as he was financially invested in the success of his company – he became one of its ‘sharers’ in 1594, and a ‘housekeeper’ in its buildings from 1599 – it may show him exploiting and teaching the use of ballads as pre- play publicity, plot summaries, or/and as post- play souvenirs.”[viii]

Click on the txt to view: The lamentable and tragicall history of Titus Andronicus : with the fall of his five and twenty sons in the wars of [t]he Goaths, with the ravishment of his daughter Lavinia by the empresse [t]wo sons, through the means of a bloody Moor, taken by the swor[d] of Titus in the war, with his revenge upon them for their cruell an in humane [sic] act. To the tune of Fortune my foe | Digital Collections

As noted above, there was more than one ballad written on the tragic and gory tale of Titus Andronicus. This one clearly followed Shakespeare's play and compresses the very gory tale into an 18-minute bloodbath:

It is noteworthy from the above research that the ballad could have a wide range of interactions with a play; it could be a souvenir, an advertisement, or an extension. As far as commercial links are concerned, "crossover" is beginning to sound like "business as usual". Both forms of popular performance entertainment were becoming ever more interlinked with the expanding world of print. That these printed artefacts were aimed at the same audience can be seen in their shared subject matter and the similar textual temptations - "most lamentable", "most excellent", "the true and tragical tale..."-that both used to entice buyers. A broadside ballad cost a penny, as did entrance to the Globe as a groundling.

Balladmongers, wide-ranging both geographically and across social classes, had an existing sales terrain perfectly suited to spreading all of these; to help make a play a hit and to help cash in on it once it was one. This leads to further speculation from Stern:

“But given that Shakespeare often used ballads, and sometimes apparently wrote them, and given that all such ballads if printed would double as souvenirs and advertisements – while also making money in their own right – it is worth exploring further whether the theatre- ballad link might have been an intentional aspect of playhouse marketing.”

And:

“.. the word ‘balladmonger’ (‘monger’ meant ‘trader’) in the period sometimes indicated a ballad-seller and sometimes ballad-writer, Shakespeare emerges as at least one form of balladmonger, and perhaps both. That raises questions about how to interpret ballads 1) in plays and 2) about plays. As the only published bits of play generally available at the time of performance are ballads – in and about plays – are they a part of theatrical marketing or cross-marketing?” [ix]

Theatres as Selling Places for Ballad Hawkers

Turning now to the benefits the theatrical environment afforded balladmongers, Stern postulates a strong commercial relationship between playhouses and the ballad trade. Contemporary accounts describe the presence of ballad hawkers at theatre entrances, capitalising on the crowds attending performances. Caralyn Bialo explores the same relationship, describing how ballad sellers contributed to the festive atmosphere around theatres, relying on showmanship to attract audiences, mirroring, now in the city, their actions as itinerant hawkers traversing the countryside. This ensured that the theatre audience had a song-saturated day even before their ballad-filled plays commenced.

From the same study on Ophelia, What Does This Song Import?, quoted earlier in this series, Bialo vividly conveys an imagined scene:

“When Ophelia first appeared on the Globe stage, the traditional proximity of minstrelsy, balladry, and playing was perpetuated on the streets outside the theater in Southwark. The suburb was hospitable to the population likely to become ballad sellers for some of the reasons that it appealed to the professional theaters; civic and guild administration was slow and ineffective across the river. With a fluid population of migrants and an economy grounded in small-time trading and victualling, Southwark became home to what Natasha Korda calls an "informal theatrical economy": "Female hawkers, foreigners and aliens, who were excluded from the formal economy" worked alongside "theater entrepreneurs and professional players, many of whom were freemen, but who nonetheless sought to profit from unregulated commerce." Players and playwrights, minstrels, ballad singers, pawnbrokers, and bear wardens were mutually dependent, and ballad sellers helped create the festive atmosphere that drew Londoners to the Bankside.” [x]

Speculative though all this is, it does raise very interesting questions about whether theatres tacitly allowed, actively encouraged, or even financially benefited from these ballad sales, perhaps through concessions similar to those for food, drink, and other printed material. The diary of Philip Henslowe, owner of the Rose Theatre in London during the 1590s, survived and is an invaluable source of information about the workings of the Elizabethan public theatres.

Stern quotes two occasions where subcontracting is apparent: “Henslowe in 1587 ‘will not permit . . . any person . . . other than . . . John Cholmley . . . to utter, sell or put to sale in or about the . . . playhouse . . . any bread or drink’; while at Whitefriars 1607/8 ‘if any . . . profit can or may be made in the said [play]house either by wine beer, ale, tobacco, wood, coals, or any such commodity, . . . Martyn Slater . . . shall have the benefit thereof’”[xi]

Ballads, then, can be seen to have had a multifaceted and complex interaction with the plays of Shakespeare. They are embedded, either wholly or in part; they are used for the jig to end the plays (more of that in a future piece); they can act as souvenirs or marketing tools; they can continue the narrative and "extend the franchise," serving as neglected extensions of the plays themselves, or something in between. The significance of balladry in the experience of theatre in the sixteenth and seventeenth century was profound. As such, it is unsurprising to find Shakespeare’s mind pondering the significance of it all in his play The Winter’s Tale, and even less surprising to discover he dramatises those thoughts via characters on stage, as we shall see in the next article in this series.

Substack Outro

Thanks to Timothy Drake for alerting me to a podcast episode from ‘Shakespeare Unlimited’, covering some of the same terrain as I have been, on "Top 100 Pop Songs of the 1600s". Christopher Marsh, Professor of Cultural History at Queen’s University, Belfast, is quoted in the podcast: “Shakespeare clearly knew ballad culture very intimately. There are lots of references to ballads in his plays. I mean not necessarily just to the ones that made it onto our website, but the famous Desdemona’s “Willow Song” in Othello and she says “ the song tonight will not go from my mind” and I think we've all had that that experience of a of a song that won't shift. And, in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Bottom wakes from a vision and says he's going to get Peter Quince to write a ballad about it. So, the idea of kind of writing ballads about funny things that have happened is very much part of Shakespeare's world. And I think he's really tapped into… I mean, he was clearly very musical and he knows that ballads are happening and that they're developing and he clearly follows this closely.”

Podcast and links to “Hot 100” Ballad chart are here:
https://www.folger.edu/podcasts/shakespeare-unlimited/top-pop-songs-of-the-1600s/

© Andrew Muir, May 2025

[i] Muir, Andrew Bob Dylan & William Shakespeare: In The True Performing of It, Red Planet Books 2019 and 2020.

[ii] See Muir, Andrew Bob Dylan & William Shakespeare: In The True Performing of It for a detailed analysis of this situation and its many ramifications.

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] Stern, Tiffany, “Shakespeare, The Balladmonger?” in Bloomsbury Collections - Rethinking Theatrical Documents in Shakespeare’s England.

[v] Stern, Tiffany,” F. W. Bateson Memorial Lecture cgac023.pdf

[vi] Stern, Tiffany, “Shakespeare, The Balladmonger?” Bloomsbury Collections - Rethinking Theatrical Documents in Shakespeare’s England.

[vii] Ibid.

[viii] Ibid.

[ix] Ibid.

[x] Bialo, Caralyn “Popular Performance, the Broadside Ballad, and Ophelia's Madness”, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/510541/summary

[xi] Stern, Tiffany, “Shakespeare, The Balladmonger?” Bloomsbury Collections - Rethinking Theatrical Documents in Shakespeare’s England.

Here is another chapter in my series “More True Performing”, this one explores the history of the oral tradition of wandering entertainers from the sixteenth century and points to parallels with hobo-minstrels like Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly. It also examines the differences between traditional and street ballads in Shakespeare’s time, and how this is mirrored in the divergent strands traditional ballads and ‘protest songs’ in the 1960s.

Voices of the People

Shakespeare and his acting company evolved out of the traditional travelling troupes of actors known as “travelling players”. The original legal status of these wandering men was akin to that of vagrants. The same applies to the original balladmongers and minstrels. All groups were looked down upon by the better off in society and were little more than outcasts with an ability to entertain and experience in doing so. In time, with the advent of permanent theatres in London, added to the protection via the patronage of nobility or royalty (such as Shakespeare’s “The Lord Chamberlain’s Men” and then “The King’s Men”), later acting companies could gain some social standing and security, but the earlier social stigma still lingered heavily. Those without such noble patronage were still in the same bracket as balladmongers and wandering minstrels. This shared heritage further solidifies the many connections I have been highlighting between the theatre and ballad spheres. The split that then occurred between commercial, professional enterprises and those who remained within the folk, amateur community, foreshadows a similar fork in the road for Dylan, centuries later.

Minstrels

The figure of the minstrel has evolved over time, carrying a range of associations that shift with each era. Aptly for my study of Shakespeare and Dylan as parallel bards from different centuries, the term "bardic", especially in Scotland, in Shakespeare’s time meant “hobo-minstrel”, a wandering entertainer living on the fringes of society.

The role of minstrels evolved with, and developed into, the rise of ballad writers and sellers, and as travelling theatrical troupes with musical "interludes" gave way to professional acting companies the minstrelsy began to fade. Yet, wandering minstrels are the beginning of our story; musical entertainers, often of a very low social status and lacking formal training, they were primarily singers, yet were not confined to music alone: instead, collaboration across different forms of entertainment was common.

Minstrelsy was deeply embedded in the oral culture from which both traditional ballads and Shakespearean drama emerged. Ballads were often sung by minstrels, and the performance of plays, similarly reliant on performers' voices, featured minstrels singing interludes and performing the jig or “merry dance” that brought proceedings to a close. This practice carried over into the Elizabethan era, underscoring how closely intertwined oral tradition and dramatic performance remained.

Even the word "ballad" itself points to this connection: "ballad" is derived from the Latin word "ballara”, meaning “dance"[i]. This connection to musical performance and movement survives all the way through to Bob Dylan. I recall, as a schoolchild in Scotland, being made to dance to the tune of "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" for an end-of-year show and then some years later hearing that traditional dance melody repurposed by Dylan to such haunting effect. I could still hear the teacher counting us in "one, two… three, four" as the final notes to Dylan’s masterpiece faded out. The epic ballad “Tempest” takes us from an individual to a communal tragedy and conveys its grim litany of the dead to another melody which echoes sad waltzes from times past. “Ballara” and its subsequently derived terms illustrate the interconnections of song and dance down through the centuries. Theatre companies, such as Shakespeare’s, employed ballad makers to write the jigs that were performed after the performances ended as well as any interludes deemed necessary during the dramas presented.

Prior to that, minstrels provided the interludes and post-acting “merry dances” as well as widely disseminating ballads and presumably improvising and perhaps creating new ones as they wound their weary and perilous roads around the countryside. Over time, "minstrel" came increasingly to denote musical entertainers of the lowest status. Their lack of formal training became an issue, and in time they became differentiated from professional players. Initially, all the entertainers mentioned here were amateur and wandering types: hobos, tramps and vagrants as far as the law was concerned.

As ballad selling developed as a trade, with hawkers singing the wares they were selling, there was an inevitable overlap with the repertoire of minstrels, whose songs were also now increasingly circulated as broadsides. With the rise of ballad sellers and professional players (actors) the role of the minstrel gradually diminishes into the past. Alongside the growing professionalism and commercialism of acting companies, there was also a continuation and development of musical performances at court, aristocratic houses and universities. These performances were more respectable than the strolling players in market places and they also fed into the commercial theatre of the 16th century. However, it is worth remembering that the origins of professional acting and the theatrical interlude are deeply rooted in the traditions of minstrelsy.

Balladmongers, Ballad Hawkers, and the Act of 1572

The development of ballad culture in the early modern period cannot be fully understood without considering the crucial role of balladmongers and ballad hawkers. As the popularity of printed broadsides grew, ballad-selling emerged as a distinct trade, overlapping with but also diverging from the older minstrel tradition.

Ballad hawkers, or balladmongers, were individuals who sold broadside ballads to the public (“monger” means “trader”, as in “fishmonger”). While both terms relate to the selling of ballads, "balladmonger" can also mean a composer, though this brought with it the connotation that these songs were of low standard and eminently disposable. Terms that many, including rock and folk fans, have used to describe “pop music”.

With the advent of affordable printing technologies, ballad sellers became central to the dissemination of popular songs. They travelled extensively, moving between towns and rural communities, selling not only ballads but also a variety of easily portable goods. To attract customers, they would frequently perform the ballads themselves, singing or even partly acting out the dramatic narratives. Much like minstrels and early theatrical troupes, these sellers occupied a precarious social position. They lived on the margins of society, often without fixed residences, guild affiliations, or legal protections. Nevertheless, balladmongers were vital agents in the cultural economy of their time, maintaining wide-ranging trade networks and a nuanced knowledge of local tastes. Their primary product, the broadside ballad, enjoyed widespread popularity throughout all levels of society, and there is even evidence of schoolchildren, (privileged males only, at the time), being “caught in possession” of copies.

Caralyn Bialo notes that: “Although the London playing companies were officially distinguished from minstrels and ballad sellers under the 1572 ‘Acte for the Punish­ment of Vacabondes,’ the status of professional players contin­ued to be contested in part because of the cultural associations among actors, minstrels, and vagrancy.” The antitheatrical writer Stephen Gosson, for example, accused players of having "bene eyther men of occupations, which they have forsaken to lyve by playing, or common minstrels".

Sadly, human nature being what it is, those in the second lowest rung are often those most cruel to those at the very bottom. A documentary I saw recently recounted testimony from British ex-patriates in apartheid South Africa saying that when the “lowest of the low” later came over from the UK, they delighted in having an underclass to persecute and torment. They exulted in no longer being the bottom rung, but in having a level beneath them. In turn, this brings to mind Dylan singing in “Only A Pawn In Their Game”:

A South politician preaches to the poor white man
“You got more than the blacks, don’t complain.
You’re better than them, you been born with white skin,” they explain.

That 1572 Act, slight elevation though it was, effectively moved actors in settled companies, with noble patronage, up a level from their old counterparts in travelling, oral culture. So we find, in 1589, that Thomas Nashe, sometime playwright and man of letters, felt that the theatre was by now elevated enough to join in the attacks on balladmongers. Caralyn Bialo writes that:

“Henry Chettle and William Harrison both asserted that "masterless men" used the pretense of minstrelsy and ballad selling to avoid real work. 'Many of the educated elite linked the ballad's literary inferiority directly to the base status of the bal­lad seller and ballad writer. Thomas Nashe attacks the "stitcher, weaver, spendthrift or fiddler [who] hath shuffled or slubberd up a few ragged rimes."" For Nashe, hack writers and bumbling, vulgar musicians emblematize the genre's coarseness.”[ii]

To be fair, broadsheets were often merely ephemeral, lacking sophistication or artistry but they were not always so and it is somewhat galling to read Nashe’s hyperbolic put-down.

You could counter by reminding me that although Dylan turned his back on his protest songs in very strong language, too, and went on to explore deeper layers of society and human nature from 1964 onwards, he was back with a blunt protest song in 1971, with a “street ballad”, if ever there was one, in “George Jackson”. Then, five years later, “Hurricane” opened Desire and went on to play a central role in the Renaldo and Clara movie.

George Jackson (acoustic)

What I am highlighting, overall is that snobbery against song is a constant through the centuries. One is reminded of Robert Louis Stevenson, decrying Rabbie Burns for spending his time on traditional Scottish songs rather than in writing “real poetry”. Such dismissal of song as opposed to “real poetry” has robbed generations of audiences from enjoying much, if not most, of the many musical elements that are integral parts of Shakespearean drama. It is part of the centuries long elevation of page over stage. Dylan and Shakespeare are masters of both print and performance, but if you were to weigh the balance of study and commentary between the two forms of expression, then you would have a pair of scales very heavily weighted to the former.

Broadside Ballads and the Rise of Print Culture

The broadside ballad was a song printed on a single sheet of paper, designed for mass appeal, particularly among the less affluent classes. In a period when books were expensive and inaccessible to much of the population, broadsides became a crucial medium for entertainment, moral instruction, news, and social commentary. Above all, they were the perfect vehicle for songs, adorned with a catchy title and occasionally a woodcut illustration; these ballads narrated stories in verse form and were intended to be sung to well-known tunes. These tunes could travel from song to song, or new melodies written for existing narrative verses.

Many broadside ballads centred on themes of love: love won and love lost, “pop songs” of their day, you might say. These ballads often reflected contemporary attitudes towards women, marriage, social and sex mores. Broadside printing was not limited to ballads, instead it was impressively extensive and encompassed a variety of topical content, be that news, salacious gossip and stories of the powerful. There was even the phenomenon of flyting - something akin to early flame wars on social media, showing how innate is our propensity to use wonderful new inventions for trivial and debased purposes – where insults between ‘celebrities’ of the day were eagerly followed as they flew back and forth. We are concerned, here, however with their star item the broadside ballad.

The rise of the broadside not only altered the circulation of ballads but also shifted perceptions of oral and written culture. Minstrels, once central to the oral transmission of ballads, increasingly came to symbolize the historical and folkloric origins of songs that were now being printed and archived. This was not a simple replacement of oral by written tradition, but rather a complex evolution of roles within a rapidly changing media environment. Ballads and Shakespeare’s plays shared the communal aspects of traditional life; they were created to be sung in the streets and taverns, or staged in market places and theatres.

Hittin’ some hard travelin’ too

Bob Dylan arrived in New York as a self-styled hobo minstrel with exaggerated tales of an itinerant backstory. He did, however, travel round and sing, albeit to a lesser extent than he claimed and he idolised Woody Guthrie and his friends and companion inheritors of the century old tradition of wandering minstrels and balladeers:

“Here’s to Cisco an’ Sonny an’ Leadbelly too
An’ to all the good people that traveled with you
Here’s to the hearts and the hands of the men
That come with the dust and are gone with the wind”[iii]

Song To Woody

In a similar manner to how the invention of the printing press and the growth of printing changed everything for the old minstrels, so too did the advent and growth of phonograph recordings prove a key factor in the story of Bob Dylan and other singers of last century. When still in the roving minstrel state, the ballads of these folk musicians could and would evolve within oral singing traditions and be tweaked to current events and even passing fancies of the performers themselves.

Just as print culture reshaped the transmission and perception of popular song, without fully displacing oral traditions, so, to varying degrees, recorded versions and “official lyrics” sometimes transformed the previously fluid folk material of the twentieth century of “official lyrics” in copyrighted form. The tension between ever evolving live music and the fixed nature of studio recordings and printed lyrics is a central theme of Dylan’s career and Dylan scholarship.

Dylan’s emergence as a leading artistic figure of the second half of last century surprisingly and spectacularly reversed the emphasis back from printed to oral culture. Shakespeare and Dylan as writers for performance, primarily for the stage not the page, but with their dual roles as writers of the highest literary worth, are at the centre of these conflicting movements and forces and both were highly aware of their position at the cultural nexus of their respective eras.

Further strong parallels between the two bards appear in the dual nature of ballads both in the 1590s and 1960s. This is seen in the differences between traditional and broadside ballads back in the day, and traditional ballads and protest songs for Broadside magazine at the start of Dylan’s career.

Traditional Ballads and Broadside Ballads

The term "ballad" itself encompasses a range of meanings. Broadly, it refers to a narrative song composed in a stanzaic form suitable for singing, dealing with themes such as love, tragedy, crime, or historical events. However, scholars distinguish between "traditional" or "popular" ballads and "broadside" or "street" ballads, based on their origins and modes of transmission.

Traditional ballads are typically of anonymous authorship, transmitted orally across generations, and subject to variation in the act of performance. They are often associated with rural settings and exhibit distinctive structural and stylistic features shaped by communal memory and improvisation. In contrast, broadside ballads were generally the product of semi-professional or "hack" writers, aimed at a predominantly urban audience. Unlike traditional ballads, broadsides existed as tangible documents: cheap, printed artifacts designed to exploit the commercial possibilities of the burgeoning mass media. It should be noted that the boundary between the two was often fluid. Some traditional ballads were adapted, edited, and printed as broadsides to achieve greater commercial success, while others persisted in oral circulation even after being committed to print.

