ABSTRACT
"The Maiden's Bloody Garland" is closer instead to John Gay's "Black-ey'd Susan," Thomas Tickell's "Colin and Lucy," and Henry Carey's "Sally in Our Alley," poems by elite authors that were taken up as anonymous broadside ballads. A closer match with Thomas Warton can be found in the person who bequeathed to Harvard the annotated version of the ballad, Evert Jansen Wendell, and he leads to some final observations on the unexpected attitudes that can accompany the elite appropriation of the ballad. Wendell's bequest thus falls uncertainly between what Susan Stewart describes as the aura of authenticity and nostalgia conferred upon the souvenir and the de-historicizing seriality and systematicity of the collection. Among the 12,000 plays, 150,000 photographs, 90,000 playbills, and 50,000 popular songs that Harvard kept, which helped form the heart of the Harvard Theatre and autograph collections, there are many pieces that are not part "of the legitimate drama".
