Early Book Collections | Ephemeral Renaissance

The Ephemeral Dr. Faustus, ca. 1680-90

Mass produced and sold throughout much of northern Europe, broadside ballads constituted a staple of the single-sheet printing industry from the sixteenth century and well into the nineteenth. While examples can be found throughout Europe, perhaps nowhere was the form more well established and widespread than in the Anglophone world. Recycling old tunes and familiar ditties for lyrics old, new, or even remixed, broadside ballads attempted to capture in printed form the ever-changing performances of the traveling minstrel. In more popular settings they preserve an otherwise entirely oral culture, whether they be performed in a public house or in the town square. Aping their oral archetypes, the broadside ballads offered ostensible classics, humorous or moral tales stretching back to time immemorial, and sharp and sometimes vulgar satires on the politics and major events of the day. Cheap to print and relatively easy to set and reset in the printer’s shop, a single ballad could appear in many different editions and redactions over many years (or sometimes just even months) after its editio princeps.

In many single-sheet ballads, the lyrics take on primacy over the popular tunes assigned to them, selected mostly to fit the meter of the printed poetry. Often printers would go as far as to suggested common melodies followed by “&c.,” which was a way of indicating “or whatever else might work.” Today, we are well acquainted with the idea of live performers riffing on and reworking the lyrics and melodies of other popular artists; in some ways, the broadside ballad might be fruitfully thought of as an early modern analogue of a live performance album today.

This particular illustrated broadside ballad, likely printed near the end of the seventeenth century and titled The Just Judgement of God Shew’d upon Dr. John Faustus, offers a lyrical retelling of the famous cautionary tale of Johann Faust, the infamous German alchemist and magician who sold his soul to the devil, from the perspective of Faust himself. Set to the tune of “Fortune my Foe, &c.,” the lyrics, in broad strokes, summarize the story of Faust made especially popular among English audiences by the playwright Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragicall History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus.

Gilding the edges of Marlowe’s seminal English adaptation of the tale with a bevy of didactic moralisms, the present broadside offers up a cheap replication of the famously diabolical title page woodcut made for the bookseller John Wright for his second and largely expanded 1616 edition of Marlowe’s play, which was again printed in 1619, and reprinted frequently thereafter in 1620, 1624, 1631, and even as late as 1663. The replicated woodblock used here may have been cut as early as the 1640s, but is likely later and closer to the production of the print itself. Interestingly, the same woodcut was also featured on a different ca. 1628 broadside ballad, The Tragedy of Doctor Lambe, the Great Supposed Conjurer. Like so many of these, but a single copy survives in the Pepys library at Magdalene College, Cambridge; the famous diarist Samuel Pepys was an avid collector of plays and ephemeral ballads such as these, and his copies are often the only ones known to survive in library records.

There are believed to be only three separate settings of this ballad, of which two are similar to the Hopkins copy, one approximated as a ca. 1640 imprint, the other ca. 1720. (The third was printed in 1653 in black letter and is recorded in a single copy at the British Library). Typographically the Hopkins exemplar appears to date from the later seventeenth century, rather than from the early eighteenth century. The British Library holds no fewer than four copies of the present ballad—a comparatively remarkable survival rate for a single-sheet imprint of the period—as well as single copies at the Bodleian Library, Oxford and only one other in the United States, at the Clark Library at UCLA. Several of these examples in British repositories had also come from distinguished collections of ballads and other early literary ephemera, collected by Francis Douce, sometime Keeper of Manuscripts at the British Museum, and John Ker, 3^rd duke of Roxburghe. The Roxburghe ballads, in particular, are conveniently preserved in five neatly bound albums filled with early English ballads and allied ephemera, though a large portion had passed through the hands of still earlier, visionary collectors who saw the value in these ephemera: first Robert Harley, 1^st earl of Oxford; thence to James West, President of the Royal Society; and then bought at auction by Thomas Pearson the British army officer and antiquarian, before ending in the hands of Roxburghe himself. Without collectors such as these, an untold proportion of the entire genre may have been lost to the shadows.