At the time Shakespeare started to write plays, street ballads, which he often included or alluded to in his plays, were, amongst other things, the protest songs of his day. Like Dylan’s early “protest songs” these “street ballads” were topical and often expressed deeply felt resentment against social injustices. They were more city based than the traditional, rural repertoire and written, as their name suggests, in the colloquial language of the street.

There are many similarities between this and Bob Dylan’s emergence in the Greenwich Village scene in the early 1960s. Again there is a split between traditional folk music and the songs Dylan and others wrote for their version of the broadside ballads, the magazine, “Broadside”. Dylan, as we all know quickly became the “prince of protest”, churning out anthems, laments and witty put downs all decrying the political and societal injustices of the day. He was to turn against this, castigating himself for turning newspaper stories or headlines into instant songs and questioning his motives for so doing. As he tried to shake off this image he had so successfully created, (it was so strong that it persists in the general public’s view of Dylan to this day), his waspish tongue turned against his previous creations in interviews. However, Dylan carefully distinguished between his “street ballads” and traditional ones. He explained this in 1966:

“And folk music is a word I can’t use. Folk music is a bunch of fat people. I have to think of all this as traditional music. Traditional music is based on hexagrams. It comes about from legends, bibles, plagues, and it revolves around vegetables and death.”[iv]

In the interview he is defending himself from accusations that he had “killed folk music”, and continued:

“There’s nobody that’s going to kill traditional music. All these songs about roses growing out of peoples brains and lovers who are really geese and swans that turn into angels -they’re not going to die. It’s all those paranoid people who think that someone’s going to come and take away their toilet paper – they’re going to die. Songs like “Which Side Are You On?” and “I Love You, Porgy” – they’re not folk music songs…”

Noting that in traditional music “mystery is a fact, a traditional fact”, Dylan goes on to say:

“I listen to the old ballads. I could give you descriptive detail of what they do to me, but some people would probably think that my imagination had gone mad. It strikes me funny that people actually have the gall to think that I have some kind of fantastic imagination...”

Dylan uses the term “folk singer”, in this interview, to denote protest singer of contemporary street ballads. He sets this up in opposition to the “purity” of traditional ballads, Dylan again stressing that the “old”, the traditional, cannot be killed, because it is full of mystery: a mystery containing magic and wonder, death and holiness:

“…traditional music is too unreal to die. It doesn’t need to be protected. Nobody’s going to hurt it. In that music is the only true, valid death you can feel today off a record player. But like anything else in great demand, people try to own it. It has to do with a purity thing. I think it’s meaninglessness is holy. Everybody knows that I’m not a folk singer.”

I have written, both in this series of articles and elsewhere, of Dylan and Shakespeare’s “gappiness” (to again use Emma Smith’s term) as a strength in their writing; coupled with the marvellous way they make us ask pertinent questions, rather than provide pat answers, it provokes a sense of wonder and, to use Dylan’s term on traditional ballads, mystery. When this is all allied to their figurative and symbolic language, the listener/reader is transported into speculative and endlessly fulfilling realms. Realms where one is always satisfied, but never sated; instead always led on to further exploration and delight.

Substack Outro

In both senses of the word, Bob Dylan is a balladmonger par excellence, and you probably have never thought of Shakespeare being called the same, but a leading critic, Tiffany Stern has written: “...the word ‘balladmonger’ in the period sometimes indicated a ballad seller and sometimes ballad- writer, Shakespeare emerges as at least one form of balladmonger, and perhaps both.”[v] I hope that quote piques your interest in the next stage in this series: “Leveraging the Synergies, 16^th and 17^th century-style”, plus Shakespeare’s staging of a balladmonger in action and all the parallels with Dylan’s art and achievements.

©Andrew Muir, 2025 With thanks to Rowland Wymer.

[i] The word comes into English via the French “ballade” popularised in the dancing tradition of the “Provencal ballade”.

[ii] Bialo, Caralyn. “Popular Performance, the Broadside Ballad, and Ophelia's Madness” Studies in English Literature, 1500 - 1900; Baltimore Vol. 53, Issue 2, (Spring 2013): 293-309.

[iii] Song to Woody | The Official Bob Dylan Site .

[iv] Hentoff, Nat. Playboy Interview, March 1966 , New York City, New York The Fiddler Now Upspoke.

[v] Stern, Tiffany. "Shakespeare the Balladmonger?" Rethinking Theatrical Documents in Shakespeare’s England. Ed. Tiffany Stern. London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2020. 216–238.

Bibliography:

Bialo, Caralyn. “Popular Performance, the Broadside Ballad, and Ophelia's Madness”Studies in English Literature, 1500 - 1900; Baltimore Vol. 53, Issue 2, (Spring 2013): 293-309.

Chess, Simone. Shakespeare’s Plays and Broadside Ballads,” Literature Compass (volume 7, 2010). pp. 772-785.

Nebeker, Eric. “The Broadside Ballad and Textual Publics”, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 , Vol. 51, No. 1, The English Renaissance (Winter 2011), pp. 1-19. Rice University.

Sewell, Helen. “Shakespeare and the Ballad: A Classification of the Ballads Used by Shakespeare and Instances of Their Occurrence” Midwest Folklore , Vol. 12, No. 4 (Winter, 1962), pp. 217-234 Indiana University Press.

Stern, Tiffany. "Shakespeare the Balladmonger?" Rethinking Theatrical Documents in Shakespeare’s England. Ed. Tiffany Stern. London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2020. 216–238.

OPHELIA

Introduction

No-one opened my eyes more to the intertwined world of popular ballads and Shakespeare’s plays than Tiffany Stern. We will return to some of her superb research at the conclusion of this series, but for now we have her explaining the significance of one of the many ballad or ballad fragments, that populate Hamlet. We saw in my last posting how Desdemona’s The Willow Song” relied on the audience knowing the mournful love ballad on which it was based. Similarly here, claims Stern:

“Another play seemingly reliant on broadside knowledge is Hamlet. In all three surviving texts of Hamlet, variant in so many ways, Hamlet recites, or perhaps sings, sections of Jephthah Judge of Israel: ‘One fair daughter and no more, / The which he loved passing well’, ‘as by lot, / God wot’, ‘It came to pass, / As most like it was’ (Hamlet, 2.2.343–56). He too seems to expect detailed knowledge of the ballad’s whole first verse[i]:

I Read that many yeares agoe,
when Jepha Judge of Israel,
Had one faire daughter and no moe,
whom he beloved passing well:
And as by lot God wot,
It came to passe most like it was,
Great Warres there should be,
and who should be the chiefe but he, but he.[ii]

The many prompts that Hamlet gives seem designed to position Polonius as Jephtha, bad judge, and misguided chief in a war – the ‘war’, in Hamlet terms, being the brewing conflict between Claudius and Fortinbras, or the local battle between Claudius and Hamlet. And, as Jephtha, in ballad (and bible, of course) promised to pay for his victory by sacrificing the first living thing he comes across – only for it to be his virgin daughter – so Polonius, the parallel suggests, will end up sacrificing Ophelia. This seemingly marked and insistent use of intertextuality to enrich subtext, however, only works if the audience have comprehensive knowledge of – and perhaps easy access to – the ballad text itself.”

It is worth noting, above and beyond the detail of the intertextuality and the audience’s ballad familiarity, the possibilities raised from it being natural for the Prince of Denmark to sing and the suggestion that audience may have “easy access” to the ballad sung on stage. The prevalence of song throughout the play is something you would almost certainly not have been taught if you learnt the play at school, but it is how the play was written by Shakespeare. The director Robert Icke was one who was well aware of this and in his hit production for the Almeida Theatre he carefully placed a number of Dylan songs throughout the play. I was lucky enough to catch it in its second consecutive sold-out run at the Harold Pinter Theatre. A version was broadcast by the BBC in which the Dylan songs, if memory serves me well, took up less time though were still a prominent feature. The songs included were: “One More Cup Of Coffee”/ “Up To Me”/ “Spirit on the Water”/ “One Too Many Mornings”/ “Sugar Baby” and “Not Dark Yet”. [iii]

Stern goes on to remark: “Hamlet is, of course, a ballad-focused play. In it, mad Ophelia also performs well-known ballads.” It is to the songs Ophelia sings in Act IV scene v that we now turn; partly because this expands on my previous article on “The Willow Song” and Othello, partly because it showcases the staging of a ballad performance within the play and partly because there is such a concentration of song in this scene during Ophelia’s two appearances, where she expresses herself through balladry.

Within the complex tapestry of the play, the character of Ophelia often stands as a figure of tragic innocence, overwhelmed by the events unfolding around her. However, a closer examination of her descent into “madness”, particularly her use of song, reveals a more nuanced and potentially subversive dimension to her character. Drawing on the vibrant culture of broadside ballads, Shakespeare crafts Ophelia's mad scenes not merely as a descent into incoherence, but stages them as a metatheatrical commentary that provides a potent lens through which to view female experience within a patriarchal society.

As is natural in performance art, productions vary greatly. I provide two links here to differing modern takes on the scene:

Hamlet - Act 4 Scene 5 - "I will not speak with her" (Subtitles in modern English)

Hamlet • Act 4 Scene 5 • Shakespeare at Play

Whatever the merits of these, neither give the full impression of Ophelia on stage in Shakespeare’s time. The stage directions tell us[iv]: Enter Ophelia playing on a lute, hair down, singing and she has two audiences: cast and audience. She will, before the conclusion of her “act”, lead the crowd in a sing-along to a refrain popular from many a bawdy ballad. This active solicitation of participation directly echoes the practices of ballad sellers who would encourage passersby to join in on familiar refrains.

What does this song import?

Critics have long pondered whether Hamlet was mad or feigning it, and, if so, to what degree. The agency was given to the character in these discussions. Contrastingly, with Ophelia madness was taken as absolute. Even when it became ever clearer, as research developed over time, that her songs and her flowers were all presented with apt meanings and allusions, this was written as Shakespeare telling us, through cryptic ‘nonsense messaging’, Ophelia’s innermost feelings. Of course, it is always Shakespeare in the cases of both characters, but the different approach in criticism until relatively recently is instructive, with Ophelia, reflective of how she is treated by other characters in the play, accorded none of the respect given to Hamlet.

When you take the character of Ophelia more seriously, you find that through her ballads, flower-gifts and interaction with the audience, an individual with agency and an important message emerges. As well as their symbolic meanings, the flowers Ophelia distributes and talks about include ones well known to her audience for use in contraception, abortion, and treatment for syphilis[v]. Something to keep in mind. perhaps, when listening to her “St Valentine’s Day” song.

Ophelia is not treated as individual in the play by the other characters. Instead, there she is talked at, talked to, talked down to, talked over, and talked about but never talked with in a meaningful sense. The others treat her as a stereotyped representative figure of ‘demure woman’. Ironically, when she dies, when she ceases to be an individual, the other characters think of her personality for the first time. We, the audience, thanks to the songs she sings, whose message they fail to recognise, get there a little ahead of them. Prior to that, as Rosalyn Stilling puts it:

“Her forced receptiveness in conversations with males represents the patriarchal idea of a woman’s position of receiving male initiative. Her life is not her own; it is owned by every man and powerful figure around her. She tries to be the passive, obedient and submissive maiden society demands of her, but in doing so, she loses her agency and identity because she is not free to discuss her relationship with her family.” [vi]

Ophelia's voice is consistently marginalized until she employs songs to express her inner thoughts, after conventional discourse and society at large has failed her.

When Ophelia descends into what is routinely dismissed as "madness" she is alone, no longer controlled by her father (killed by her boyfriend), her brother (still far away, as far as she is aware) or her boyfriend (sent away by the king, to be killed). Stilling argues that her madness is not necessarily a psychological disturbance but rather a multifaceted response to her objectification, abandonment, and sorrow. In this state, Ophelia, rather than simply going mad, gains a voice through songs and the symbolic language of flowers, both traditionally linked to feminine expression and sexuality:

“Instead of responding directly to Gertrude’s and Claudius’s questions, Ophelia's songs are all applicable to her life, which should not be the case for someone supposedly mad. In this way, the ever-obedient Ophelia, through experiencing heartbreak and abandonment, breaks the chains of her receptive and timid nature by choosing to say what she wants rather than what Gertrude wants.”[vii]

There is a fear over Ophelia’s behaviour, but what immediately concerns the onlookers is what she may say rather than her mental health: “'Twere good she were spoken with; for she may strew/ Dangerous conjectures in ill-breeding minds.” The corrupt Danish Court is not a centre of power that can bear any light being shown upon it.

Ophelia’s songs, in order

Editor G. R. Hibbard tells us that: “The songs Ophelia sings are not known elsewhere, with the single exception of the lines: How should I your true love know/From another one? However, they smack very strongly of the traditional ballad, in which love - especially lost or unrequited love - and death were the leading motifs. The likeliest explanation of their origin is that Shakespeare took snatches, as the queen calls them, of old songs and wove them together to fit his own purpose, for they do render in a manner which is both poignant and haunting the two causes of Ophelia’s madness - Hamlet’s rejection of her love and the death of her father killed by his hand. Inextricably involved with one another her two losses compete for attention in her mind…” [viii]

Ophelia’s singing begins with:

How should I your true love know
From another one?
By his cockle hat and staff,
And his sandal shoon.

The Queen interrupts, and asks “Alas, sweet lady, what imports this song?”. However, in a complete transformation of her former obedient and submissive character, Ophelia demands that she be listened to and continues to sing:

He is dead and gone, lady,
He is dead and gone;
At his head a grass-green turf,
At his heels a stone.
O, ho!
Test

Ophelia again responds to attempts to silence her by continuing to sing; it is her time to tell her story and she will not be deflected from doing so.

White his shroud, as the mountain snow
Larded with sweet flowers
Which bewept to the grave did not go
With true-love showers.

Ophelia's choice of ballads is not arbitrary. The excerpt Hibbard quotes as “known lines” come from the hugely popular "Walsingham Song", which, with its theme of abandoned love, resonates with her relationship with Hamlet[ix]. These lines are the first Ophelia sings, suggesting that her distress stems not only from her father's death but also from her abandonment by Hamlet. The later line "He is dead and gone, lady" connotes her father, but as she begins by singing of “true love” and goes on to sing of “true-love shower”’ reinforcing this as more of a mournful love ballad than (just) a daughter’s lament for her lost father.

Shakespeare thus conveys through Ophelia an intimate sense of loss that intertwines her grief for her father with her grief for Hamlet. There is even a quick improvisation when Ophelia realises that her father’s burial did not follow the lines she was singing and so she inserts a negative into the second of these lines: “Larded with sweet flowers/Which bewept to the grave did not go”. Again, this quick-thinking and apt change are not something you would expect from a deranged mind. She is deeply traumatised, but she is not senseless.

The lyrics of Ophelia's songs are not, then, random ramblings, but are closely connected to her experiences and offer a critique of woman’s place in the Danish court and society and, by extension, those of England at the time of performance. There has been no ballad yet found of her next song, and it is generally now taken to be one that Shakespeare wrote to suit his purposes as there was not one to hand that the audience would already know[x]. Original, or not, the “St Valentine's Day” song is a recognizable ballad form directly relating to recurrent love ballad themes of sexual desire, and potential loss of virginity. The maid in the song goes to her lover on St Valentine’s Day to have sex; Ophelia's singing again reflects her own situation regarding her desires for Hamlet. However, critics are divided on whether she is revealing that she lost her virginity to Hamlet or that she wanted to but that her social situation meant she had to suppress those desires and laments now that she never got to express them.

While broadside ballads could sometimes reinforce patriarchal norms, they also provided a crucial space for the articulation of female desires and anxieties. After the King’s interruption, Ophelia “makes an end” that begins in traditional fashion by claiming men “are to blame”, but ends with the revelation that the woman had gone to the man’s bed, reflecting back to the opening when she went to his bedroom on St Valentine’s Day. The man then refuses to marry her because she took the pre-marital initiative, and because presumably she is “damaged goods” even though he was the one who “damaged” them. Ballads were one of the very few places where women could express themselves on such subjects.

In traditional ballads featuring lower-class women, it is not uncommon for a female character to "succumb" to the advances of a persistent young man, often one she desired from the beginning. This can have catastrophic results for her, but not always so and sometimes it ends very happily, or life continues without undue drama. A similar pattern appears in James Joyce’s Dubliners story “The Boarding House,” where a mother strategically enables her daughter’s liaison with a young man. When the daughter becomes pregnant, the man is socially compelled to marry her. Here, too, societal pressures are evident, but notably, it is the man who finds himself ultimately constrained by them.

By contrast, in ballads and plays featuring women of higher social standing, yielding to temptation typically results in far more severe consequences (the Eve story, again) and Ophelia was under threat of ruin if she behaved in this way. This is made abundantly clear in the play and it is something that would have been assumed to be the case by the audiences of the time.

To-morrow is Saint Valentine's day,
All in the morning betime,
And I a maid at your window,
To be your Valentine.
Then up he rose, and donn'd his clothes,
And dupp'd the chamber-door;
Let in the maid, that out a maid
Never departed more.

KING CLAUDIUS

Pretty Ophelia!

OPHELIA

Indeed, la, without an oath, I'll make an end on't:

Sings

By Gis and by Saint Charity,
Alack, and fie for shame!
Young men will do't, if they come to't;
By Cock, they are to blame.
Quoth she, before you tumbled me,
You promised me to wed.
So would I ha' done, by yonder sun,
An thou hadst not come to my bed.

Just as he did with Othello and Desdemona, Shakespeare leaves open the question of whether Hamlet and Ophelia have had sex. It is up to directors and actors to decide how they will play this and, as is natural in performance art, it changes from production to production. I have seen productions where it is clear they have and ones where it is clear they have not and Ophelia is singing from frustrated longings. I would even say it is quite likely that I have felt both possibilities in the same performance, in the earlier and later scenes, without being disturbed by the seeming contradiction. Performing art makes this possible, only when sitting in a study reading, does it become an issue of concern. We are watching a play, after all, that includes a ghost who first appears in armour and can be seen by all but when he next is seen is dressed in ordinary clothes and can only be seen by his son. The magic of performance, the ephemerality of the moment allows not only ambiguity but not also paradox, as noted in previous posts in this series and elsewhere.[xi]

Staging Ophelia’s performance

Ophelia leaves the stage and re-enters for her second set of songs. It is all very carefully managed; her performance is a staged show within a stage show. Before we hear her sing, Horatio describes her behaviour as that of someone intending to captivate onlookers and introduces her upcoming performance to cast and audience alike.

Carolyn Bialo foreshadows a later theme in this series when she expands this metatheatricality to encompass the scenes outside the playhouse, even before the performances begin:

“When Ophelia begins to sing, her performance within the play reproduces on stage the idioms of ballad sellers around the theater. Ballad sellers opened their songs with invitations to passersby to stop and listen, and they closed with invocations to buy the broadside text. Music and lyrics were circulated simultane­ously in multiple ballads, and ballad sellers asked their audiences to sing along with well-known refrains. Similarly, Ophelia enters the Court demanding audience attention, specifically from Ger­trude, and she departs with a formal adieu: "Good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night" (IV.v.70). In the meantime, she demands that her onstage "hearers"—and by extension, her Globe audience—participate in her burdens: "You must sing A-down, a-down'; and you 'Call him a-down-a^- (IV.v.171-3; italics mine). Globe spectators were likely familiar with Ophelia's "snatches of old tunes" and able to hum along in their places. They may even have strolled among peddlers singing precisely Ophelia's refrains as they entered the theater.”[xii]

Ophelia’s second set of songs begins with another mixture of fatherly and romantic lamenting love:

They bore him barefaced on the bier;
Hey non nonny, nonny, hey nonny;
And in his grave rain'd many a tear:--
Fare you well, my dove!

