English Language and Literature ETDs
Publication Date
5-18-1971
Abstract
This is the first edition with an introduction, notes, and commentary of John Payne Collier's eighty-three holograph ballads in Folger MS. V. a. 339. Written between approximately 1843 and 1849, they were composed in imitation of ballads of the time of Elizabeth and James I. In the course of his lifetime, Collier published thirty-four of them either wholly or in part in his Extracts from the Registers of the Stationers' Company... 1557-1570 and, Vol. II, 1570-1587 (Shakespeare Society, 1848 and 1849). Eighteen others are included in his Twenty-five Old Ballads and Songs (privately printed, 1869). Interspersed among the fabrications are nineteen poems derived from genuine sources, all more or less altered. The collection shows a remarkable range of learning and no little skill within the limitations of the genre. Indeed, some caught the fancy of William Chappell, J. W. Ebsworth, Winston Churchill, and Norman Ault, among others. The whole collection, however, has never been published until now and neither (since Collier was an atrocious copyist) has it been transcribed accurately. The study will, it is hoped, throw further light on the mind of the nineteenth-century's best known scholar and its most sensational forger.
Degree Name
English
Level of Degree
Doctoral
Department Name
English
First Committee Member (Chair)
Franklin Miller Dickey
Second Committee Member
Illegible
Third Committee Member
Robert E. Fleming
Language
English
Document Type
Dissertation
Recommended Citation
Berryman, Eric J. C.. "The Holograph Ballads of John Payne Collier from the Hall Commonplace Book, Folger Ms. V. a. 339." (1971). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/engl_etds/396
