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SONGS AND BALLADS |
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letters. They enable the historian to complete his picture and vivify his narrative, and the ordinary reader to realise the life of the past.
Of the ballads here reprinted a great number were the production of professional composers of ballads who had no direct connection with the navy, and no part in the events they described. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the ballad filled the place which the cheap newspaper fills now, and professional writers put the stirring incidents of the day into verse for the information of the people as naturally as the modern journalist puts them into prose. Most of the older narrative ballads are of this class: for instance, Deloney's verses on the capture of the Great Galeazzo and the taking of Cadiz. Often the' ballad was simply an adaptation of a prose pamphlet on the same subject. In the registers of the Stationers' Company for the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century there are many examples of this. For instance, on May 15, 1579, Andrew White, a bookseller, entered as his copyright a prose pamphlet relating The Wonderful Victory obtained by the Centurion of London against Five Spanish Gallies, and on the same day registers ' a ballad of the same victory.' (Arber, Stationers' Registers, ii. 274 b.) Often a bookseller entering a prose narrative of this kind provided, at the same time, for securing the copyright of a ballad version which had not yet been written, just as a modern author reserves the right of dramatising a new novel. If this was not done some rival publisher or bookseller seized the opportunity, produced a ballad on the incident of the moment, and spoilt the sale of the original narrative (id. ii. 162-3, 261-2). Not only incidents in naval history, but stories and items of news of every kind were treated in the same |
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