After an interruption, she continues with:

You must sing a-down a-down,
An you call him a-down-a.
O, how the wheel becomes it! It is the false
steward, that stole his master's daughter.

Ophelia earlier made a remark on “the owl and the baker’s daughter” just before singing the St Valentine’s Day song. This appears to have brought the ballad “The Miller in His Best Array" to Ophelia’s mind. Reminiscent of the Joyce story above, the baker’s daughter plays hard to get but is intending to be “caught” all the while. The frank embrace of pleasures of the flesh are celebrated in a chorus which was shared with other popular songs of the time. Bialo comments:

“…she resorts with the miller to his mill where they "will merrye be" and "daunce a downe," a playful euphemism for sex that was a common ballad refrain. The maid decides that dancing "a downe" is "the pret­tiest sport in all this towne." Ophelia uses precisely this refrain when she invites her audience to sing along with her in Hamlet. "You must sing 'A-down, a-down'; and you 'Call him a-down-a’ (italics mine) she insists, echoing the language in which ballads not only depict but also condone lower-status women who enjoy sexual intimacy.”

Before her final song which reflects grief for her father,[xiii] Ophelia sings an intriguing single line: “For bonny sweet Robin is all my joy.” The ballad “Bonny Robin” is referred to in other plays of the time, though no copy has ever been found. Additionally, however, Robin, as a male name, like the later “Willie”, also carried the same lewd connotation of Ophelia’s earlier use of “Cock”, both being double entendres for penis. This usage appears in various plays and ballads of the time, including Shakespeare’s Henry IV part 2.[xiv]

Ophelia's ballad singing, much like we saw with Desdemona's "Willow Song" in Othello,[xv] has the potential to evoke a sense of shared female experience within the audience. The themes of lost love, betrayal, and societal constraints resonated with the experiences of women in the Elizabethan era. By singing these familiar tunes, Ophelia links her personal anguish to a broader expression of female vulnerability within a patriarchal society.

Caralyn Bialo, in discussing Ophelia, also uses the example of Desdemona's "Willow Song” in Othello, which becomes a symbol of female solidarity and a counter-voice to male misogyny, to suggest that Ophelia's ballads similarly allow for a reading where her tragedy stems not only from Elsinore's corruption but also from a broader patriarchy demanding her complete submission. By speaking through the genre of the ballad, Ophelia's voice becomes one among other female voices, potentially appealing to the women in Shakespeare's audience.[xvi]

There is also the contrast of Desdemona singing in private (acceptable female behaviour for her time and social position) and Ophelia singing impromptu and in public, which would have been far more transgressive. The startling combination of themes in her songs - love, lust, bawdy puns and paternal loss - intensifies the scandal and would have electrified the crowd. Yet we must also recall that the singer on stage was, in fact, a boy actor playing a woman, which adds additional layers of theatrical and cultural complexity.

To conclude, a familiar cultural language

These songs were not random; they were deeply rooted in the popular performance tradition of broadside ballads, the "pop songs of his day". What Gertrude calls "snatches of old tunes" are carefully brought together. Despite her distracted state, Ophelia is not incoherent nor rambling; but instead is expressing her situation and the traumas she has lived through via the familiar cultural language, open to, and enjoyed by all, of the popular performance tradition of broadside ballads, the “pop songs”.

We often read of Shakespeare’s plays within a play (the Mousetrap scene in this very play, for example). This metatheatrical episode is similar, but this time it is the staging of a ballad seller’s performance, something connected to but outside the main flow of action. A startlingly fresh new viewpoint is opened and the spectators’ involvement is introduced by Horatio and demanded by Desdemona. This new viewpoint allows a female perspective, tied to ballads and feminine participation in those, into proceedings. That Shakespeare’s audience recognised the tunes and themes of her songs meant that there was a direct connection between them and Ophelia, making her plight all the more relatable and impactful. Despite Ophelia’s situation, it must have been a release from the dark main narrative for the audience to find themselves humming along to familiar tunes and joining in on a lusty chorus.

Ballad culture provided Shakespeare with a rich and multifaceted tool to develop Ophelia's dramatic function. It allowed him to portray her “madness” in a way that was both culturally resonant and deeply expressive. Ophelia's mad songs, far from being mere fragments of a shattered mind, represent a sophisticated deployment of popular cultural forms by Shakespeare. By staging what resembles a ballad seller's performance, he not only blurs the boundaries between theatrical traditions but also provides a powerful platform for a female perspective. Through the familiar melodies and resonant themes of broadside ballads, Ophelia provides a poignant commentary on the constraints and tragic realities faced by women and invites the audience to engage with her plight on both an emotional and a cultural level.

What does this song import?
Part 2 “Nettie Moore”

Listen: Dylan’s “Nettie Moore”
(other featured songs, if not embedded, are to be found at the foot of the article)

***

The release of Modern Times in 2006 marked a distinctly different experience for me compared to all of Dylan’s albums since 1990’s under the red sky. From that album onwards, I had written extensively about each new release and continued to revisit them for subsequent book projects. By the time Modern Times arrived, however, my second fanzine was winding down, and I found myself exhausted by the relentless cycle of Dylan research, commentary, and news. So, rather than pore over the lyrics, I simply sat ‘on that ol’ bank of sand and just listened to the vocals flow’. As relaxing and enjoyable as that was, the experience reinforced a simple truth: the more effort one invests, the greater the rewards.

“Nettie Moore” stood out from the start and remains my favourite track to this day. Yet I did not fully grasp what was happening in the narrative until I read Sean Wilentz’s insightful commentary in Bob Dylan in America. In retrospect, my initial disengagement feels almost shameful, especially given that the key to unlocking the song’s meaning lies precisely in the kind of intertextual balladry I’ve been exploring throughout this series.

I was still reading about Dylan, naturally, how can one stop, especially at the time of a new album release? Consequently, I knew that “Nettie Moore” had a source in an old song, from just before the Civil War, known as: “The Little White Cottage” or “Gentle Nettie Moore”[i].

Text - The little white cottage, or, Gentle Nettie Moore | Library of Congress

Song - Gentle Nettie Moore

This brought me back to familiar Dylan territory, once again into the fraught land of minstrelsy, the antebellum South and slavery[ii]. I assumed, without studying the situation, that the narrator in the Dylan song was the slave whose love (Nettie Moore) had been taken away after being sold by their master as described in the blackface song from 1857. I further assumed Dylan’s song featured him on the run trying to follow and find Nettie. This was all rather loose thinking, as I sat back and let the vocals wash over me. I was aware that much of the song did not cohere around this imagined scenario in my mind, but I let it go, I let it all go and luxuriated in the hypnotic melody with its rising hope followed by an inevitable-sounding, dying fall. An emotional cadence that brought these lines of Shakespeare to mind:

That strain again! it had a dying fall:
O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet south,
That breathes upon a bank of violets,[iii]

The narrator’s mood and the song’s lyrical trajectory mirror this dynamic: a pattern of rising hope, a pause, and then a crushing descent. The chorus assures us that “Winter’s gone,” yet for this narrator, there is no Spring to follow—only an unending darkness. Near the end of the song, he declares, “I'm standing in the light”, only to undercut it with a swift return to despair: “I wish to God that it were night.”

The captivating vocals were at their strongest for me at the heart-stopping pause in the chorus line: “I loved you then - - - and ever shall” which I thought beautiful and intuited was key to the song. I still feel the same way, not due to any revelation of my own, but to the aforementioned Wilentz’s critique in which he points out that:

“…he alludes to “Frankie and Albert” as fact, stone cold fact…There, in plain view, is a song of a lover’s murder: Albert is dead, and Frankie is raising hell.”

Just as Shakespeare relied on his audience’s familiarity with songs - either alluded to or partly sung in his plays - to convey the full story of what was going on in his characters’ minds, so Dylan here is calling on his listener to recall the well-known tale of “Frankie and Albert,” a song covered by many artists, including himself, to uncover the meaning of his narrator’s thoughts and memories. When we do, we find ourselves back in the land of murder ballads and, I fear, femicide. Drunkenness, infidelity, violence and a killing, all hinted at in the lyrics, though the narrator keeps shying away from those memories and switching to ones of love and carousing, plus dreams of a return to previously known peace. His mind won’t let him off so easily though:

Everything I've ever known to be right has proven wrong
I'll be drifting along
The woman I'm lovin', she rules my heart
No knife could ever cut our love apart

The narrator may claim love’s inviolability from the knife in a spiritual sense, but it has separated them, physically, forever and has set him on the road to a death sentence.

Here, once again, we hear the importance of ballad intertextuality directly impacting the meaning of the song (or play in Shakespeare’s case). The story of “Nettie Moore” is the story of interposed ballads and blues. From the opening scene of the drifter hobo, Lost John, corrected immediately with the warning, “Something's out of wack “ and the additional information, supplied by a Robert Johnson line, that this ‘lost John’ has a hellhound on his trail and the results will not be pretty.

That pursuing fiend now appears as guilt for killing his beloved (or, possibly, her lover). Is it the “Frankie and Albert” story, but with the genders reversed to the more common one of the man being the killer and the woman being the victim? There are suggestions of infidelity: “Don't know why my baby never looked so good before I don't have to wonder no more”, notwithstanding that the verse that this line introduces can be read two ways; though whichever way you take it, the imagery seems more sexual than victuals:

Don't know why my baby never looked so good before
I don't have to wonder no more
She been cooking all day and it's gonna take me all night
I can't eat all that stuff in a single bite

There are ominous threats remembered:

I'm going to make you come to grips with fate
When I'm through with you, you'll learn to keep your business straight

Yes, he still loves Nettie, he always has and always will but then the same can be said of Frankie, who still loved Albert even as she killed him:

Frankie got down upon her knees.
Took Albert into her lap.
Started to hug and kiss him.
But there was no bringin' him back.
He was her man but he done her wrong.

If I had been paying my usual attention when albums are released, then the Edna Gundersen interview would surely have jolted me into examining the song more closely. It would be helpful to hear Dylan speaking the quotes; however, I have no recording and so can only read them as printed. Talking of all the songs on Modern Times as a whole, Dylan said, “(These songs) are in my genealogy. I had no doubts about them. I tend to overwrite stuff, and in the past I probably would have left it all in. On this, I tried my best to edit myself, and let the facts speak. You can easily get a song convoluted. That didn’t happen. Maybe I’ve had records like this before, but I can’t remember when.” On “Nettie Moore” he remarked that it: “troubled me the most, because I wasn’t sure I was getting it right. “Finally, I could see what the song is about. This is coherent, not just a bunch of random verses. I knew I wanted to record this. I was pretty hyped up on the melodic line.”[iv]

I take this as a Dylan hint that one should look for a ‘coherent’ story through seemingly ‘random verse’ and that he is concerned people miss that. Jealous rage, whisky, a knife and an ending on the scaffold. This sounds like familiar terrain. I listen and ask myself if this what Dylan meant by: “Finally, I could see what the song is about. This is coherent, not just a bunch of random verses”.

The listener is taken through thoughts and conversations from memories, from different periods in his past, and the ‘coherent’ story that is there can only be followed by, what else, the quoting of other ballads and popular songs. It is still quite difficult to follow because the narrator does not want to remember, though he is hounded by the memory.

As my good friend, Bob Jope puts it: “‘The fragmentedness is in fact a product or even an expression of the speaker’s inability or unwillingness to articulate: the crime that he may have committed is something he both wants to admit to but cannot find words for. Instead, he remains in a purgatory of his own making.” And, again: “…the speaker in “Nettie Moore”, the adopted persona, is haunted by memory, this time guilt for something left unexplained – something he can’t explain or, more likely, can’t bear or dare to articulate. The monologist wants to talk but can’t find words to tell us why…”[v]

We are introduced to the main narrator, we see back in his mind that he was at a crossroads, we know – the music and vocals are more than enough to tell us before attending to the lyrics – that he chose the wrong path. Despite repeated yearnings and dreams he is never going to get back to Nettie Moore and the life they once had, just as the singer of “Gentle Nettie Moore” would never see his beloved again.

Albert's in the graveyard, Frankie's raising hell
I'm beginning to believe what the scriptures tell

Is he thinking here of “Thou Shalt Not Kill?” We are told he has “Got a pile of sins to pay for” and there is an abrupt change from all the swirling memories and dreams to the present, the inevitable ending that the persistent drum beat has been pushing the song towards, as “the Judge rises”. In the context of the song the judge is both an earthly one passing sentence for murder, and the heavenly one for the breaking of a sacred commandment. Yet, the singer still looks to heaven which seems odd at first, but it echoes that other killer in the song, Frankie from “Frankie and Albert” as well as resonating with the ending to “Gentle Nettie Moore” (the Little White Cottage) . ”

The “original” Nettie Moore closed with lines which bring Dylan’s “A lifetime with you is like some heavenly day” to mind:

You are gone, lovely Nettie, and my heart must surely break,
When the tears come no more into my eyes;
But when weary life is past, I shall meet you once again
In Heaven, darling, up above the skies!

Killers, too, look to heaven “when weary life is past”. In Lead Belly’s “Frankie and Albert”, we last hear of Frankie:

Once more I saw Frankie
She was sittin' in her chair
Waitin' for to go an' meet her God
With the sweat drippin' out her hair
Albert was her man, but she shot him down

Murder it would appear does not preclude a meeting with God. Lead Belly, in yet another intertextual use of song, references “Nearer My God to Thee”, and ties Frankie to it, in this verse:

Little Frankie went down Broadway
As far as she could see
And all she could hear was a two-string bow
Playing, "Nearer, My God To Thee"--
All over the town, little Albert's dead

Dylan retains this reference but transposes it to the end of his recording. Dylan brings a judge into his closing scene, as he does in Nettie Moore, and ends with Frankie unbowed:

Judge said to the jury.
"Plain as a thing can be.
A woman shot her lover down.
Murder in the second degree."
He was her man but he done her wrong.

Instrumental

Frankie went to the scaffold.
Calm as a girl could be.
Turned her eyes up towards the heavens.
Said, "Nearer, my God, to Thee."
He was her man but he done her wrong.

“Nettie Moore” concludes with the narrator utterly alone, and again the rising music gives way to a fall, a final fall this time. Now, we hear the lines “I'm standing in the light/I wish to God that it were night in the sense of: “Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed” (John 3:20), fittingly for a man who had been “beginning to believe what the scriptures tell’ :

Today I'll stand in faith and raise
The voice of praise
The sun is strong, I'm standing in the light
I wish to God that it were night

Oh, I miss you Nettie Moore
And my happiness is o'er
Winter's gone, the river's on the rise
I loved you then and ever shall
But there's no one here that's left to tell
The world has gone black before my eyes

If you have been following this series so far, you will have noticed certain motifs returning regularly. Two of Graley Herren’s three readings of Time Out of Mind appear in this song: namely, Herren’s themes of runaway slaves and femicide murder ballads. As with The Ballad of Donald White we have a subset of the murder ballad tradition, highly popular in Shakespeare’s Day, the “execution ballad”. (“Donald White” is not part of the series, but it is interesting how often it chimes with the ongoing articles.) Ambiguity, intertextuality, the primacy of performance and, to take us back to the start of the series (‘MTP – More True Performing), with “Matty Groves” and Dylan’s “Nobel Lecture in Literature” speech, a mention of Frankie just before the “Matty Groves” reference:

You know what it’s all about. Takin’ the pistol out and puttin’ it back in your pocket. Whippin’ your way through traffic, talkin’ in the dark. You know that Stagger Lee was a bad man and that Frankie was a good girl.

Lead Belly appears, most pertinently, later in the same speech: “somebody – somebody I’d never seen before – handed me a Lead Belly record with the song “Cottonfields” on it. And that record changed my life right then and there. Transported me into a world I’d never known. It was like an explosion went off. Like I’d been walking in darkness and all of the sudden the darkness was illuminated. It was like somebody laid hands on me. I must have played that record a hundred times.”[vi]

Lead Belly's name is a particularly perceptive one for Dylan to use on this occasion as the blues singer, and convicted murderer, had already found his way into the lofty sphere of literary acclaim. In the 1930s, John Lomax brought Lead Belly to several American colleges and universities, including a notable appearance at Vanderbilt University during a major gathering of literary scholars in 1934. More significantly, Lead Belly’s version of Frankie and Johnny (also known as Frankie and Albert) was included in the influential and long-standard anthology Understanding Poetry, edited by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, a cornerstone of the “New Criticism” that formed the bedrock of mid-20th century literary pedagogy.

Francis Dore, in her excellent account of these matters and their ramifications for Dylan scholars[vii], points out that the inclusion of “Frankie and Johnny” in Understanding Poetry is all the more resonant when we recall that John Donne, another figure referenced in Dylan’s Nobel Lecture, also features in the same volume. Together, Donne and Lead Belly form a striking dyad, perfectly encapsulating Dylan’s vision of his own artistic lineage, one rooted as much in the raw immediacy of vernacular performance as in the canon of high literary tradition.

***

To conclude, here is Lead Belly introducing and singing “Frankie and Albert” in 1940. It begins at about three minutes in. There are many other versions easily found on the internet, but I thought you good people would appreciate the whole recording here: 【TLRMC043】 Woody Guthrie & Leadbelly 12/12/1940

Dylan: Frankie & Albert

Lead Belly: “Cottonfields”

Substack Outro

Next time will see a turning away from specific killing or deaths in ballads (phew!), for the most part, and concentrating on why ballads were so vital and prominent on the Shakespearean stage in general, rather than particular examples. We all know why ballads are so important to Dylan, but the history of their inter-relationship with Jacobethan drama is worthy of investigation before we go on to look at Shakespeare’s own considered examination of the same topic.

© Andrew Muir, 2025

Thanks again to Bob Jope!

Endnotes:

[i] Bloomsbury Collections - Rethinking Theatrical Documents in Shakespeare’s England.

[ii] [A proper new ballad, intituled], When Jepha Judge of Israel; Manchester Central Library,

[iii] This performance is explored in chapter 7, “Dylan in Shakespeare” in my book Dylan and Shakespeare, in The True Performing Of It Red Planet Books 2019 and 2020.

[iv] There are three printed versions of Hamlet available to us, each markedly divergent from the others. Fascinating though it is to compare them, I am leaving that discussion almost entirely out, given the considerable expansion that covering it would entail.

[v] “We are accustomed to finding multiple layers of meaning in Shakespeare, but modern readers may not realise that most of the plants mentioned by Ophelia were widely known and used in Elizabethan England to induce abortions and control fertility. Lucille Newman, in a paper published in Economic Botany (1979), has suggested that Ophelia’s references to these herbs and flowers should be read as ‘a shocking enumeration of well-known abortifacients and emmenagogues’ which would have been recognised as such by Elizabethan audiences. (An emmenagogue is a drug or agent that increases menstrual flow.) Newman refers to the two-thousand-year tradition of plants used for fertility regulation, including the common herbs rosemary, fennel, rue, pansies, and violets. She gives examples from sixteenth-century herbals where it was said of rosemary, that it ‘bringeth down women’s fleurs’; fennel, ‘it provoketh flowers’; rue, ‘it driveth down floures but it killeth the bryth’; and violet, ‘Seede thereof casteth out conception of women’. Of pansy, as John Gerard (1545–1612) wrote in The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes (usually referred to as Gerard’s Herbal), its ‘tough and slimie juice’ was used against the pox (syphilis). Dwyer, John “Garden plants and wildflowers in Hamlet”: Australian Garden History , Vol. 24, No. 2 (October/November/December 2012)

Also, see Chelsea Phillips, Kenzie Lynn Bradley, Veshonte Brown, Luke Davis, Kate Fischer, Alycia Gonzalez, and Sarah Stryker, ‘The Dramaturgy of Ophelia’s Bouquet’, Shakespeare 19.1 (2023)

[vi] Microsoft Word - Stilling-Paper-Final-Version (1).docx

[vii] Ibid.

^[viii] G.R. Hibbard. Oxford World’s Classics. Reissued 1998.

