On the title page to this section, Pepys writes: “Marriage, &c. [. . .] Advice about the Choice of Husbands & Wives. Praise & Dispraise of the good and Bad. Cuckoldry, &c.” (1.375). There are twenty-one ballads under “Marriage” in Volume 1 of Pepys’s collection that span the years 1617-1635 and fall roughly into the three subcategories that Pepys names. The “advice” ballads offer a range of cautions for those men and women choosing a spouse: from admonitions to stay single as long as possible to “strike while the iron is hot.” In the second subcategory, Pepys includes both ballads that praise commendable wives and husbands and ballads that criticize those who lack virtue. The ballads in the last of Pepys’s subcategories, “Cuckoldry,” tell stories of reconciliation and forgiveness after an infidelity.

Advice

The “advice” ballads are typically warnings to women and men against hasty marriage. For example, in "Anything for a quiet life" (1.378-379), a young man rushes into marriage in order to secure a quiet life for himself. Much to the young man’s dismay, marriage is full of strife and stress. The ballad ends with a warning to all young men:

"The cunning Age" takes the form of a dialogue between a newly married woman, a widow, and a remarried woman (1.412-413). The young wife and the remarried woman are unhappy in their marriages and warn the widow not to remarry hastily. The widow claims that she will be cautious when it comes time to remarry and will try not to fall victim to the popular trend of marrying young men. There are three ballads that discuss the marrying of widows by young men—two encourage the practice and one denounces it. Those in favor of marrying them claim that widows are simply better wives. Widows, because they are experienced, know how to deal with servants, are good in bed, and are not overly jealous (1.382-383; 1.386-387). Martin Parker, in "The wiving age," aims to console the young maidens who have no husbands because all of the good men are taken by widows: “Though widowes be chosen and maids be rejected, / They will be esteemed, though now they’r neglected” (1.385). Two of the widow ballads, then, advise young men to get married to a widow as soon as possible, while the other claims that this practice will soon die out.

Praise and Dispraise of the Good and the Bad

There is overlap between the “advice” ballads and the “praise and dispraise” ballads in that the former usually criticize spouses and the latter often end with a note to all young men or all maidens to “take heed.” What distinguishes the praise and dispraise ballads is their concern with both the internal and external threats to marriage. The internal threats come mainly from the character of the spouse, for example a drunken husband or a demanding, pregnant wife. The external threats are usually any opportunity for women or men to gather together: alehouses, church, childbirth, and gambling. The ballads accuse both men and women of spending too much time at the alehouse. For example, in "Man’s Felicity and Misery," David claims that his

. . . wife will at the Alehouse sit,
And wast away both money and wit;
Nay rather than shee’l liquor lacke,
Shee’l sell the smocke from off her backe. (1.393)

In "A Hee-Divell," the wife tells us that her husband is always running around and wasting her money at the alehouse (1.398-399). Church, according to many of the husbands in the ballads, is a place where women learn the latest fashions and talk with their gossips, not a place of holiness. Childbirth is a time when a wife is surrounded by other women. In "A merry dialogue," the husband expresses his anxiety about the child’s parentage: “Your Gossips come unto your joy, / . . . They say the child is like the Dad, / when he but little share in’t had” (1.389). The husband is excluded from the experience of childbirth; thus it is a threat to the marriage. "Tis not otherwise: Or: The praise of a married life" is narrated by a man who is grateful to be married because it keeps him away from gambling, which is a tiresome and dangerous lifestyle (1.394-395).

Cuckoldry

The ballads in “Marriage” that tell stories of infidelity all have happy endings. There are three ballads that are about the adoption by one spouse of the other’s illegitimate child. "Rocke the Babie Joane" tells of a husband who asks his wife to raise his deceased mistress’s newborn child (1.396-397r). The wife, Joane, resists at first, claiming that her husband’s request is outrageous. Her husband, John, reminds her of the story of patient Griselda and convinces Joane to raise the baby as her own. In a variation on this story, "Children after the rate of 24 in a yeare," a man unknowingly marries a woman who is pregnant by another man and she has twins in the first month of their marriage (1.404-405). The husband takes this as a sign that his wife is very fertile and looks forward to a marriage filled with children. The stories of infidelity also have a happy ending; they result in reconciliation. For example, in "The contented Couckould," a husband searches for his wayward wife in London and finds her with a sailor (1.408-409). The wife apologizes, promises never to run off again, and they live happily ever after. The cuckoldry ballads, then, are about the ways in which marriages can outlast infidelities rather than about the infidelities themselves.

Conclusion

The “Marriage” section of Volume 1 contains a lot of ballads about unfortunate and pleasant relationships, which leads to the question of why these ballads are not categorized under “Love Unfortunate” or “Love Pleasant.” Those ballads Pepys grouped together as “Love Unfortunate” tend to end in the death of one or both lovers and rarely concentrate on married characters. In “Love Pleasant,” many of the ballads end in marriage, but they do not concentrate on marriage as such. According to Pepys’s divisions, marriage is its own kind of relationship with its own set of rules, sorrows, and joys. The ballads in this section are about those rules, sorrows, and joys. Some are surprising, such as the happily ending cuckoldry tales, some are predictable, such as the complaints about alehouses, but all reveal some of the pleasures of and anxieties about marriage in the early seventeenth century.

~ Jessica C. Murphy

Works Cited

Pepys, Samuel. The Pepys Ballads. Ed. Hyder Edward Rollins. Volume 1. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1929-32.