Accepted author manuscript, 305 KB, PDF document
Available under license: CC BY-NC-ND: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
}
TY - JOUR
T1 - Popular propaganda
T2 - John Heywood's wedding ballad and Mary I’s Spanish match
AU - Hyde, Jenni
PY - 2022/12/31
Y1 - 2022/12/31
N2 - The text of John Heywood's wedding ballad for Mary I and Philip of Spain, A Balade specifienge partly the maner, has been underestimated for many years. It is criticised for the poor quality of its poetry and lambasted for its tortured imagery. Instead, this article re-evaluates the ballad as a highly effective popular song intended to spread propaganda defending the queen's Spanish match. It argues that the song performed an excellent job of addressing complex constitutional issues through a quintessentially popular genre, while at the same time successfully overcoming the problem of fitting new words to a pre-existing tune. Furthermore, it is proposed that the song was deliberately set to the melody from Henry VIII's ballad 'Pastyme with good companye' and, by drawing on the latest research into cultures of creativity and examining what resonances the tune would have had for its listeners, it suggests that the potential multivalency of the melody was crucially important for understanding the song and its reception.
AB - The text of John Heywood's wedding ballad for Mary I and Philip of Spain, A Balade specifienge partly the maner, has been underestimated for many years. It is criticised for the poor quality of its poetry and lambasted for its tortured imagery. Instead, this article re-evaluates the ballad as a highly effective popular song intended to spread propaganda defending the queen's Spanish match. It argues that the song performed an excellent job of addressing complex constitutional issues through a quintessentially popular genre, while at the same time successfully overcoming the problem of fitting new words to a pre-existing tune. Furthermore, it is proposed that the song was deliberately set to the melody from Henry VIII's ballad 'Pastyme with good companye' and, by drawing on the latest research into cultures of creativity and examining what resonances the tune would have had for its listeners, it suggests that the potential multivalency of the melody was crucially important for understanding the song and its reception.
KW - Mary I
KW - ballads
KW - John Heywood
KW - Philip I of England
KW - song
U2 - 10.1017/S0080440122000019
DO - 10.1017/S0080440122000019
M3 - Journal article
VL - 32
SP - 73
EP - 91
JO - Transactions of the Royal Historical Society
JF - Transactions of the Royal Historical Society
SN - 0080-4401
ER -