[ix] The ‘Walsingham tune’ may have been played more than once by Ophelia in her series of songs, as it was in the play I covered in my “Matty Groves” article, Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle.

[x] Shakespeare does also seem to write ballads elsewhere, in The Winter’s Tale, for example, but at this distance of time one must always tread with caution in asserting with certainty.

[xi] The use of paradox and ambiguity by both artists are explored at length in my book Dylan and Shakespeare, in The True Performing Of It, Red Planet Books 2019 and 2020.

[xii] Bialo, Caralyn “Popular Performance, the Broadside Ballad, and Ophelia's Madness”,

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/510541/summary

[xiii] This last has similarities to a ballad with a Dylanesque title. “Go from My Window”. It appears in Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle, the 1607 (printed 1613) play that included lines from the ballad that began the “Matty Groves” series, “Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard” which I discuss in the Substack post “Our Wells Are Deep”.

[xiv] For Shakespeare and Dylan’s corresponding use of bawdy, see Muir, Andrew: Dylan and Shakespeare, In The True Performing Of It, Red Planet Books 2019 and 2020.

[xv] The later play reminds us of Gertrude’s line “there’s a willow grows askant the brook” and the beautiful verse that follows, describing Ophelia’s death, when we hear Desdemona and Emilia sing “The Willow Song” before they, too, die.

[xvi] Bialo, Caralyn “Popular Performance, the Broadside Ballad, and Ophelia's Madness”, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/510541/summary

Nettie Moore endnotes:

[i] Sean Wilentz (ibid.): “written in 1857 by the blackface performer and lyricist Marshall Pike and James Lord Pierpont, the composer (during that same year) of “Jingle Bells.””

[ii] For more on these topics, see:

(“Nettie Moore”) Robert Reginio, ““Nettie Moore”: Minstrelsy and the Cultural Economy of Race in Bob Dylan’s Late Albums” in Highway 61 Revisited: Bob Dylan’s Road from Minnesota to the World. Colleen Josephine Sheehy, Thomas Swiss, University of Minnesota Press, 2009

(More Generally) Herren, Graley Dreams and Dialogues in Dylan’s "Time Out of Mind" (Anthem Studies in Theatre and Performance) 2021 and Foster & Poe & Dylan - by Graley Herren - Shadow Chasing
(And)
Muir, Andrew Troubadour (2001) esp. chapter on “Love and Theft”, and chapter 6, Dylan and Shakespeare, In The True Performing Of It, Red Planet Books 2019 and 2020.

[iii] Orsino at the opening of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.

[iv] Gundersen, Edna DYLAN’S ART IS FOREVER A-CHANGIN’ USA TODAY Posted 8/28/2006 10:36 PM ET.

[v] Jope, Bob, Dylan's Voices: "Nettie Moore" Bob Jope (Publication tba)

[vi] Bob Dylan – Nobel Lecture - NobelPrize.org
[vii] In “American Literature”, from The World of Bob Dylan Cambridge, ed. Sean Latham University Press (6 May 2021).

Thanks for reading More True Performing! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

I am conscious that the majority of my readers are Dylan aficionados and knowledgeable ones at that. Consequently, in this series of “ more true performing” articles on Shakespeare and Dylan, there will be a significant Shakespeare ‘front loading’ before I can turn to highlighting what I see as fruitful parallels to consider between balladry in the work of the two artists. I am, however, trying to restrict footnotes, at least comparatively to an academic paper, and I am saving the Bibliography until I reach the end of the series.

There will be new writing purely on Dylan, and articles, some updated, from the past as well, but for now - onward with balladry.

She Died Singing It

Having made various claims in my last post about Matty Groves and ballads in Shakespeare’s time, I now want to flesh them out with examples and connect them to Dylan and his use of the ballad form.

The first Shakespearean use of ballads I examine appears in a play that echoes the themes of many femicide ballads. In the tragedy, Othello, we once again witness the "boss" killing "his lady," just as in Matty Groves, Blackjack Davey, and other traditional ballads. This time, the "boss" is Othello, and the "lady" is Desdemona, who meets her fate, as later does maid, Emilia, shortly after singing “The Willow Song”.

A very quick recap of the main plot: Othello is a tragic tale driven by jealousy and deception. Desdemona, a Venetian noblewoman, falls in love with and marries Othello, a Moor and a celebrated general, defying both her father’s wishes and societal norms. Enter Iago, Othello’s ensign and a master manipulator, who skilfully plants doubts in Othello’s mind. Like a playwright orchestrating a performance, Iago stages Desdemona’s supposed betrayal, twisting perception into certainty and driving Othello into a violent rage. It is within this suffocating atmosphere of suspicion and impending doom that “The Willow Song” emerges.

The song is so significant that Act IV, Scene iii of Othello is often called the "Willow Song" scene. It offers a haunting commentary on the precarious position of women in Elizabethan society, and the ballad form itself becomes a powerful means of expression. Desdemona sings it in an intimate moment with her maid, Emilia, as she prepares for bed—aware, perhaps instinctively, that the end is near.

(Maggie Smith and Joyce Redman in Laurence Olivier's "Othello" (1965)

(This is from 1965, a film version which notoriously featured Laurence Olivier in blackface. There you have another link to Dylan themes from Time Out of Mind onwards and especially “Love and Theft” and the ever more prophetic seeming “Masked and Anonymous”.)

Traditionally, “The Willow Song” was sung by a man mourning the loss of his lover, his grief so profound that it ultimately led to his death[i]. Shakespeare reverses the genders in the song and gives the narrative voice to the woman. In the same way, in this scene, he reverses the male points of view that have dominated throughout and shows us female points of view. Up until now men have talked, mostly nonsensically, about women throughout and characterised them either as goddesses or strumpets, (recalling Joan Baez describing those disappointingly clichéd female roles in Renaldo and Clara). This moment shifts the perspective; suddenly we see real women enjoying some time together as people and not exaggerated abstractions.

For the song to have had its full effect, the audience must have recognized it, just as they must have done with “Matty Groves” in the Knight of the Burning Pestle and other ballads in other plays. Hearing Desdemona sing it forces us to reflect on how often women of the time, rather than men, suffered fatal consequences from love, infidelity, and betrayal. It also leaves no doubt that her death is imminent, a foreboding reinforced by her own words in the moments leading up to it.

EMILIA

I have laid those sheets you bade me on the bed.

DESDEMONA

All's one. Good faith, how foolish are our minds!
If I do die before thee prithee, shroud me
In one of those same sheets.

The scene unfolds as an intimate conversation between Desdemona and Emilia, as Desdemona prepares for bed. Othello has ordered her there, his anger already apparent, and instructed her to dismiss Emilia before he arrives. This interlude with the two women serves as a pause for reflection, a mirror to the play’s central themes, an introduction of the female perspective, a foreshadowing of tragedy, and a direct expression of sorrow. It also highlights the abuses of patriarchal society, female solidarity, and the inextricable link between love, lust, and death.

Both “The Willow Song” and the surrounding, intimate conversation, act as a brief stillness in the rapidly escalating turmoil of the tragedy. This allows the audience, along with Desdemona herself, an opportunity to contemplate the unfolding events, absorb the emotional weight of Desdemona's situation, and anticipate the impending catastrophe.

By having Desdemona perform the mournful ballad, Shakespeare poignantly conveys her sense of foreboding, and the anguish of potential betrayal. Through song, Desdemona goes straight to the heart of all her sorrow and evokes a deep emotional response. Her inner turmoil takes on an almost universal quality, resonating deeply with the play’s central theme of betrayal.

Many traditional ballads focused on themes of love, loss, and tragedy. The original broadsheet ballad, and all its many known variants, on which “The Willow Song”, is based, was about a man betrayed by a woman. Shakespeare subverts this convention, transforming the lament into that of a woman betrayed by her lover, a shift that enables it to directly parallel Desdemona’s own fate.

As Desdemona sings, the heartbreak embedded in the ballad becomes ever more potent. It is no longer merely a song, but instead a chilling foreshadowing of her imminent betrayal, abandonment, and death. For Shakespeare as a dramatist, the ballad is an ideal device: it allows the audience to connect with Desdemona’s suffering on a deeply emotional level, making her impending fate all the more heartrending.

After the brief conversation about the wedding sheets - a detail to which we will return - Desdemona introduces “The Willow Song” by telling us:

My mother had a maid call'd Barbary:
She was in love, and he she loved proved mad
And did forsake her: she had a song of 'willow;'
An old thing 'twas, but it express'd her fortune,
And she died singing it: that song to-night
Will not go from my mind; I have much to do,
But to go hang my head all at one side,
And sing it like poor Barbary. Prithee, dispatch

“An old thing 'twas, but it express'd her fortune” is apt not just here but for so many of the ballads I am discussing. The ominous feeling in the scene is underscored once again, with the words “she died singing it” and the opening line’s ‘sycamore tree’, a traditional symbol for mourning. All of this adds to Desdemona’s name, which in its Greek origin, means “ill-starred”. Like Romeo and Juliet, she is a ‘star-crossed lover’ moving swiftly to her doom.

“The Willow Song” is a chain connecting generations of women. Desdemona’s mother’s maid died singing it and so soon shall her own maid, and she is just about to sing it and die herself. The alternate spelling for Barbara, ‘Barbary’, is deftly deployed to connect the ballad directly to Desdemona’s character recalling as it does, Iago calling Othello a “barbary horse”, (referring to Barbary Moors) .

Desdemona (sings):

The poor soul sat sighing by a sycamore tree,
Sing all a green willow.
Her hand on her bosom, her head on her knee;
Sing willow, willow, willow.
The fresh streams ran by her, and murmured her moans;
Sing willow, willow, willow.
Her salt tears fell from her, and soften'd the stones;
Lay by these:--

Sing willow, willow, willow.

{Speaks}Prithee, hie thee; he'll come anon:--

{Singing}

Sing all a green willow must be my garland.
Let nobody blame him; his scorn I approve,-

{speaks}Nay, that's not next.--Hark! who is't that knocks?

EMILIA: It's the wind.

DESDEMONA:
[Sings]

I call'd my love ‘false love’; but what said he then?
Sing willow, willow, willow:
If I court more women, you'll couch with more men!

Let nobody blame him; his scorn I approve, Desdemona sings this line, then questions if she is correctly remembering the ballad. It is so true to Desdemona in the play; her love for Othello, even in the face of his harshness, "My love doth so approve him / That even his stubbornness, his checks, his frowns…have grace and favour in them," In addition to expressing her abiding love, this underscores the societal expectation for subordination of women to men within marriage and a deeply ingrained acceptance of male authority. The next lines of the original ballad are: “She was born to be false, and I to die for her love” which Desdemona would have to sing as: “He was born to be false, and I to die for his love”. While this would be true, you can see why she stumbles at the line.

Desdemona's distress at Othello's anger highlights the vulnerability of women to male ire and accusations. So dependent are they on their husbands' favour that they could be easily condemned based on suspicion. The "Willow Song" reflects the defenceless situation of women in the face of betrayal or broken promises. There is often, in ballads like “Matty Groves”, “Blackjack Davey”, an age as well as a power differential between ‘the boss’ and ‘the lady’ figures, with the former being older (thus encouraging the younger wife to seek a lover of her own years and vitality being the insinuation) and Othello, too, follows that traditional line. Desdemona is being attacked by a renowned warrior general, who is an older figure of authority. Like her father Brabantio before him, Othello is her Lord and master in every sense. Still, her devotion to him is unwavering and she is more than willing to accept this. “All husbands are good men, as all wives know”. As the ‘lady figure’ succinctly puts it in “Tin Angel”. Even as she dies, Desdemona speaks up for Othello, absolving him of guilt for her death. Her ‘reward’ for this when Emilia reports it to Othello, is: She’s like a liar gone to burning hell!/’Twas I that killed her.

Desdemona is understandably stunned when Othello asks her, Are you not a strumpet, not a whore. I took you for the cunning whore of Venice that married with Othello in the preceding scene to “The Willow Song” which highlights that the ballad scene is a pause in the face of an incoming fury, something that is in the forefront of our minds when we hear Desdemona’s sorrow expressed through her singing.

In traditional ballads, the singer is often a narrator recounting past events, however we hear Desdemona sing it not as a detached storyteller, but as someone potentially predicting her own fate. The actor playing Desdemona is both performer and participant-performer. They sing a song about betrayal and sorrow while acting the part of someone experiencing those very emotions. All of which makes the ballad’s effect even more poignant.

This short pause in the action that the singing of the ballad affords allows a counter-voice of female solidarity to emerge and empowers Emilia to eventually strike back and bring the truth to light. Shakespeare uses “The Willow Song” to amplify Desdemona’s tragedy and give voice to women’s experiences within a society that often sought to silence them, and the movement toward Emilia speaking truth to power first arises in her speech just after Desdemona sings “The Willow Song”.

“The Willow Song” and Emilia’s speech (Subtitles in modern English). CorkEnglish:

A significant turning point comes when Emilia describes a wife’s potential infidelity as “a small vice”. This is an arresting statement in the face of all the chaos, violence and impending death the play has thrown at us over that very issue. It is like a bucket of cold water, breaking the spell of the action preceding, and to succeed, the breathing space given to us by “The Willow Song”. Emilia’s comment compels the audience to question the disproportionate consequences faced by women, even those deemed ‘guilty’, far less the innocent Desdemona. This resonates with the themes prevalent in femicide ballads, where the male figure often fatally punishes the female for transgressions. Furthermore, it prompts reflection on the stark gender inequality inherent in such judgments, a point that Emilia explicitly addresses in her subsequent and remarkably progressive speech, which, despite its contemporary resonance as common sense, was remarkable in its time:

But I do think it is their husbands' faults
If wives do fall: say that they slack their duties,
And pour our treasures into foreign laps,
Or else break out in peevish jealousies,
Throwing restraint upon us; or say they strike us,
Or scant our former having in despite;
Why, we have galls{courage}, and though we have some grace,
Yet have we some revenge. Let husbands know
Their wives have sense like them: they see and smell
And have their palates both for sweet and sour,
As husbands have. What is it that they do
When they change us for others? Is it sport?
I think it is: and doth affection breed it?
I think it doth: is't frailty that thus errs?
It is so too: and have not we affections,
Desires for sport, and frailty, as men have?
Then let them use us well: else let them know,
The ills we do, their ills instruct us so.

Note again here the use of ‘fall’, for when a woman gives in to temptation, with its connotations to Eve and ‘the Fall’ as in “The House Carpenter” and so many other ballads. [ii]

From a lament to a protest song

Emilia's argument that husbands often mistreat their wives and her critique of the sexual double standard provides a strong articulation of female agency . She later proves her assertion that women have "galls" (courage) by exposing her husband, Iago, and clearing Desdemona’s name. She does this in full knowledge of the likely consequences and then she too is killed, another uxoricide to add to the litany in plays and ballads in this subset of myriad femicide narratives. Before she dies, Emilia sings a snatch of “The Willow Song” thereby creating a connected sequence, from Barbary to Desdemona to Emilia, all betrayed by men and linked by the song.

Emilia:

“What did thy song bode, lady?
Hark, canst thou hear me? I will play the swan.
And die in music.
[Singing]
Willow, willow, willow —
Moor, she was chaste; she loved thee, cruel Moor;
So come my soul to bliss, as I speak true;
So speaking as I think, I die, I die.”
[Dies]

By reclaiming “The Willow Song” with her last breaths, Emilia transforms it. Not only is it a sorrowful lament but it is now also a symbol of female solidarity and resistance, across time and class barriers, a protest song, if you will.

No song in Shakespeare has inspired more composers to write their own music to it than “The Willow Song”. Additionally, new productions of the play often feature new musical arrangements, such as here.

In a reciprocal cycle of creativity with Broadside ballads, Desdemona’s version of the old ballad spawned a generation of new ballads from a female-as-victim perspective.

Entwined symbols: Handkerchief and Ballad

Shakespeare further employs the ballad by entwining its connotations with the central symbol of the play, the infamous handkerchief. Just as “The Willow Song” links women, so too, does this piece of linen, which becomes ‘proof’ of Desdemona’s infidelity after Iago ensures it escapes her possession. This is no ordinary handkerchief; its history is rich and its significance layered and complex. However, here I want to look at one aspect and that is the one first written about fifty years ago by Lynda E Boose in Othello's Handkerchief: "The Recognizance and Pledge of Love" . Boose’s thesis centres on Elizabethan marriage customs, as this extract from the abstract reads:

“Othello is a play about a marriage, and the meaning of the highly visual "strawberry spotted handkerchief" lies buried in marriage customs still apprehended within the ritual consciousness of the Elizabethan audience. Depending on his audience to understand the traditional connections between strawberries and virginity, Shakespeare pointedly created a visual reduction of Othello's wedding sheets, the emblem of marital consummation so important to our understanding of this tragedy. The display of stained wedding sheets as proof of consummation has a long history in folk custom”[iii]

In losing the symbolic handkerchief, Desdemona has also loses the proof of her purity. The handkerchief symbolises the white sheets of the wedding bed and before singing “The Willow Song” Desdemona asks Emilia to put her wedding sheets on the bed. This might seem strange, given it is not their wedding night, but the white sheets are, in many critics eyes as yet unstained with red because the marriage has yet to be, and never is, consummated. In that reading, the reason Desdemona asks for her wedding sheets is clear, that is, that tonight will be the night they finally consummate their relationship[iv]. My first reaction to this theory was one of instinctive disbelief and some critics still feel that way. There is evidence to make a compelling argument for it, however, not least that the only two nights they have spent together as husband and wife have been interrupted by riotous behaviour which Othello has to leave the bed to go and quell like the military leader he is. In modern parlance we could say that Othello ‘is a fighter not a lover’.

Ultimately, Shakespeare leaves the question of whether or not the marriage has been consummated unresolved. This ambiguity is yet another example of what Emma Smith calls Shakespeare’s “gappiness”, which I discuss near the conclusion of my previous post on “Graley Herren and Time Out of Mind.” Describing someone as being ‘so good with words and at keeping things vague’, as Joan Baez so memorably sang, is more telling a comment on the nature of Dylan’s genius than it first appears, as it would be if applied to Shakespeare. By now there are so many questions in the audience’s minds, and ambiguity adds to the unsettling feelings we have as Othello drops deeper and deeper into violent madness.

Even as he is about to kill his wife the imagery of red blood on white still haunts Othello and so he decides to strangle her:

Yet I’ll not shed her blood,
Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow,
And smooth as monumental alabaster.

Shakespeare presents us with another disturbing image a few lines later when Othello conflates murder with deflowering:

When I have pluck’d thy rose,
I cannot give it vital growth again.
It must needs wither:

This combination of sex and violence, with the recurrent imagery of blood on the sheets becomes the tangible representation of Othello’s twisted perception. Intertwining the acts of consummation and killing is also a theme of femicide ballads; it is the brutal end game for those who view women as objects to be possessed and dominated. As such, it is present in the minds of ‘sickos disguised as Romeos’ as Graley Herren put it. In that earlier post, here, I quote Herren at one point writing: “Woe to the woman being pursued by this jilted lover, stalking her through streets that are dead with blood in his eyes.” On reading this, my friend Steve Jones wrote to say: “I felt some murderous intent in “Blood In My Eyes”, not just sexual lust.” Certainly, Steve’s view of the World Gone Wrong track would be a fitting representation of Othello’s mind as he kills Desdemona and I’ll always take any excuse to include a link to the video.

From “Pretty Polly” to “Murder Most Foul”, 59 years later and arguably on through Shadow Kingdom and The Philosophy Modern Song, (see outro to last post), murder ballads feature throughout Dylan’s canon. From Time Out Of Mind onwards, though, the emphasis has been on those ‘sickos disguised as Romeos’. For lengthy explorations of these, see my In The True Performing of It[v] and Graley Herren’s Dreams and Dialogues[vi]. In my book, I concentrate on “Moonlight” and “Soon After Midnight” in the context of looking at Shakespeare and Dylan together.

