Choyce Drollery: Songs and Sonnets Being a Collection of Divers Excellent Pieces of Poetry, of Several Eminent Authors. — Background and Themes

The Editor's Partisan Frame

Ebsworth's introductions are openly polemical. He describes the Interregnum as a period when 'Old England' was 'torn by civil wars' and 'oppress'd by gloomy zealots.' The drolleries, he argues, were 'inhibited' by Puritan authorities, making their survival an act of defiance. This framing shapes his editorial choices: he highlights poems that mock Puritanism, celebrates royalist authors, and speculates about suppressed editions. For instance, he notes that Choice Drollery was 'inhibited' shortly after publication, though he offers no direct evidence beyond the title page's claim. His notes on individual poems often digress into biographical sketches of Cavalier poets, such as the 'reverent Elegy for Jonsonus Virbius' by Dudley Digges. The reader is never allowed to forget that these songs were weapons in a cultural war, not mere entertainment.

Textual Archaeology and Attribution

Ebsworth's appendices are dense with variant readings, emendations, and attribution debates. He compares the 1656 edition of Choice Drollery with later printings, noting discrepancies in wording and ordering. For example, he identifies a poem attributed to 'W. S.' and speculates about its authorship, drawing on parallels with known works by Sir John Suckling or Thomas Carew. He also reconstructs the publication history of Antidote Against Melancholy, arguing that its 'Ingredients' include poems by 'Arthur O'Bradley'—a pseudonym he attempts to unmask. The notes are a mix of erudition and conjecture: Ebsworth freely admits when evidence is lacking, but his tone remains authoritative. This scholarly apparatus transforms the volume into a detective story, where the editor is both historian and sleuth.

The Politics of Poetic Form

The drolleries themselves are a mix of love lyrics, satirical verses, and drinking songs, but Ebsworth's commentary consistently politicizes them. He reads a seemingly innocuous pastoral as a coded royalist lament, and a bawdy song as a jab at Puritan hypocrisy. In his notes, he compares the 'Sessions of Poets'—a mock-trial poem—to actual legal proceedings under the Commonwealth, suggesting that the genre served as a veiled critique of judicial corruption. He also draws attention to the physical layout of the original editions: the use of blackletter type, the placement of ornamental initials, and the inclusion of musical notation. For Ebsworth, these formal elements are not neutral; they are part of the drollery's rhetorical strategy, designed to evoke a lost Cavalier world of wit, leisure, and defiance.

Readers approaching this edition should be prepared for a dialogue between the 17th-century texts and their 19th-century editor. Ebsworth's voice is never far from the surface, and his biases are part of the experience. To engage fully, one must read both the poems and the footnotes, weighing Ebsworth's claims against the evidence he provides. The volume rewards those interested in the politics of literary preservation, the history of song, and the ways later editors shape our understanding of the past.

I finished that old Choyce Drollery last week, and it stayed with me—not for the songs, but for how the editor’s footnotes kept turning into quiet arguments about what was safe to say. It felt a bit like finding a friend’s marginalia in a borrowed book. That ache for context reminded me of another guide I once kept nearby: Biographia Literaria — A Reader’s Guide. Both made me feel like I was listening to someone think aloud, slowly, in the margins of history.