Birds, Ballads, and Broads

Abstract

A group of singers stand in a circle, clustered around a crowned figure. Each one sings in turn, recounting their admirable faithfulness for a lost lover. Their communal song concludes with a neat moral lesson for the audience: “Thus you have heard the Birds complaint, / Taking delight in their restraint; / Let this to all a Pattern be / For to delight in Constancy.” Wait, birds? Indeed, the group of singers pictured at the top of the seventeenth-century English broadside ballad, “The Woody Choristers,” or “The Bird’s Lamentation,” is composed of a variety of winged warblers. The ballad must have been a popular one, for versions are extant in at least five locations. In the ballad(s), the genders of the bird singers appear to be rather slippery, as some birds are male, some female, but all have female lovers. My question, and the one I hope to address in this conference paper, is why? Why is gender so promiscuous in the song? And indeed, why are birds teaching human singers about constancy, or the lack thereof? How does the ballad use and respond to classical and continental mythology about birds? In the paper, I plan to use the ballad to consider again a rather well-worn scholarly concern: the nature of gender in the English Renaissance. But what does the “woman question” look like from the new perspective of popular music, ballad culture, and singing birds?