Herren begins his discussion of the murder ballad theme in Time Out of Mind by tracing a path from World Gone Wrong. The latter contains probably my favourite Dylan ‘femicide’ cover song, the incomparable “Delia” where the title character is shot ‘down with a cruel forty-four’. Dylan repeatedly reminds us Delia’s buried, “Delia's in the graveyard, boys, six feet out of sight”. However, by the time the song ends, I cannot help but feel Delia’s spirit is still fighting its way back, doing her damndest to get out, adding a touch of the supernatural, to the already intoxicating ballad brew of sex and death: Delia back to life to replay the old story one more time. Granted that is just a personal reaction to the song. And I have no idea if anyone else hears it the same way. One of the many attractions of the subjectivity of responses to performing arts.

Herren’s connection between World Gone Wrong and Time Out of Mind’s (and later) murder ballads may have been strengthened by a non-musical source. I have always maintained that Dylan’s interviews need to be heard, seen is even better, to be properly understood. I used to go to considerable lengths to obtain recordings of them. One I got of the 1997 interview, to promote Time out of Mind, with Newsweek’s David Gates, came with the unexpected bonus: the microphone was left on during a coffee break. While I hesitate to relay off-the-record remarks, one comment stands out as too interesting to ignore and involves nothing I view as improper to share. It comes when Dylan casually mentions having recently read and enjoyed two books: Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain and Larry Brown’s Father and Son.

Both books appear to me to have left an impression on Dylan’s work in the following years. Cold Mountain shares imagery and themes with Time Out of Mind: an alienated character who is love-sick and endlessly walking. The novel’s preoccupation with the past and its place in the present similarly resonates with Dylan’s work. Most striking, however, are its connections to Homer’s Odyssey, which Richard Thomas has explored so fruitfully in regard to Dylan’s later career[vii]. Cold Mountain is an adventure tale of a long homeward journey from war. The warrior is attempting to return to his love, and as such The Odyssey would spring to mind even if Frazier had not made the link explicit, as he does.

The other novel, Father and Son by Larry Brown, brings us back to psycho killers. It is a brutal tale, featuring, among other violence, the harrowing rape of a young woman whose virginity is gloatingly taken by her mocking assailant (who later goes on to rape the mother of his half-brother).

Dylan is reportedly a great admirer of Larry Brown’s writing[viii], once being quoted that he had read every word Brown ever wrote. A line from Brown's 1988 short story "Kubuku Rides (This Is It)" from his collection Facing the Music bears a striking resemblance in a similar context (alcohol) to a line fromDylan’s "Sugar Baby."

In "Kubuku Rides (This Is It)", we read: “Angel not drinking anything. Don't mean she don't have nothing. Just can't have it right now. He awake now. Later he be asleep. He think the house clean. House ain't clean. Lots of places to hide things, you want to hide them bad enough. Ain't like Easter eggs, like Christmas presents. Like life and death.”

In “Sugar Baby”, we hear:

Some of these bootleggers, they make pretty good stuff
Plenty of places to hide things here if you wanna hide ’em bad enough

It is a common enough phrase for this to be no more than a coincidence but the overall connection brings me back to Graley Herren’s murder ballad critique in Time Out Of Mind. Brown’s work explores the dark undercurrent of life, where alcohol and violence seem ever present. The explosive and disturbing violence that erupts, not only in murder ballads, but also in surprising places, in Dylan’s twenty-first century output is the constant feature in the brutal promotional video for “Beyond Here Lies Nothing”:

Bob Dylan - Beyond Here Lies Nothin' (Explicit) (Official HD Video)

Although there is not, somewhat miraculously, death for the female protagonist in the video, as a song, it may or may not fit into the femicide category. Again, that ‘gappiness’ appears in the closing lines, but when I hear them sung, I fear the worst:

Listen to me pretty baby
Lay your hand upon my head
Beyond here lies nothin'
Nothin' done and nothin' said

And there’s yet another Larry Brown connection. “Beyond Here Lies Nothing” opens Together Through Life (2009), an album whose cover features the same photograph as the paperback edition of Brown’s short story collection Big Bad Love. A small detail, perhaps, but one that suggests the ties between their work run deep.

****

Substack Outro

I am beginning to stray from my main thread here, and so I end with a reminder that Shakespeare’s adaptation of a traditional ballad, “A Lover’s Complaint” as Desdemona’s “The Willow Song” in Othello serves not only to heighten the emotional impact and foreshadow the tragic conclusion but also to provide a poignant commentary on the social position and shared experiences of women in his time, exploring themes of love, betrayal, and the vulnerabilities women faced in a patriarchal society. This observation was followed by connections with Dylan and murder ballads, as discussed at the conclusion to the previous post, “Our Wells Run Deep”. You may wish to consider Dylan songs that present a feminine point of view. Two stand-outs for me are the original song “North Country Blues”, from Carnegie Hall ’63’ and his magnificent renditions of the traditional “Wagoner’s Lad”. Here’s a personal favourite, its live debut, 1988, Upper Darby:

Oh hard is the fortune of all womankind
They're always controlled, they're always confined
Controlled by their parents until they are wives
Then slaves to their husbands the rest of their lives

Next time in this series, we look at another doomed Shakespearean heroine and the importance of the ballads she sings. It is quite likely a posting in another category will precede this as my Substack site takes shape.

© Andrew Muir, 2025

[i] Shakespeare's Saddest Song

[ii] One of the enduring mysteries around the printing of Othello is that neither “The Willow Song” nor this speech of Emilia’s are in the Quarto edition, though both are in the posthumously published First Folio. Shakespeare himself was not in charge of either publication and so speculation as to motives quickly becomes tenuous. The main question is whether they were cut from the Quarto printing or later additions for the Folio. For “The Willow Song” and Emilia’s proto-feminist speech I am in the “they were cut” camp. The Quarto still has Desdemona’s introductory remarks to the song which suggests it was always supposed to be present, and Desdemona’s immediate response to the speech answers Emilia’s closing remark,“ Then let them use us well” with “God me such uses send”. That answer is still present in the Quarto, suggesting that the speech, like the song, was originally there but has been omitted from the Quarto.

There are many theories as to what happened and why. It is not uncommon for there to be a practical reason, for example, if the Quarto was based on a performance and that night the boy actor could not sing for one reason or another, voice breaking amongst the leading contenders.

[iii] Othello's Handkerchief: "The Recognizance and Pledge of Love" | WorldCat.org

[iv] This is something that Desdemona is anticipating with relish, back at the beginning of the play in the Quarto version. This is downplayed, by a change of expression, in the Folio Version.

[v] Andrew Muir Bob Dylan & William Shakespeare: The True Performing of It Red Planet (2019 and 2020)

[vi] Graley Herren Dreams and Dialogues in Dylan’s "Time Out of Mind (Anthem Studies in Theatre and Performance, 2021)

[vii] Richard F Thomas Why Dylan Matters Dey Street Books; Reprint edition (5 Mar. 2019)

[viii] http://www.swampland.com/posts/view/title:bob_dylans_admiration_for_mississippi_writer_larry_brown (This is the only link, though it comes with a security warning.)

‘More true performing’ is the name of this Substack, referring to my ongoing exploration of the parallels in Shakespeare and Dylan, especially with regard to broadside ballads. There will be, as can be seen from my first postings, other articles too. I will create sections and tags for them all once I populate the site further. (The tag for the Shakespeare/Dylan ones will be MTP, the tag for other new writing on Dylan will be NDW.)

This one comes with thanks to Bob Jope.

Introduction: ‘Deep wells’ and the interplay between ballads and plays

Douglas Brinkley, in the epilogue to Mixing Up The Medicine,1 tells us that when asked which lyricist he considered a kindred spirit, Dylan replied, ‘Shakespeare…Our wells are deep.’

In the essay that follows, I want to continue my exploration, begun in The True Performing of It, of the parallels in Shakespeare and Dylan with regard to broadside ballads:

“Printing of quarto versions of Shakespeare’s plays took place alongside those of traditional ballads many of which Dylan has sung in one form or another, referenced in his songs and used as the basis for his own work. Furthermore, so popular were these traditional songs that new ones were written, again including a number that Dylan has sung over the years, including ‘The Golden Vanity,’ ‘Barbara Allen’ and ‘The Roving Blade’. The term used for them was ‘broadside ballads’, and this is where the mimeographed magazine in the early Sixties New York folk world got its name. Lyrics and music to topical songs were disseminated in Broadside, with Dylan the star contributor. It would be here that songs like ‘Masters of War’ (see previous article, here) would first appear with the lyrics and music accompanied by small drawings. The language of these Elizabethan ballads had crossed the ocean with the songs and was absorbed into Dylan’s linguistic core as part of the direct link from Elizabethan broadside ballads to the Broadside ballads in the magazine of that name.”2

I am now returning to the subject as it’s so large that it would have been impossible to cover in the original volume, alongside all the other factors examined there. As I mentioned in my introduction to this Substack site, I found myself entangled in a veritable warren of rabbit holes, pleasurably so, but entangled nonetheless. It quickly became clear that it would take another full length book to address my two bards’ balladry properly, or a Substack site. So, let’s get started by noting that in Shakespeare’s time, ballads and plays ruled popular entertainment and were closely interlinked.

There is no need for me to belabour the importance of balladry in the work of Bob Dylan to this audience, but I would like to convey a feeling for how vital they were to Shakespeare and his contemporary playwrights. In that era, the two most popular entertainments were broadsheets and plays, they were intertwined, rather like music and movies in the last sixty years or so, but more so as they were the only two fields at the time. There was as yet no competition from radio, TV, computers or even books. The printing press was getting there, but not there yet in terms of mass publications available to all and the majority of the population were still preliterate.

Plays were multimedia events (visual, dramatic, most times musical, then printed in quartos and, later still, folios) but perhaps more surprisingly, so were broadsheet ballads. Even when presented as woodcuts, most ballads were adorned with illustrations, and these could become more numerous and elaborate when printed. Ballads sometimes also contained the musical score and enterprising hawkers of these songs would often sing them and even partly act out their stories for would-be buyers. In his later plays, Shakespeare becomes more and more involved in examining the links between the forms and their respective claims for satisfying audience tastes and demands.

There was much rivalry, as you would imagine, as they were, after all, chasing the same audiences, but there was also a cross-pollination and support, what would be called in this century’s unappealing term, ‘synergy’. Other than straightforward copying (plays based on a hit ballad; ballads based on a popular play) you find partial lines from plays appear in ballads and you find a great many ballads or quotes from ballads appearing, to a variety of ends, in the theatre of the age.

You have to forget about studying Shakespeare in a book or watching an actor in spotlight on stage in a darkened auditorium and remember that his plays were loud events performed in natural daylight and filled with music and song, including ballads both topical and traditional.

In Shakespeare, you find interwoven lines from, and embedded, ballads playing a myriad of roles. They set scenes; they foreshadow, they give the audience and most actors a breather, or change of emphasis from the ongoing action, they provide an extension to the action and a further exploration, or an explanation even, for the action that has just occurred. Whether quoted fully or partially, they often provide layers of irony. They can also perform multiple functions simultaneously, as they do when sung around the deaths of Ophelia and Desdemona. So central do they become that Shakespeare seems to have written one or more of the ballads in his plays, when he could not locate an existing one that suited his purposes.

Additionally, a strong case can be made, even at the distance in time, for elements of what nowadays we would call ‘product placement’. The ballad sellers in the prime position leading up to the opening doors of the Globe Theatre would be singing from and enacting from the specific ballad they were trying to sell at the time. It would help advertise the play if it featured to some extent in the ballad, and it would greatly boost ballad sales after the play were the song to be sung at a crucial juncture in the play. Such reciprocity between ballads and plays, the implications of their different forms, and how both were born from oral culture but now existed in a world that was turning increasingly to the printed page became ever more prominent themes in Shakespeare’s plays.

Ballads and plays also share subject matter, in particular: infidelity, class boundaries (the normally hidden voices of underclasses), gender issues, the rise and fall of kings and queens, history, supernatural, horror, sensational slayings, femicide and domestic dramas. They could be tragic or comic, serious or silly, and the titles of plays and ballads used the same, what we would call, ‘clickbait’ terms to attract customers. The title “The Lamentable and Tragical History of Titus Andronicus” comes not from the frontispiece to Shakespeare’s, extremely popular in its day, schlock-horror play but from the title of the ballad covering the same tale. The first quarto editions of the play called it “the most lamentable”, which illustrates how close the two forms of popular entertainment were. Both the play and the ballad were first registered in 1594. Debate over which came first has been ongoing for some time with no definitive conclusion as yet agreed. To further complicate matters, there is evidence that they may have been registered on the same day (a printer with an eye for ‘synergy’, perhaps) and that both may have been inspired by an earlier prose version of the tale. However, let us leave that particular set of rabbit holes and head back to the connection between ballads and Shakespeare and then on to Dylan.

Some plays were based on ballads, some ballads retold a play; sometimes, as above, it is difficult to tell which came first. For, even if there is a line from a Shakespeare play in a ballad, you have to resist the automatic conclusion it is taken from the play as you cannot be certain that Shakespeare did not like the line when hearing it in a ballad and then use it himself. Thankfully, there are centuries of research, upon which to draw, in all the areas I have mentioned. I will reference these at the appropriate junctures when we delve into the songs, plays, poems and other writings that Shakespeare and Dylan have given us and the parallels that can be drawn between these.

For now, as an illustrative example to set us off on our journey, I will look at a ballad I have never heard Dylan sing and its appearance in a play Shakespeare did not write Instead, this example is chosen due to a coincidence which could have been designed to catch my eye and enchant me. The ballad in question was mentioned in Dylan’s Nobel Lecture in Literature and was quoted on the stage of Shakespeare’s company’s indoor playhouse, the Blackfriars Theatre. Neat coincidence aside, the play, The Knight of the Burning Pestle and its use of the ballad “Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard”, among numerous others, illustrate how interwoven ballads and the theatre were in Shakespeare’s time.

Matty Groves

In that lecture, Dylan tells us that:

By listening to all the early folk artists and singing the songs yourself, you pick up the vernacular. You internalise it. You sing it in the ragtime blues, work songs, Georgia sea shanties, Appalachian ballads and cowboy songs. You hear all the finer points, and you learn the details.

You know what it’s all about. Takin’ the pistol out and puttin’ it back in your pocket. Whippin’ your way through traffic, talkin’ in the dark. You know that Stagger Lee was a bad man and that Frankie was a good girl. You know that Washington is a bourgeois town and you’ve heard the deep-pitched voice of John the Revelator and you saw the Titanic sink in a boggy creek. And you’re pals with the wild Irish rover and the wild colonial boy. You heard the muffled drums and the fifes that played lowly. You’ve seen the lusty Lord Donald stick a knife in his wife, and a lot of your comrades have been wrapped in white linen.

“You’ve seen the lusty Lord Donald stick a knife in his wife” refers to the ballad "Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard" which has, through the years, undergone many name changes in the main characters and its title. For simplicity’s sake, in this article, I will refer to it in modern times as “Matty Groves”, as this is the name by which it has become best known and by “Little Musgrave” when I am talking about the ballad in the time of Shakespeare. (Dylan also refers to the titular character in Tarantula where he writes: “Matty Groves, who secretly at midnight tries to chop down the church steeple.)

The ballad’s narrative is that Lord Donald’s wife instigates and engages in a sexual relationship with Little Musgrave. That sets in motion a chain of events that unfold with a tragic inevitability: the husband's deadly revenge on his wife’s lover, his subsequent offer to his unfaithful spouse to disavow her lover and reconcile with her husband, then his killing of her when she defiantly proclaims her preference for the dead Musgrave. The ballad reflects a prevalent male insecurity surrounding infidelity in a society based on primogeniture, the perceived dangers of women's sexual desires, as well as the love of gossip, particularly around the misdeeds of the nobility.

Dylan will know it through many folk versions, including this one by Joan Baez on a 1962 album: Joan Baez - Matty Groves. This version by Fairport Convention is more traditional, especially with regard to the crucial ending scenes to which Dylan refers: Fairport Convention - Matty Groves.

Lord Donald he jumped up
And loudly he did bawl
He struck his wife right through the heart
And pinned her against the wall

"A grave, a grave," Lord Donald cried
"To put these lovers in
But bury my lady at the top
For she was of noble kin”

The ending, while rather curious to modern ears, highlights the importance of class divisions and social mores in this and other ballads, which is one of their themes Shakespeare exploits most fully on stage, allowing the character in a ballad to express feelings that the character in the play cannot do directly. More of that, later, for now we can note that Lord Donald does everything strictly by the book. He refuses to exercise revenge until his adversary is dressed. He not only gives Musgrave/Matty a sword, but he gives away the better of his two and takes the first blow to himself. He also follows his code of ethics both when killing and burying his wife. We may be attracted to, and feel sorry for, his wife who exercises her sexual agency but she does so in full and deliberate transgressions of codes that her husband is duty bound to obey. This is something she is fully aware of and so she knows the consequences which will follow her answer here:

And then Lord Donald he took his wife
And he sat her upon his knee
Saying, “Who do you like the best of us,
Matty Groves or me?”

And then up spoke his own dear wife,
Never heard to speak so free
“I’d rather a kiss from dead Matty’s lips
Than you or your finery”

Lord Donald’s response is inevitable and his tenacious clinging to his code of honour persists even unto the grave, where his slain wife is buried above her dead lover as she was nobility and he a mere commoner.

"Matty Groves" is a perfect example of traditional ballads that encapsulate timeless themes of love, betrayal, revenge, and the societal constraints and inequalities of its time. Its exploration of gender roles, class dynamics, and the tragic consequences of infidelity continues to resonate down through the centuries. The song links to other ballads of the time and within Dylan’s canon, both performed and written. After looking at those connections, we will trace it back to Shakespeare’s time and theatre.

Although I have no knowledge of Dylan singing “Matty Groves” itself, which makes his decision to highlight it in his speech all the more intriguing, we do have recordings of him, both live and in the studio, playing various related songs and also writing one himself. “Gypsy Davy”/ “Blackjack Davey” parallel “Matty Groves” in featuring noblewomen leaving their wealthy husbands for lower-class lovers . In “Blackjack Davey”, from the Good As I Been To You album, a very similar tale is sung. Dylan - Blackjack Davey

After the ‘boss’ catches up with his straying wife, he again asks her to choose between himself and his wealth and her chosen lover and he, too, gets a disappointing reply:

"Well, I'll forsake my house and home,
And I'll forsake my baby.
I'll forsake my husband, too,
For the love of Black Jack Davey.
Ride off with Black Jack Davey."

"Last night I slept in a feather bed
Between my husband and baby.
Tonight I lay on the river banks
In the arms of Black Jack Davey,
Love my Black Jack Davey."3 [i]

A shortened version of the tale can be found in “Gypsy Davey” which Dylan sang in 1961 and is on the East Orange Tape: Dylan - Gypsy Davey (East Orange Tape).

The wife’s commoner-lover is now a gypsy, as he is in the various “Raggle Taggle Gypsy-o” variants where the boss’s woman is ‘away wi' the raggle taggle gypsy-o’.

From 1961 to sixty-one years later for a Dylan original intertwined with this tradition: Dylan - Tin Angel.

The loping music creates an ominous undertone which emphasises the inevitability of the narrative ending in death. In Dylan’s song the commoner-lover figure is dismissed by the boss as “a gutless ape with a worthless mind.” The runaway wife here shares the same sentiment that all her forbears held, all the way back to Lady Barnard, and declares ‘This man is dearer to me than gold.’ Death all around is the climax to Dylan’s masterful addition to the large folk body of variants on the Little Musgrave tale; with the boss, the adulterous wife who puts love/lust above wealth and stability, nudity and a tragic conclusion all present and correct.

Dylan’s “Tin Angel” additionally references other ballads that played an important part in his artistic development, as noted in his Nobel lecture. The type of ballads, indeed, which also feature in the play that provides us with our first known reference to the ‘Little Musgrave’ ballad. This took place at Blackfriars Theatre, the indoor theatre home of Shakespeare and his company.