The lyrics and woodcut here are nearly identical to the two other known versions, though another, 1653 version was printed in black letter and boasts three separate woodcut scenes that more closely align with the narrative of the ballad itself. Though an apparent intermediary printing, the Hopkins broadside would have been more immediately recognizable as a Faustus ballad than the 1653 version thanks to the engraving’s nearly identical composition to Wright’s 1616 Faust ur-woodcut. By the late seventeenth century, the image of Faust in a summoner’s circle just as Mephistopheles emerges from the ground had itself become, as literary critic Jennifer Mylander has noted, “something akin to a brand,” since the 1616 woodcut itself was sold “as an integral part of the rights to publish [Marlowe’s] Faustus.”

Repeated, reprinted, reworked, and retooled, at the turn of the eighteenth century, the tale of Dr. Faustus was hardly more than an assemblage of tropes and symbols in the Anglophone world; indeed, the image of Faust in this broadside visualizes this phenomenon of eternal retelling. While almost identical to the original, certain details are skewed. Instead of a bearded scholar draped in fine, fur-trimmed robes and a catercap, the broadside Faust resembles something more of a baby-faced lad dressed in a tasseled robe, capped by a biretta. The curly-haired, hooked-nosed Mephistopheles with spiked arms and a twirled moustache comparable to Faust’s own has here become a goat-headed, but angel-winged beast with wedged fangs and rake-like claws. The astrological symbols on the summoning circle have been recut, the checkered cross obscured by the bookshelf, and the cross-hatched windows inverted, perhaps because they were easier to carve that way. Compared to its 1616 archetype, the c. 1680 Hopkins Faust woodcut seems something of a half-remembered imitation.

And yet while the woodcut does all it can to call to mind the early printings of the play, the lyrics and suggested melody of “Fortune my Foe” actually predate John Wright’s publication of Marlowe’s Faustus. “On Feb. 28 1589,” literary historian Claude M. Simpson noted, “a license was issued to [the printer] Richard Jones for a ballad ‘of the life and deathe of Dr. Ffaustus [sic] the great Cunngerer’ sung to the tune of ‘Fortune my Foe.’” That license predated the first quarto publication (1604) of Faustus by nearly fifteen years and Wright’s 1616 edition by nearly thirty. Jones’s original licensing of the lyrics almost certainly came in the wake of the first theatrical run of Faustus, performed intermittently on the London stage between October 1594 and October 1597. Separated by nearly a century from its first licensing, the lyrics had changed over the course of the seventeenth century, becoming more stilted and less biting. The end of the second line of an earlier version formerly preserved in the library of the Earl of Macclesfield, for instance, reads “how I am plungd in paine, and cannot dye” whereas the Hopkins version reads “How I am plung’d in Pain, but cannot see.” The eternal suffering of Faust in hell has been dulled, emerging more as an anticipatory state of blindness that may be thematically apt, but is affectively blunted. Still, the melodramatic moralizing that comprises Jones’s lyrics and their later replications have reworked Marlowe’s Faustus into little more than a cautionary tale more useful for unwary children than knowing adults; if the characterization of literary critic C.L. Barber that “Doctor Faustus tends to come apart in paraphrase” holds, then the Hopkins ballad version seems to all but come apart before the fourth stanza.

The tune itself is remarkable since “Fortune my Foe” forces a limping pentameter as opposed to the septameter line (also known as the fourteener) common to the early ballad form. The fourteener later becomes two lines of trimeter and tetrameter (i.e., “common meter”), the meter central to later poets like Emily Dickenson and A.E. Houseman, among others. “Fortune my Foe” was wildly popular during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and unique as one of only a handful of ballads in pentameter. In a truncated imitation of the fourteener’s rhythm, “Fortune my Foe” takes the pentameter line and breaks it with a caesura after the second foot, functionally dividing each line into one of dimeter and one of trimeter. The tune also places a secondary stress halfway between the fourth iamb, producing a synthetic spondee in the fourth foot. Thus, the first line would be sung as “All Christ | ian Men || give Ear | a while | to me” (emphasis added). To give a sense of the lyrics set to “Fortune my Foe,” the first stanza has been reproduced with musical notation below:

—Daniel T. McClurkin