ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book describes how ballads featuring female warriors serve as indices to "early modern lived experience" and provides access to "the ways that the experience of actual women—and of actual songs—are shaped and imagined". It demonstrates the eighteenth century, in John Gay's The Beggar’s Opera and Polly, which inserted popular ballads where in a "real" opera arias would have been sung. The book shows that how ballads attributed to the cobbler Richard Rigby functioned in a political critique that was exploited, and perhaps initiated, by the printing trade. Once again ballads take their place in a social history that once would have been dominated by letters and tracts written by Rigby's social superiors. Ballads may have seemed like residuals to Laneham and Sidney, but to versifiers, printers, sellers, and consumers ballads were very much phenomena of the present.