Blackfriars and The Knight of the Burning Pestle

The Blackfriars’s Theatre was first set up by James Burbage (father of the famous actor, Richard and impresario for Shakespeare’s company, The Lord Chamberlain’s Men) in 1596, but local residents objected to a theatre in their midst and Shakespeare’s Company did not have the use of it until 1608, the year after The Knight of the Burning Pestle was performed. The period up until 1608 did see the theatre in use for the highly popular children’s companies of the time, these productions and the attendant audiences being deemed acceptable by the local residents.

With Dylanesque resonance, the earliest known reference we have to “Little Musgrave” dates from two 1607 performances of The Knight of the Burning Pestle that challenged the audience and ended in backlash, disappointment and anger. It went on, however, to become popular in later decades and was played to applause in the years leading up to the closure of English theatres. One of the main characters, Mr Merrythought, sings throughout the play, in answer to almost anything said to him. “Little Musgrave” is referenced here:

Mistress. Merrythought: What, Master Merrythought! will you not let's in? what do you think shall become of us?

Merrrythought. [Sings.] What voice is that that calleth at our door?

Mist. Mer. [within.] You know me well enough; I am sure I have not been such a stranger to you.

Mer. [Sings.] And some they whistled, and some they sung,
Hey, down, down!
Ever as the Lord Barnet'a horn blew,
Away, Musgrave, away!4

The ballad must have been well known to the London audience or there would have been no point in these lines being sung. They set the end of the ballad and Lord Donald’s revenge and moral code in the audience’s mind (aka Barnard/Barnet et al) comically deflating the ballad and the play simultaneously and implicitly attacking the tastes of those who like both. Some scholars trace the origins of Matty Groves to Scotland from where it came to North England and then on to the south; others claim the first incarnation was in the north of England and then on through the British Isles.

With a reminder that I am discussing the play and the ballad as one example pair to show how intermingled the two forms were in Shakespeare’s time, I cannot resist highlighting a further coincidental Dylan resonance. That is, audience resistance when it was first performed. The play directly challenged its audience’s expectations and was ahead of its time, resulting in a backlash and subsequent recriminations.

The Knight of the Burning Pestle's failure at the Blackfriars in 1607 appears to have arisen for a variety of reasons, each one given more or less emphasis by different critics.5 Beaumont elected to put on a play seemingly designed for the Inns of Court in a commercial playhouse. The audience composition and expectations were very different in the two venues. It is also claimed that the play challenged the audience's expectation of exercising critical judgment and exhibiting social superiority. The audience at Blackfriars, this theory propounds, revelled in laughing at others but not so much at themselves and they were among the many targets lampooned in this song-saturated comedy.

The play is much in the mode of Cervantes’ Don Quixote, puncturing ideas of chivalry so extolled in ballads celebrating knights of heroic adventures and strict moral codes. The use of ballad excerpts throughout the play provides particularly delicious irony as they highlight the knight’s absurdity. The author’s introduction claims that: Perhaps it will be thought to be of the race of Don Quixote; we both may confidently swear it his elder above a year; and therefore may (by virtue of his birthright) challenge the wall of him. I doubt not but they will meet in their adventures, and I hope the breaking of one staff make them friends; and perhaps they will combine themselves, and travel through the world to seek their adventure. However, as Mandy Rice-Davies once said in very different circumstances: “Well he would, wouldn’t he?”6 To be fair, Don Quixote was not at this point translated into English, and so it may be a fair claim after all. Nonetheless, the novel’s fame was widespread and if not a direct source of the play, the spirit of Don Quixote was very much in the air.

Both “Matty Groves” and Don Quixote have remained popular through the centuries and Dylan namechecks the latter just a few moments later in his 2016 Nobel Lecture in Literature speech quoted above. That continues, from where we left it, with Dylan recounting what the old ballads had taught him and with what he combined it:

I had all the vernacular down. I knew the rhetoric. None of it went over my head – the devices, the techniques, the secrets, the mysteries – and I knew all the deserted roads that it traveled on, too. I could make it all connect and move with the current of the day. When I started writing my own songs, the folk lingo was the only vocabulary that I knew, and I used it.

But I had something else as well. I had principles and sensibilities and an informed view of the world. And I had had that for a while. Learned it all in grammar school. Don Quixote, Ivanhoe, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, Tale of Two Cities, all the rest – typical grammar school reading that gave you a way of looking at life, an understanding of human nature, and a standard to measure things by. I took all that with me when I started composing lyrics.

Back on stage at the Blackfriars, Mr Merrythought at least twice quoted from the ballad “Fair Margaret and Sweet William” which intersects both with “Matty Groves” (in many versions some middle-story stanzas are shared) and “Barbara Allen” ( ‘sweet William’ dies in both and the rose-briar motif growing from the lovers’ graves is also duplicated ), which Dylan has sung so memorably on various occasions. and which he also referenced in the aforementioned “Tin Angel” starting immediately, by replicating the opening line of “Barbara Allen”.

Dylan - Barbara Allen (Gaslight 1962)

Dylan - Barbara Allen ( Salt Lake City 13th June 1988) (Noisy crowd, but Dylan soars above it all.)

As already mentioned, there is a recurring theme in many of these ballads of the temptations and dangers of infidelity, especially when it involves a woman leaving her husband for a mysterious lover. Numerous ballads play variants on this as a retelling of the ‘Eve story’, which always leads to a catastrophic ending, the inevitable ‘fall’. One such tale, "The House Carpenter" was an early example of Dylan's education ‘by listening to all the early folk artists and singing the songs yourself’, and from it you can hear him ‘pick up the vernacular’ and ‘internalise it’. Already, he displays vocal mastery control over ballad themes, techniques and motifs.

Bob Dylan - House Carpenter (1961)

Ubiquity of ballads

Ballads have been everywhere in my posts on Substack already. “The Ballad of Donald White” is an example of the extremely popular sub-genre of ‘execution ballads’. Very often these were set to the popular tune of “Fortune my foe” which appears in numerous plays. Execution themselves, often gruesomely enacted, were another major ‘popular entertainment’ along with plays and ballads in Jacobethan times.

A third of Graley Herren’s book was on ‘murder ballads’. As for “Masters of War”, that shows up in the poetic devices. As Dylan said, above, I had all the vernacular down. I knew the rhetoric. None of it went over my head – the devices, the techniques,… “ The rhetorical flourish of anaphora I highlighted in the “Masters of War” article, is present also in “Blowin’ in the Wind” something I compare to Shakespeare’s:

How many make the hour full complete,
How many hours bring about the day.
How many days will finish up the year,
How many years a mortal man may live.
When this is known, then to divide the times:
So many hours must I tend my flock;
So many hours must I take my rest; So many hours must I contemplate;
So many hours must I sport myself;
So many days my ewes have been with young;
So many weeks ere the poor fools will ean;
So many years ere I shall shear the fleece

That was from Henry VI, Part 3, soon after that Shakespeare wrote Richard III (which was what Dylan answered when Christopher Ricks asked what he was reading) and where we can find:

O, cursèd be the hand that made these holes;
Cursèd the heart that had the heart to do it;
Cursèd the blood that let this blood from hence.

“A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” shares the call and response and anaphoric styling of the ballad it is based on, Lord Randall. “oh where have you been…” “I’ve been to…” .

Just as rhetorical devices are shared in drama and balladry, so ballad themes of adultery, revenge, and the social inequalities and gender dynamics and techniques recur throughout the works of both Dylan and Shakespeare. Much of what I have written of the themes in “Matty Groves” and associated ballads are mirrored in the experience of Othello’s Desdemona, another slain wife and one who tellingly reveals her life story and death via balladry, as does Ophelia when she is driven to madness and suicide in Hamlet. Dylan’s Nobel Laureate speech references "Matty Groves" and similar ballads, highlighting their impact on his artistry, rhetoric and vocabulary. Shakespeare’s artistry, rhetoric and vocabulary were influenced by them, too, and he became increasingly interested in the interplay between the two forms and their respective, perhaps shared, futures as oral cultures entering the age of print.

That is the subject matter for future instalments of ‘more true performing’.

© Andrew Muir, 2025

Endnotes:

Ten years ago, I was asked to do a couple of hours a week teaching at a secondary school. This was a new experience for me but it soon grew to be the place I spent most of the working week. My rapid acclimatisation was perhaps aided by a request for me to give a talk to a class whose syllabus included a course on “protest songs of the 1960s”.

I couldn’t help but think back to the 1970s when I was studying the war poets of around half a century earlier in time, from an unimaginable era to my 1970’s mind. This class in front of me were similarly distanced in time from the subject of my talk, Dylan’s “Masters of War”.

The article below follows the course of my talk, which was given with a slideshow projection including various visual backdrops and three audios (1963, 1978 and 1994). Poetic elements were dealt with up front to show I was paying attention to the lesson time being part of a poetry class year and the naming of poetic techniques and their usage is the way to pick up points when work is marked. I broaden the talk out here with additional passages and deeper commentary.

The origins of the song:

We are lucky to have Dylan telling us exactly how the song originated, soon after he wrote it. Dylan was recorded at Alan Lomax’s apartment Manhattan New York City, New York January 1963.[i]: As recounted there:

“This brief session features a young Bob Dylan performing a private performance of Masters Of War followed by a lively conversation about the origins of the song and current geopolitics. Bob Dylan discusses composing Masters of War in England after reading an article about Kennedy and MacMillan. He tells a brief story about Nikita Khrushchev. Mono recording, 8 minutes.”

Masters Of War / Commentary by Bob Dylan about Masters Of War, John F. Kennedy, and Nikita Khrushchev | Lomax Digital Archive

Dylan recounts for Lomax that he had written the song in London in a ‘rehearsal place out in Putney’. Dylan goes on to recount seeing the English papers ‘putting down MacMillan’ and saying ‘Kennedy's gonna screw him, on these missiles’. Presumably this was all to do with the US’s decision to cancel the Skybolt missile program and the lead up to the President and Prime Minister meeting at Nassau in that December and coming to the agreement that led to the UK purchasing Polaris submarine-launched missiles and maintaining its independent nuclear deterrent.

Dylan continues: “They got headlines in the papers, underneath MacMillan's face, saying "Don't mistrust me, don't mistrust me, how can you treat a poor maiden so?" How surprising, if apt, to have ballad reference to pop up amidst these tense nuclear talks[ii]:

The song, my talk:

I started by playing the Freewheelin’ version and then looking at the grade boosting techniques, the most effective of which is probably anaphora, the use of repetition at the beginning of successive lines. A fine example of this technique can be found in the first verse:

Come you Master of War
You that build all the guns
You that build the death planes
You that build all the bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks

By repeatedly using the words “You that…”, Dylan creates the image that he is speaking directly to these ‘Masters’ as he levels his accusations. At the same time, these lines show Dylan’s deft use of apostrophe, the addressing of absent figures as a powerful means of attacking the people who finance, control and profit from war efforts. The use of ‘me’ and ‘I’, whilst actually referring to the author (Bob Dylan), also implies that he is one of many in the general populace who are opposed to the ‘you’ he is accusing. The name for the technique of implying that the singer is standing for a whole community is synecdoche, and it drives the entire song into a balance of us (against wars) and them (pro-wars). There is no doubt that the intended audience feels when Dylan sing “you hide from my eyes” that these absent, hidden figures are hiding from their eyes, too, and, as with so many, ‘masters’ they have no time for those who ‘speak out of turn’.

You get the idea, and perhaps also a surprise at quite how much poetic technique resides in what is presented as, seemingly, a blunt diatribe. As the talk progressed, I also illustrated similes, rhetorical questions, biblical allusions, plus lists of opposing characteristics and the stanza structure and focus of each verse.

As it was a poetry class, music was only touched upon, though the contrast in each version played was, obviously, dwelt upon later at length. In the beginning, I ran through the background we all know, of Dylan using the Jean Ritchie melody to the old nonsense song “Nottamun Town”. A song whose lyrics would, incidentally, fit nicely on the album, under the red sky[iii]. There was no sign of “Masters of War” pre Dylan’s December 1962 trip to the UK. The various accounts of his performances in December are somewhat contradictory, but most point to it being played to appreciative audiences. Certainly, it was one of the melodies he returned with and to which he had put his own striking words. Jean Ritchie was proud of the melodic contribution made by the Ritchie family in her version of “Nottamun Town” and claims to have pursued a successful financial settlement against Dylan’s uncredited use of same.[iv]

In 1965, Dylan showed his eye for the finest mythic folk traditions when he spoke glowingly of “Nottamun Town” for its lyrics, here he shows his ear for its melody as a perfect fit for his rhetorical oratory and strident denunciations.

The talk went on to look at the twin targets the song takes aim at, its background in history, both general and personal, the controversies it engendered, Dylan’s later revisionist take on its origins and message and seemingly contradictory to this, the repeated reappearance of the song in places and times resonant with war.

I originally posited two targets in the song: conventional war and nuclear war. The song’s depiction of old men sending young men out to die from behind desks evokes nothing so much as the World War 1 poets I mentioned being taught to me at school. Although the song was born into, and implicitly addresses, especially in the fifth stanza, a time of threatened nuclear war, the terminology of “guns” and “bullets” allows a broader range of wars to be covered in the sentiments.

There is no denying the Cold War setting in which it was created, though, and the early 1960’s were a fearful time for Americans. I put in some of this context with a quick sketching of Cuba, the building of shelters and Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and “Let Me Die in my Footsteps”.

I also showed them the Duck and Cover film that Dylan would have seen repeatedly in his school days. This was particularly effective given rows of school children were watching rows of school children diving for cover.

I talked about Suze Rotolo, too, the real one, not the needy and weepy substitute incarnation from A Complete Unknown, and her illustrations for the Broadside lyric publication:

Song Controversies: wishing death and unforgiving Jesus

In the liner notes to The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, Dylan confronts, in advance, expected criticism of the controversial closing stanza:

And I hope that you die
And your death’ll come soon
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I’ll watch while you’re lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I’ll stand o’er your grave
’Til I’m sure that you’re dead

Liner notes: "I've never really written anything like that before. I don't sing songs which hope people will die, but I couldn't help it with this one. The song is a sort of striking out, a reaction to the last straw, a feeling of what can you do?"

I always think, when listening to Dylan’s chastising of his younger self in “My Back Pages” that the line “rip down all hate, I screamed” was inspired by this verse as much as any other. The defence in the liner notes is not a weak one, however, with the extremity of his declaration being fully provoked by the ludicrous, M.A.D. situation he was denouncing. As such, back in ’63 Dylan had no difficulty doubling down on it in concert: Some people say this song I wrote is very naive. But I've got to stand here and really not care, because I do, actually, hope that the masters of war die tomorrow.

The verse has continued to resonate through time, as we shall soon discuss, and has been referred to by other singers. I pointed these out to the class, but thought it politic not to directly quote all of the reference rapper Sage’s Francis’s song, “Hey Bobby”:

Sage Francis - Hey Bobby

"Hey, Bobby...the Masters are back.
They're up to no good just like the old days
They played dead when you stood over their grave, Bobby.
They played dead when you stood over their grave

"Hey, Bobby...them bastards are back.
It's our turn to stand over their grave
I'm a do it right this time...I'm awake...
I'm a wait until their fuckin' skin decays."

For many, another contentious claim in the lyrics was the fifth stanza’s closing couplet, "Even Jesus would never / Forgive what you do", as it stands in contradiction to the doctrinal message of Jesus preaching forgiveness of all sins in others. Much has been written regarding Dylan ‘dropping’ the verse after his ‘born again’ experience. While it is true that he no longer included the verse after 1979, this was not when he ’dropped’ it. It was also omitted from the performances on his 1978 world tour.

The ‘stand over your grave’ verse has, however, resounded around concert halls in many performances over the decades. It still sparks the same rush of cathartic outrage especially in some of the places and times it has featured, as we shall see. Paul Williams, writing of the song in his 1990 book Performing Artist:

^“Masters of War" seems to contradict everyone who praises Dylan for the understated quality of his political songs; it shouts, it is openly angry, it points a finger, it even rejects forgiveness and calls for the antagonist's death. I was uncomfortable with it in 1963. But it has weathered very well—unfortunately. The issue is as real today as it ever was: those who consciously and manipulatively participate in war profiteering still hide behind walls and desks and they more than ever encourage and enable the young of faraway nations to slaughter each other.

Critics complained in the Sixties that "Masters of War" was overstated and one-dimensional; today it seems to me we need more Old Testament prophets as brash and angry as young Dylan, who will talk straight and shout in appropriate anger and point some fingers where they need to be pointed, not with smugness or righteousness but with the humility and candor of the speaker in this song. Brashness is sometimes an expression of clarity and courage, and all three are required if we are to break down the "good family man, goes to church, friends in high places" safe houses in which the real mass murderers of our age hide, even from themselves. I still am made uncomfortable by the claim that Jesus wouldn't forgive their deeds, and the line "I hope that you die"—but it is a creative discomfort, that stimulates and forces tough questions. Dylan wrote this one and moved on, as he always moves on, but the songs stay around, and some of them get more relevant as time goes by…”[v]

Nuremberg 1978

Picking up on Paul’s “more relevant” remark, I guided the talk through the decades. The class seemed particularly engaged by the background to, introductory words and performance at Nuremberg in 1978. The stage was built opposite of the podium where Adolf Hitler used to stand during these rallies in the 1930s. The audience, mostly German, therefore were turning their backs to that podium and facing Dylan. The symbolism must have felt close to overwhelming for the man born Robert Zimmerman only thirty-seven years earlier, with the war and Holocaust raging in Europe. According to Wikipedia (yes, I know) “After the concert, Bob Dylan said that it was a very special event for him, which he had marked by appearing in normal street clothes instead of the usual stage clothes.” Your spine tingles at the last sentence with which Dylan introduces the song: “Thank you. That was a new song. This is an old one. Not really new. It gives me great pleasure to sing it in this place!”

Listen here: Bob Dylan live, Masters Of War, Nuremberg 1978

Grammy Awards, 1991

Relevance was exactly the point again at the Grammy Award show in 1991. Here is Greil Marcus looking back that night.

“In 1991, when Dylan was given a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Grammy show, “They now hand these out very promiscuously; at the last Grammy Award show people didn’t even show up for them. But this was unusual at the time; it was a big deal. So here is Dylan being given a Lifetime Achievement Award, and Jack Nicholson comes up and gives a hilarious little speech introducing “Uncle Bobby,” as he puts it. And then Dylan comes on with a very small band. A very noisy, loud, small band, all dressed in dark suits with fedoras pulled down over their heads, looking like characters out of film noir. And they go into the most furious, unrelenting, speeded-up piece of music. And Dylan is slurring his words, you cannot understand what he’s saying, but you don’t need to understand what he’s saying. The sound that’s being made is so exciting, so thrilling. And about halfway through, at least for me—other people might have caught on more quickly, maybe later—I realized he was singing “Masters of War.” His most unforgiving, bitter, unlimited denunciation that he’s ever recorded. It’s a song about arms merchants. It ends with “And I hope that you die, I’ll stand over your grave, I’ll follow your coffin (sic)” Not too many songs really wish for the death of the subject, the person who’s being addressed.” [vi]

Listen here: "Masters Of War" - Live At The Grammy's 1991

My own memories are to be found in my book on Dylan’s ‘Never Ending Tour’:

“Dylan performed his damning anti-war indictment, “Masters Of War”, a brave choice given that the Gulf War was still going on and hawkish jingoism was rife. However, since he chose to sing it without a pause for breath, no-one who did not already know the song would have got the message. In fact, many who did know the song didn’t even recognise it here. Not only did Dylan’s nasal passages sound blocked (he later revealed he’d had a cold) but it seemed he had swallowed a burst of helium before starting to sing. Many observers thought he was singing in Hebrew. The tuxedoed crowd looked on in utter bewilderment. The next day’s papers marvelled how only Dylan had performed a song with any meaning and purpose, but then, being Dylan, he had made it completely incomprehensible. So far this was all quite funny, but pure comic genius was still to come in the form of his acceptance speech, as we will see in a moment.

