The “Humour, Frollicks &c.” category of Pepys’s collection contains significantly fewer ballads than the more expansive categories of Volume 1, such as “Love Pleasant,” “History—True & Fabulous,” or “State & Times.” Unlike these, Pepys did not include this category in any of the other volumes of his collection. Perhaps this category’s absence from Volumes 2-5,can be tied to its rather ambiguous classification of ballads as either “frollicks” or humorous. Indeed, most of the ballads in “Humour, Frollicks &c.” seem to fall most clearly under “&c.” In the earlier part of the 17 th Century, when (according to the STC) these ballads were written, “frollicks” apparently referred to humorous verses circulated at a feast. Later in the century, when Pepys was collecting these ballads, “frollicks” denoted “fun, merriment, or sportive mirth” (OED). One might expect, then, that the ballads in this category might exhibit more comedy and jesting than the rest of the collection, but, while they certainly do lack the weightiness or gloom of the darker ballads (under “Tragedy,” for example), they are comparable in gaiety to many ballads found throughout the collection. Perhaps in the first three ballads of this category we can locate the notion of “sportive mirth”: each of these ballads describes the glories of hunting as a pastime. Nevertheless, these ballads use excessively lofty and grandiose descriptions of the sport, each aligning it with the endeavors of classical gods and heroes.

Beyond the sport of hunting, the other distinguishable subcategory in “Humours, Frollicks, &c.” contains the four ballads that discuss jobs. The least upbeat of this subcategory, “A pleasant Song, made by a Souldier” (1.465), describes the soldier’s fall from the glory of his youth and his longing to die now that he is poor and alone. Ostensibly more suited to this category are “The famous Ratketcher…” (1.458-459) and “A pleasant new Songe of a joviall Tinker” (1.460-461), both of which laud (in two parts) the drunken exploits of their eponymous manual laborers. The good-humored tone of these ballads also comes through in the lightheartedly moralizing “The Rimers new Trimming” (1.464), in which a rhymester makes fun of barbers while waiting for a trim but receives his comeuppance when the barber uses coal instead of soap, darkening his face and humiliating him. The relatively harmless humiliation suffered by the main character of “The Rimers new Trimming” teaches him a valuable lesson and is fitting with his crime: his mocking of a barber earns him a punishment tantamount to a mere practical joke, making this ballad ideally suited for the “Humour, Frollicks, &c.” category.

While several of the ballads in this rather small category are not as lighthearted or even as humorous as one might expect, connections can be drawn among isolated ballads to suggest some logic behind this grouping. “The Rimers new Trimming,” for example, recalls an earlier ballad in this category in which someone is punished for her vocal criticism of others: “The Cucking of a Scould” (1.454) delineates the penalty one woman receives for constantly berating her fellow townspeople. However, while the scold’s tale undoubtedly has been funny to some audiences, her fate appears quite cruel and distinctly sexist to a modern audience in comparison to the barber’s rather genial retribution for the “rimer’s” ribbing: the scold of this ballad is jailed, harassed, tied to a chair, and repeatedly dunked in water or “cucked.” This kind of torture, it seems, could be considered amusing. In fact, a reference to “cucking” occurs in “An excellent new medley” (1.456), which is in many ways the most expected sort of ballad from a category called “Humor, Frollicks, &c.” This ballad’s rhythm and tone recalls Skelton with its virtual litany of proverbs, popular sayings, observances, and witticisms, linked together by rhyming couplets. Indeed, “An excellent new medley” encapsulates “Humour, Frollicks, &c.”: it depicts humor, sportive mirth, and all the rest.

~ Kris McAbee