The event worked a treat, Dylan acting so shockingly dissimilar to the norm for TV award ceremonies: newspaper after newspaper carried the story along the lines of, “Want to know what Bob Dylan was singing last night, it was.....”, then acres of print about Dylan, about the war, about the Grammies. Most comment was pretty favourable too, praising Dylan for being an individual, for resisting the cloying show business approach and for still, all these years later, being a rock’n’roller who made you think.” [vii]

This one I did not play for the class. From memory I quoted the “swallowed a burst of helium before starting to sing” comment which inevitably led to a chorus of requests for it to be played. I decided discretion was the better part of valour here, as I thought it would ruin the atmosphere required for the next segment, Hiroshima in 1994.

You would think that the point of Dylan choosing this particular song to sing at that time was too obvious to need to be spelt out, but, as Greil Marcus continued form his previous quote: “Then he was asked later, later that night, why he chose to sing that song. This was 1991. It was February, it was the middle of the bombing of Baghdad, the first American-Iraqi war. And the Grammy show was kind of a respite from the round-the-clock coverage of that magical pinpoint bombing and all that green film. And he said “Well, why did I perform that song?” He said, “The war.”[viii]

Hiroshima, 1994

Listen here: Hiroshima, 1994

The greatest surprise of the Japanese 1994 dates was saved for February 16th, when a reworked acoustic “Master of War” was performed in Hiroshima. This was the first acoustic performance of the song since 1963. An apt, if harrowing, choice, it was given a breathtaking performance. Dylan once again sounded like an angry young man: the folk singer rebelling with cause after cause. Here he was in Hiroshima, an American in the first Japanese city obliterated when the U.S. dropped The Bomb, singing out against the terrible sufferings of the innocent in war. I have rarely been as moved. How strange that such a blunt, unforgiving, adolescent piece should achieve that effect. Or rather how strange it would have been in almost any other location.[ix]

My fanzine of the time was winding up, but contributor Robert Forryan should still have been aware that accepting unsolicited tapes from an editor was akin to escorting a large wooden horse into Troy. There was still a final subscriber’s special to go and he duly ended up in it, writing on the first acoustic performance of “Masters of War” since thirty-one years earlier. Robert’s article is now another thirty-one years in the past . Out of the sixty-two year span, the first half seems so much longer in my mind than the second. In his article, Robert even mentions the anguish he feels at how long it has been since he first knew the song. I hope this Substack piece of mine does not redouble that ‘anguish’. Back then, Robert wrote:

“The conclusion to be drawn, then, is that there is no kinder act that one Dylan fan can perform for another than to send him/her a wonderful, but unsolicited, tape. It is just that unexpected tape that stuns, that claws at your innards, that knocks you sideways and recreates those emotions that you felt that very first time you really heard Dylan. Such an act of kindness has been something I have known several times, thanks mainly to Andrew Muir. It was just such an act of his that spawned this article. This was the arrival, in April 1994, of a tape of the Hiroshima show of 16 February of that year. It wasn't the whole tape that I responded to, good though it is, but the first track that I heard. This was not the opening song, Jokerman, but the song that Andrew had contrived that I hear first. So remarkable did he consider the performance of this song to be, he had wound the tape to the exact point that would ensure that this was the song I first heard.

Nothing could have been better designed to induce a positive response in this listener. Had he written a long letter extolling the merits of this one performance of this particular song I could only have been disappointed. By doing it this way, and by not telling me that this is what he had done, Andrew virtually guaranteed that he achieved the desired effect. Within seconds of rolling that tape, I was stoned on Dylan; out of my mind on just one song. The song, and the inspiration for me to be writing now, was Masters Of War - according to The Telegraph the first acoustic version of Masters since 1963. Since Hiroshima, of course, Masters Of War has become a regular choice in Dylan's acoustic sets and featured strongly during the 1995 European Tour; but at the time this acoustic performance was a revelation.

A gentle, haunting, melodic instrumentation; not at all angry, this time, and a voice from which the years have dropped away. This is the voice of a young man. It sounds as if for one night, and for one song, Dylan has done a deal with the Devil. ‘Let me have my youth back for this song in this place – let me be inspired.’ A pact with the Devil – or maybe a prayer to the Lord.”[x]

Greil Marcus continued, in 2005, from the last piece quoted above, by saying: “One of the most striking performances of that song that I’ve heard was on election night. I think it was in Des Moines, Iowa. It was on election night, when all the votes had been cast, but the results were not yet known. It’s a song that the world will not let wear out.”

New Century; same old relevance

Yes, the song’s relevance continued, the world will not let it wear out: new century but same old human race, mass murders and another Gulf War. After the next President Bush’s speech proclaiming “we must send more troops there” of “Masters of War” sounded like a pointed rendition, that night, especially as it was followed by “It’s Alright, Ma” with its famous line ‘even the President of the United States must have to stand naked.” Coincidence? Possibly, possibly not, before that Dylan had come out with comments on “Masters of War” that surprised us all.

In 2001, Dylan came out with a startling piece of seeming revisionism on “Masters of War”, telling Edna Gundersen in an interview published in the USA Today, on September the 10^th, (a chilling date for such a topic as ours here, with unspeakable horror a mere day away) that “It’s not an anti-war song. It's speaking against what Eisenhower was calling a military industrial complex as he was making his exit from the presidency. That spirit was in the air, and I picked it up."

It was a time of interviews, with “Love and Theft” being released on the same say as the Twin Tower attacks. The L.A. Times, on September the 16^th, saw this theme expanded "Every time I sing it someone writes that it's an antiwar song. But there's no antiwar sentiment in that song. I'm not a pacifist. I don't think I've ever been one. If you look closely at the song, it's about what Eisenhower was saying about the dangers of the military-industrial complex in this country. I believe strongly in everyone's right to defend themselves by every means necessary".

Given what we have seen regarding the origins and history of the song so far, these seem surprising claims. Dylan is vehemently denying it is an anti-war song, and claims he is not a pacifist and he ‘thinks he never has been’. There is an interesting shift away from certainty there regarding the past. Perhaps he is thinking back to when he wrote the song, when he was with Suze Rotolo and very much appeared to be a pacifist to all who knew him at that time. That was then, however, and now was now with Suze and her CORE activism a distant memory.

Certainly, Dylan was never a politically engaged pacifist in the way his then girlfriend Suze Rotolo and soon to be girlfriend Joan Baez were. What Dylan was enraged about, the money making and controlling ‘military-industrial complex” - note the figure eating the world in Suze’s illustrations for Broadside - was, as Dylan correctly notes, a danger made clear by President Eisenhower as he handed over to the doomed JFK with these words of warning about the dangers of the military industrial complex in a farewell address in February, 1961. It is worth reproducing in full as it was a mighty message, though alas it was a warning that went unheeded by most:

“A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction. Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defence establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defence with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

US Airforce man, Doug Mackenzie, had an exchange with Dylan that reveals a Dylan lauding those who ‘put themselves in harm’s way for their fellow countrymen’ while his son, “Masters of War” is still a rallying cry for opposition to the military-industrial ogre they serve and which Eisenhower so clearly foresaw. [xi]

***
Substack Outro

My talk at the school ended with the Doug McKenzie exchange. I thought at first that I would expand on it for here, by maybe going back and linking this postcard exchange to Dylan playing the song at West Point military academy in 1990. A head-spinner that no-one from the original listeners would have credited as being possible. Even in trying to imagine it, you would portray in your mind’s eye, a Dylan as avenging prophet speaking truth to power and yet the circulating recording of that momentous sounding event conveys nothing out of the ordinary, nothing particularly different to “Masters of War” on other nights of the tour. I thought, too, of later performances and started to Google search links for these when all such plans came to an abrupt halt.

To badly misquote: ‘Ain’t it just like the ‘Net to play tricks on you’. When I searched for performances over the last couple of decades, I found plenty, but I also found this webpage: Bob Dylan's Masters of War, by Michael Organ, providing a lengthy look at “Masters of War” through time. I could hardly believe it. Ah well, there’s another take on the origin and evolution of this song, for you, plus numerous links to live performance through the decades.

***

© Andrew Muir, 2025

[i] Released on Various Artists - Root Hog Or Die: 100 Years, 100 Hundred Songs, An Alan Lomax Centennial Tribute, 6LPs,Mississippi Records MRP060LP, 12 February 2016.

[ii]

(Burl Ives.)

[iii] The original release had no initial caps in the album title (but did on the title track.)

[iv] Clinton Heylin, Revolution in the Air: The Songs of Bob Dylan, 1957-1973 Chicago Free Press, 2009 pp 116-7 for more background to this.

[v] Paul Williams: Bob Dylan Performing Artist Book One, Xanadu, UK 1991 page 76.

[vi] Greil Marcus and Don Delillo discuss Bob Dylan and Bucky Wunderlick (2005) | GreilMarcus.net

[vii] One More Night: Bob Dylan's Never Ending Tour CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform; (26 July 2013)

[viii] Greil Marcus and Don Delillo discuss Bob Dylan and Bucky Wunderlick (2005) | GreilMarcus.net

[ix] One More Night: Bob Dylan's Never Ending Tour CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform; (26 July 2013)

[x] Hts_ssx.pdf Follow the contents page to find Robert’s article.

[xi] The site which provided this image, positively-bobdylan.com, is currently showing “discontinued”.

This posting is a review of Graley Herren’s: Dreams and Dialogues in Dylan’s "Time Out of Mind" (Anthem Studies in Theatre and Performance) Hardcover, 2021 paperback 2022. It has not previously been published because I came to a stop in writing around this time, despite having undertaken much research that was ripe for turning into finished work. However, I’ll pick that story up again and its relevance to this Substack, after the book review:

----

Dreams and Dialogues
in Dylan’s Time Out of Mind

Noting the importance of the number three to Dylan, this study of Time Out of Mind has three main sections, comprising readings based on the themes of Murder Ballads, Religious Allegory and Race. Not only that, but we have other triptychs within the chapters, a structural device that aids the reader in keeping his bearings through the sometimes complex topics under discussion.

The introduction, consequently, examines three speeches from the latter part of Dylan's career framing the overall study. In addition to being introduced to the book itself, many of the attributes that make the main chapters shine are already in evidence here, such as Professor Herren's attention to detail. The mortality surrounding people in Dylan's circles at the time, for example, and the adept way an interview comment from Dylan talking to Mikal Gilmore about this is utilised: maybe it doesn't deal with my mortality, it maybe just deals with mortality in general. It's the one thing we have in common, isn't it?"

A significant strength of the book, as in this example, is Herren's use of Dylan interview quotes. These are employed with a keen eye for their contextual significance and the paths down which Dylan is obliquely pointing. Graley Herren does not just take a Dylan quote; he analyses how and where it was used and to what deeper likely purpose. That approach leads to fascinating insights and a genuinely inspired reading of the much-examined quote: "Those old songs are my lexicon and my prayer book."

For the purposes of this study Time Out of Mind includes "Red River Shore," "Marchin' to the City", "Dreamin' of You," and "Mississippi". Consequently, when I refer to the album as addressed by the critic in this review, these are to be taken as part of the whole[i]. The writings on these 'extra' tracks contain some of the best insights in the book, unsurprisingly, as Mr Herren regards "Dreamin’ of You" as a microcosm of the album as a whole and "Red River Shore" and "Mississippi" as two of its most outstanding achievements in song.

Numerous songs from elsewhere in Dylan's oeuvre are discussed, where appropriate. Thus, for example, we find “The Ballad of Emmet Till”, “Blind Willie McTell”, and “Nettie Moore” in the section on race relations and slavery.

Murder Ballads

Graley Herren begins his examination of TOOM (a homonym-acronym the author likes to employ, and it undoubtedly suits his purposes) with murder ballads as the first of his three main themes. After describing their prominence throughout Dylan's career, starting with the debut album, Herren concentrates on the two cover albums that preceded Time Out of Mind. Dylan, as the author notes: "had hundreds of songs at his disposal. It is striking, therefore, how many murder ballads he selected for the two albums." Furthermore, it is pointed out that both album titles are taken from such ballads.[ii]

Taking on board Stephen Scobie's remark that: "it's not too fanciful to describe Time Out of Mind as World Gone Wrong 'written by' Bob Dylan."… our writer proceeds to demonstrate how every track evinces the substance and imagery of the murder ballad tradition. Furthermore, he traces the start of a recurring story in certain Dylan songs to a surprising source: "Compare "Make You Feel My Love" to its offspring "Moonlight" from "Love and Theft" (2001), "Spirit on the Water" from Modern Times (2006), "Beyond Here Lies Nothin'" from Together Through Life (2009) and "Soon after Midnight" from Tempest (2012). All feature sickos disguised as Romeos, serenading their targets." This eye-catching last line is one of many where the writer steps out of academic tone to make a point with brio.

Herren’s investigation into murder ballad tropes and resonances throughout the rest of the songs is compelling. Only rarely do I find myself unconvinced, and then only at the granular level of a single line in one song, and perhaps merely a solitary word in “Till I Fell in Love With You”. Otherwise, I am carried along with him until the statement: "Time Out of Mind functions on one important level as a song-cycle of murder ballads. The narrator dreams about stalking and killing his lost love. Dylan obscures this narrative by scrambling the chronology." This was a step too far for this reader; why would Dylan tell a story and then jumble up the 'chapter-songs' so that the reader-listener has to rearrange them to get a linear story? I realize that Dylan likes games, jests and so forth, but I fail to see that such a strategy would bring any artistic merit to the recordings.

These quibbles should not be over-stressed as I am in danger of highlighting the one area with which I am at odds in a study packed with valuable insight and commentary. It would be a mistake for anyone to do this at the expense of all the positive features which provide much illumination.

Overall, this first leg of the triptych constitutes a highly impressive investigation into Dylan’s history of singing murder ballads and how their tropes and techniques resonate throughout all the songs from the TOOM sessions.

Religious Allegory

As Dylan sang, over four decades ago: It's the ways of the flesh to war against the spirit /
Twenty-four hours a day. That concept is at the core of this section as a Bunyanesque pilgrim is faced with a Kafkaesque maze rather than the traditional linear journey. Herren opens with an introduction to the history of allegory and the concept of allegoresis, that is, the audience who ‘reads’ the allegory as allegory. Otherwise that ‘dialogue’ is never engaged, which is similar to, as is observed, the fact that intertextuality only succeeds as intertextuality if it is recognised. These aspects are part of the reason we can have different “dreams and dialogues”, when listening to Dylan, from each other or at different periods in our lives. I will return to this in my conclusion but for now, let us return to our modern-day pilgrim and the non-linear route he undertakes, which results in even deeper swings between faith and doubt.

The narrator becomes a form of Everyman, and echoes Christ’s own despair and doubt, when on the cross. Observing that Dylan and Martin Scorsese “have long admired each other’s work”, Graley Herren postulates that TOOM “stages a fascinating intertextual dialogue” with the latter’s 1988 movie, The Last Temptation of Christ. Herren sees this as being particularly strong in “Standing in the Doorway”, a song which features strongly in each of his three ‘dream’ readings.[iii]

“Red River Shore”, viewed here as “an ardent psalm”, and “Highlands” are two of the outstanding interpretations in this section, while the changeable identity of Herren’s “dreamer” is explained in terms of ‘metempsychosis, or the transmigration of souls’. To avoid giving away too many ‘spoilers’, I will now turn to the third in our trio of ‘dreams’, this one being from the viewpoint of a slave on the run and encompassing much of import on the subject of race both in US life and Bob Dylan’s songs.

Runaway Slave

There are obvious parallels between a fugitive slave and a fleeing killer, with both being hunted by their pursuers. This time it is the victim that is running, not the psychopath, and this particular race takes us deep into the subject of race itself. Herren skillfully navigates through the thorny topics surrounding the history of racism and slavery in the United States, and how Dylan has handled these in songs from “The Ballad of Emmett Till” through “Blind Willie McTell” to Time out of Mind and beyond.

‘Thorny topics’, above, refers to the multiple social and artistic conundrums arising that are so sensitively probed in this study. The issue of white voices expressing black pain is never going to be a straightforward development and, within that complicated terrain, by adding an artist such as Bob Dylan who is never known for taking an easy path, the situation becomes ever more complex. Bob Dylan, as we all know, specialises in tackling essential topics head on and blasting his own path through prickly surroundings. Herren places Dylan in the context of contemporary thought, art and debate on the subject. In doing so, he provides a telling contribution to one of the areas I expect to be most explored by US academics writing on Dylan in the coming years.

As he writes: Above all, Dylan’s dream-songs represent some of his most provocative confrontations with the legacy of slavery. These confrontations have remained central throughout Dylan’s work, and form a, if not the, core theme of Dylan’s 21st-century art. Blackface minstrelsy especially dominates in such seminal works as “Love and Theft” and Masked and Anonymous. The seemingly straightforwardly despicable tradition is, as ever in this field, anything but straightforward. Its history is, instead, devilishly complex, as Dylan has so brilliantly illuminated in his art. Herren, here, adds to my understanding of both the subject itself and Dylan’s achievements in exploring its complexities.

Radical Uncertainties

The reader may be pondering how the songs express three divergent ‘readings’ simultaneously. Surprising as this may appear at first, it is, instead, inevitable given the nature of Dylan’s art. There is never ONE “answer” to Dylan’s songs. They are not crossword puzzles open to only a solitary correct “solution”. Murder ballads, the struggle between the flesh and the spirit and the impact of race/slavery on the US are perennial Dylan themes. As such, it is hardly surprising to see them overlap, interpenetrate and for all three of them to ‘haunt’ each song.

As we have seen with intertextuality and allegory, different ‘dialogues’ and different ‘dreams’ appear depending on what each listener brings to them or, what any listener at different stages of their lives brings to the listening experience.

Furthermore, as an artist matures, they have more and more past art to draw and reflect upon – including their own earlier work. As Shakespeare did with increased intensity as his short career drew to its end, Dylan has done in this last quarter of a century. In both cases, the increased intertextuality deepens an already inherent ambiguity and mystery that engages the audience whose responses, in turn, have to contribute to the ‘meaning’ they attain from the art.

This is a deepening of something that is always at the heart of both writers’ output. What Professor Emma Smith refers to as the ‘gappiness” and “radical uncertainties” of Shakespeare are very much evident in all Dylan’s albums, although they undoubtedly become even more central to those from Time Out of Mind forwards.

Smith writes of Shakespeare in a paragraph readily adaptable to Dylan:

This book has presented a Shakespeare whose plays are constitutionally incomplete. I've tried to show how their gappiness and their ambiguities produce creative readings. These radical uncertainties function as dramatic and intellectual cues to readers, playgoers and theatre-makers. Just as these dialogues direct audiences to make up their own minds, so Shakespeare's characters, plots and unanswered questions provide space for us to think, interrogate and experience different potential outcomes. Shakespeare's plays aren't monuments to revere, or puzzles to resolve. They are partial, shifting, unstable survivals from a very different world which have the extraordinary ability to ventriloquize and stimulate our current concerns.[iv]

Conclusion

Graley Herren’s study is highly recommended. It deepened my appreciation of the album as well as Dylan songs from elsewhere in his canon, and one cannot ask for much more than that. There were some outstanding insights, and it was extremely well written with the writer’s own prose being an extra delight. Disagreements with other writers’ opinions are politely and respectfully framed, while full accreditation is always given, something that one could once take for granted but which has recently slipped even in academic realms, far less the wider world where disregard for it often reaches shameful levels.

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Substack outro

As you can see, by the end of the review, my mind was back on matters Shakespeare and Dylan, ‘more true performing’, you might say. Murder ballads, that is, for me as a subset of Shakespeare, Dylan and ballads and the particular scenarios to which Dylan keeps returning. The same thoughts continued to pre-occupy Graley Herren, too. In his series on Dylan in Cincinnati, Herren’s 2013 review included the following: “And what he has to say is all brooding menace. “Love Sick” is the first song on Time Out of Mind, an album deeply influenced by the murder ballad tradition. From the start, Dylan presents us with a psycho issuing threats under his breath. Woe to the woman being pursued by this jilted lover, stalking her through streets that are dead with blood in his eyes.” [v]

Given that I had followed the ‘psycho killer trail’, in my then recent book on Dylan and Shakespeare, especially in regard to “Moonlight” and “Soon After Midnight”, I was soon exchanging emails on this and other Dylan matters with Graley. I had often wondered about the verb "make" in the song, “Make You Feel My Love” as it is so far in meaning from, say, "let". I had not, however, previously considered this, wildly popular outside 'Dylan circles', song as the progenitor of Dylan's twenty-first century songs focussing on femicide. In our correspondence, Graley extended his work on Dylan and murder ballads back in time and I noted how it was still growing into Dylan’s later work. For example, by the chilling rewrite of "To Be Alone With You" on Shadow Kingdom, with its darkly sinister lines: "I’ll hound you to death – that’s just what I’ll do” and “ Did I kill somebody? Did I escape the law?”.

Arguably, further extensions of the same theme came in The Philosophy of Modern Song where Dylan’s chapter on Rosemary Clooney’s 1951 release: “C’mon On-A My House” concludes; “This is the song of the deviant, the pedophile, the mass murderer. The song of the guy who’s got thirty corpses under his basement and human skulls in the refrigerator. This is the kind of song where a black car rolls down the street, a window rolls down and a voice calls out, “Do you want to come over here for a second, little girl? I got some pomegranates for you and figs, dates, and cakes. All kinds of erotic stuff, apples and plums and apricots. Just come on over here for a second.” This is a hoodoo song disguised as a happy pop hit. It’s a Little Red Riding Hood song. A song sung by a spirit rapper, a warlock.”

Additionally, in the chapter on Elvis Costello’s “Pump It Up”, we are confronted by: “Why all the monotonous and lifeless music that plays inside your head? And what about that little she goat that won’t go away? You want to maim and mangle her. You want to see her in agony, and you want to blow this whole thing up until it’s swollen, where you’ll run your hands all over and squeeze it till it collapses.”

Meanwhile, Laura Tenschert was also podcasting with in-depth analysis on Dylan and murder ballads, Graley Herren and “Make you Feel My Love”. In the latter, Tenschert remarks on: “…how Dylan uses their tropes as well as violent imagery in his songs. I actually went down a real rabbit hole and all this before realising that this would lead way too far for this episode but … I do really recommend the Graley Herren book because he provides a really fascinating historical context for murder ballads as well as writing about how they figure into the album Time Out Of Mind.” [vi]

“Down a real rabbit hole”, yes, indeed, that’s exactly how it felt. Additionally, given the way it led me back to Shakespeare and his deep and complex relationship to balladry in general, and femicide in particular, I found that the rabbit holes were multiplying all around me . I was deep down inside an ever expanding warren of burrows on Dylan, Shakespeare and Broadside Ballads. Yes, I had written about them in my book, Dylan and Shakespeare: In The True Performing of It , but there was so much more to explore there that I left bundles of research at each hole entrance and hopped on to the next.

For contributory reasons plentiful, yet with the ultimate cause still unknowable to myself, I suddenly stopped and left the warren, my research and all writing behind. The primary aim of this Substack site is to return to that work, hence the name More True Performing and making this my own “influenced by the past and a bridge to the future”, as Dylan said half a century ago, moment. There may be one more article before I begin those particular postings. If so, it will be another from the time of Greenwich Village, as that period seems to be much in the news of late for some mysterious reason.

[i] This was all before the Fragments collection came out. We should start a campaign for Graley Herren to update his book to incorporate that release. There’s a handy 30^th anniversary date approaching, just saying Graley, just saying….

[ii] It also does not escape Herren’s attention that Eric Lott's book, Love and Theft, “ was published in 1993 as Dylan was transitioning from his two folk albums and beginning the gestation of songs for Time Out of Mind” This further deepens his earlier exploration of the two cover albums which precede Time Out of Mind.

[iii] Interestingly, some three decades ago, Dylan critic John Stokes wrote on specific parallels to the previous Lanois produced album, Oh Mercy and Nikos Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation of Jesus Christ. Indeed, so insightfully did John expound on these correspondences that the office of Martin Scorsese requested a copy of the article from its publishers (Look Back fanzine)

[iv] Smith, Emma This is Shakespeare Pelican Books, UK 2019 pp 332

[v] Dylan in Cincinnati: July 2013 - by Graley Herren

[vi] "Her heart blood did flow": Bob Dylan's Murder Ballads of the Early 1960s — Definitely Dylan and https://www.definitelydylan.com/podcasts/2023/3/24/make-you-feel-my-love-the-marmite-of-bob-dylan-songs

Subscribe now

Thirty-Five years after starting my first fanzine (Homer, the slut) and numerous publishing ventures and platforms later, I am turning to Substack for a new place to explore Dylan’s work.

I’ll get to grips with the platform as I go and so you can expect to see it change as I post more and explore the options Substack provides.

For now, as I learn the ropes, you should see the opening article which invites you to snuggle down with Bob and Suze to watch TV.

References in brackets { } are to time point in the documentary The Volcano Named White . Quotes are used by kind permission of University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections Division (Uwdigital) Uploaded by University of Washington Special Collections on January 4, 2022. Presented by Robert (Bob) Schulman. Interviewer Bobby Farrell. Volcano Named White : King Broadcasting Company : Free Borrow & Streaming : Internet Archive

Lyrics quoted for study purposes are from Ballad of Donald White | The Official Bob Dylan Site Copyright © 1962 by Special Rider Music; renewed 1990 by Special Rider Music. There are minor deviations when sung, as you would expect, though only the official words are used below.

There are two versions of this song available to us, one from the McKenzie tapes (here) and the other from The Best of Broadside 1962-1988[i] (here)

Context and settling down to watch and listen

When Dylan moved on from protest songs to examine society at a deeper level, he declared that propaganda all is phony in the coruscating It’s Alright Ma, (I’m Only Bleeding). He included some of his own, earlier work in this denunciation, using the same word, “phony” to describe his “reasons and motives” when he wrote The Ballad Of Emmet Till. That , he said, “in all honesty was a bullshit song”[ii]. He mentioned, too, his tendency in those days to see something in the news and immediately write a song about it; The Ballad of Donald White came straight from watching a documentary on TV with Suze Rotolo. You can watch the same documentary and compare it to the song, as I do below.

It is natural for a creative, evolving artist to cast aside his previous work and persona and throw himself fully into the art he is currently creating. As audiences we can continue to enjoy the fruits of both. Dylan’s ‘finger-pointing’ songs contain much of worth, but it is also true that they range from juvenilia to masterly compositions. The Ballad of Donald White undoubtedly belongs to the former category, yet it is still instructive to view a young talent at work, shaping an instant response song, based on the news just heard and a melody from folk’s misty past.

The Ballad of Donald White is a prime example of a ‘journalistic song’. It was created almost, perhaps even partly, in real time, as and after Bob Dylan and Sue Rotolo watched the documentary “A Volcano Named White”.

Juvenilia it may be, but it offers you the opportunity to imagine yourself, back in the early Sixties, with Bob and Suze in their apartment in Greenwich Village watching this programme together and then following how Dylan created his song via the links at the beginning of this article.

The song draws heavily on themes of alienation, the external forces that shaped White’s criminality and institutionalization, mirroring key moments from the broadcast. Specific phrases in the song, such as White’s inability to connect with others, his comfort within institutions, and his eventual plea to return to them, closely mirror the sentiments expressed on TV.

Dylan tells us in the McKenzie tape where the melody originated: “I took this from Bonnie Dobson’s tune, Peter Emberley….” As Clinton Heylin[iii] has pointed out, he helps himself to some of the words as well as the melody which can be traced back to the Scottish Ballad Come All Ye Tramps And Hawkers. It is a popular tune, reckoned to stretch back in time from before John Calhoun put the words to Peter Emberley in 1881. It is also a melody to which Dylan would return to with masterly effect. [iv] Dylan takes the following lines from Peter Emberley:

There's danger on the ocean,
Where the waves roll mountains high
There's danger on the battlefield
Where the angry bullets fly

For his quatrain:

And there’s danger on the ocean
Where the salt sea waves split high
And there’s danger on the battlefield
Where the shells of bullets fly

Thus providing a rare flash of poetic language in the journalistic retelling of the tragic tale of Don White. Dylan also uses the old language of capital punishment and has a repeated phrase “Farewell unto” in place of Peter Emberley’s “Here's adieu unto” in his lyrics (though, when sung, Dylan uses the more modern “farewell to”).

Dylan’s phrases for the 20^th Century capital punishment Donald White is to face, recall the earlier setting of the old ballad in a stream of references to hanging: ‘hanging tree’, ‘the gallows pole’, ‘the hangman’s knot’.

There are also pointed contrasts in the situation the narrators of each song. For example, where Don White tells us:

And I’m glad I’ve had no parents
To care for me or cry
For now they will never know
The horrible death I die

Peter Emberley bids an accusatory farewell to his father and a loving one to his mother. The ending for both, though, is inescapably the same in both songs, as it is in the TV Broadcast.

A sad, sad story

Both TV documentary and Dylan’s song tell ‘a sad, sad story’ of White’s early life, his alienation from normal society and his, preferred, life in institutions. They chronicle the inevitable consequences of the refusal of White’s pleas to be kept inside.

White starts out on his short life’s journey by entering the world of crime when he was still, in a phrase that occurs in both documentary and song, ‘very young’ .

Dylan picks up on the documentary’s The doctor added because he is a very bright boy, he seems worth saving, but there was no hospital equipped to handle him[v] and expands this into the first of many missed opportunities:

If I had some education
To give me a decent start
I might have been a doctor or
A master in the arts

However, Donald White's early life followed a very different path, than that of a 'decent start'. Instead, Dylan sings I used my hands for stealing / When I was very young to reflect Don’s own comment First in trouble with the law when I was 10. We are told White … spent all his life in and out of institutions and Dylan’s next song lines “And they locked me down in jailhouse cells / That’s how my life begun.” {02:20}

The cycle of his repeated run-ins with the law from a young age and of being in and out of institutions result in White feeling safer, less troubled and more at home when locked up in institutions, away from the chaos and pressures of outside life. While in ‘Peter Emberley “There's danger in the lumber woods, for death lurks sullen there/And I have fell a victim into that monstrous snare.” In Donald White’s life, and this ballad commemorating it, the snare is street life, outside the institution: “And for me the greatest danger/Was in society”.

Donald White tells us that: “I’d rather be institutionalized, as I was, it felt more like home…better than the outside world.” Dylan reflects White’s preference for prison over the outside world in the lines: “The inmates and the prisoners / I found they were my kind / And it was there inside the bars / I found my peace of mind.”

As far as the documentary is concerned, the peace White finds inside is only a relative one. Just as violence punctuated his life on the outside, we also hear of the same happening when White is inside. He is still tormented and mentally ill, after all, and ‘the volcano’ can and does still erupt. Near the end of the programme we are told: "Now he awaits his fate in the gaol in Seattle, where he has already tried to gouge out the eyes of a fellow prisoner.” {55:04-55:14 } Although the pressure, and concomitant release of any restraint, of being on death row may well have contributed to that latest explosion. Nonetheless, White is much calmer inside, and he, the authorities, the commentators and Dylan’s song are all agreed that he would be a danger if let out. Yet, that is precisely what happened.

Dylan’s song concentrates solely on the solace White finds in incarcerated existence. This is encapsulated in a telling and effective oxymoron: “So I asked them to send me back/To the institution home”. White felt secure there, it was indeed his ‘home’, and in a striking comment informs us that many inmates feel this way.

In life ‘outside’, White is a misfit, alienated and unable to communicate. Dylan’s song reflects the theme of alienation that pervades the documentary. White tells us that he “couldn’t talk to anybody, mother or father”, while Dylan sings ““I could never get along in life / With people that I met”.

Being all too aware of how he is “I’m broken as far as I can see” {38:55}, White is desperate to be kept inside. Dylan illuminates this desperation in White’s repeated requests to be returned to an institution through the vivid image of a penitent pleading to be returned to the penitentiary: “I got down on my knees and begged / ‘Oh, please put me away.’”

Although Dylan sings that this plea is ignored: But they would not listen to my plea/
Or nothing I would say , the greater tragedy is that White’s parole officer did listen and agreed this should happen but there was simply no room for him and consequently his despairing plea went unanswered.

“.. I was crying. And I don't usually cry for nobody. ..And I told him (parole officer, Wheeler) I say anywhere. Just lock me up, get off the street.” Officer Wheeler said he’d “do something for me” {39:00: 39:20} and he tried. However, we are told that; “Parole officer Arthur Wheeler tried to get Don White committed to a state hospital, but authorities said no. After that, officer Wheeler had 127 other paroled convicts to worry about.” {38:45 - 39-40}

No room, no time and the opportunity was lost. Dylan sings of this in the lines: But they said they were too crowded /For me they had no room and: “But the jails they were too crowded / Institutions overflowed / So they turned me loose to walk upon / Life’s hurried tangled road.”

White’s desire to return to institutional life being thwarted by overcrowded jails and institutions reminds us of the earlier lack of opportunity to ‘save’ the clever but mentally disturbed boy.

The remainder of Donald White’s short life is, from that moment, set on an inevitable course:

The jury found me guilty
And I won’t disagree
For I knew that it would happen
If I wasn’t put away

What White, and everyone else involved, ‘knew would happen’ ” took place on Christmas Eve, 1959.

Dylan reduces two murders to one by omitting the brutal killing, and it would appear rape, of the elderly woman in the laundry room. Schulman tells us that : “In this laundry room, Seattle's Yesler Terrace housing project, he savagely attacked and beat to death an old woman he never had set eyes on before. And asks: But was it only coincidence that this laundry room, where Don White killed was the same one used by his foster mother when he was killed?”

This murder and its attendant question are absent from the song which concentrates only on the killing of a man in an apartment block:

And so it was on Christmas Eve[vi]
In the year of ’59
It was on that night I killed a man
I did not try to hide

There is no doubt that Donald White committed the brutal killing. He does not deny it and far from hiding after the second murder, he sat across the road, having a drink and watching the police and ambulance services attend the scene. As there is no doubt over White’s guilt, so there is no doubt over his punishment. White bluntly tells us: “I’ve always thought I was going to end up on death row anyway. There’s no way I’d ever get away from that.” While Dylan puts the words predicting the death sentence more poetically: “I will die upon the gallows pole / When the moon is shining clear.”

The moral of this song

‘Now the moral of this story. The moral of this song’, is to learn from what happened; as the presenter of documentary Bob Schulman asked at the beginning “In presenting it, there is only one purpose in mind and that is to share with you what this tale can teach us about the urgent need for a better understanding of how criminals develop, the need for taking stock of the methods and institutions we have for reducing and for preventing crime and violence”. The documentary closes with the questions: “Is he an enemy of society or its victim? Has the course of his life been a waste or an inevitability? These are the burning questions that are hurled at us from the case of the volcano named White. Dylan echoes this in his closing verse with Donald White himself being the one to ask:

I’m wondering just how much
To you I really said
Concerning all the boys that come
Down a road like me
Are they enemies or victims
Of your society

Dylan converts the raw material of the probing documentary into a poetic version of White’s life, focusing on his feelings of alienation, his criminal past, and the peace he finds in prison as well as drawing us into the inexorability of his fate.

It is an early piece, first steps in the extraordinary journey Dylan was embarking upon and a mere six or so years later, and on the other side of a run of artistic triumphs unparalleled in American history, Dylan returned to the melody of Tramps and Hawkers/Peter Emberley for the song I Pity The Poor Immigrant.

Closing Matters

Some end notes for Bob cats.

I hope that you enjoy taking the opportunity to watch the documentary. When you do, I suspect that, like me, Dylan’s songs are so ingrained in you that you will hear familiar echoes: "I used to play in the cemetery"…"It's blowing like wind blowing in a pipe…""with blood in his eyes…" I even hear, “didn't know what it was for or what is was all about” in Dylan’s voice.

In the same way as we do not need Hattie Carroll’s ethnicity to be specified in The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll, so we do not need to be told that Donald White is a man of colour. The irony is there already, in reality, so there was no need for the writer to invent a poetic conceit.

The question at the end of the TV programme is posed amidst Don White singing “Parchman Farm Blues” a song by another ‘White’, this time Bukka. Bob Dylan covers Bukka’s Fixin' to Die Blues on his 1962 debut album.

POSTSCRIPT: Further info on the above

More on Donald White, with thanks to Ian Woodward, his archives and Todd Harvey’s The Formative Dylan.

All photos and links courtesy of Ian and I have to further thank him for reminding me of Todd Harvey’s The Formative Dylan book. I was merrily putting my article together imagining no-one had written about this song, How I could have forgotten to check Harvey’s book, which thrilled me as a resource when it first was published and has stood me in good stead many times since is a mystery.

Harvey discusses Dylan seeing Dobson perform Peter Emberley in February 1962 at Gerde’s Folk City. He also quotes Gil Turner , “I remember the first night he heard the tune he used for the ‘Ballad of Donald White.’ It was in Bonnie Dobson’s version of the ‘Ballad of Peter Amberley.’ He heard the tune, liked it, made a mental record of it and a few days later ‘Donald White’ was complete”

February 1962 ad for Bonnie Dobson at Gerde’s and here she is performing Peter A(E)mberley:
Bonnie Dobson - Peter Amberley - Live at folk city 1962

Soon afterwards, in the spring Broadside Reunion interview, Gil Turner quotes Dylan as follow :

“I’d seen Donald White’s name in a Seattle paper in about 1959. It said he was a killer. The next time I saw him was on a television set. My gal Sue said I’d be interested in him so we went and watched... . Donald White was sent home from prisons and institutions ’cause they had no room. He asked to be sent back ‘cause he couldn’t find no room in life. He murdered someone ’cause he couldn't find no room in life. Now they killed him ’cause he couldn’t find no room in life. They killed him and when they did I lost some of my room in life. When are some people gonna wake up and see that sometimes people aren’t really their enemies but their victims?”

Which in turn reminds me you can hear Bob introduce and play the songs, here, too:
Bob Dylan - Broadside Show And Sessions 1962-63

Harvey further informs us, via Antony Scaduto, that Sue Zuckerman, watched “A Volcano Named White” with Dylan and Rotolo on February 12, 1962. Zuckerman is quoted as saying: “Bobby just got up at one point and he went off in the corner and he started to write. He just started to write, while the show was still on, and the next thing I knew he had this song written, Donald White.”1 that Dylan wrote “The Ballad of Donald White” immediately following this television program.”

Below is an advert for the programme from The New York Daily News that day:

And here’s a review from the next day’s New York Times:

The San Francisco Examiner carried the following advertisement on March 27^th:

[i] The Best of Broadside 1962-1988: Anthems of the American Underground from the Pages of Broadside Magazine ℗ Smithsonian Folkways Recordings

[ii] Clinton Heylin Behind The Shades Faber & Faber, 2001 pp 142

[iii] Clinton Heylin Behind The Shades Faber & Faber, 2001 pp 91

[iv] Original versions of Tramps and Hawkers written by [Traditional] | SecondHandSongs

[v] “He was only 14 when a psychiatrist said this boy shows evidence of a malignant mental illness. The outlook for eventual cure is not very hopeful, but treatment in an institution is absolutely necessary if he is not to end.” {04:20-04:30}.

[vi] Christmas time to me is rotten anyway…My mother told me that Christ was born in November or October and Christmas is heathen I came up like that, Christmas was wrong…I knew what Santa Claus was too quick.. {01:00-01:40}