ABSTRACT
Laws has observed that ‘this ballad begins not in the fifth act of the play but in the first and proceeds chronologically through half-a-dozen episodes.’ Those half-dozen episodes are generally dealt with in ten or eleven somewhat pedestrian stanzas. John MacDonald’s broken-down text scarcely does justice to the story, which is as follows: Caroline, against the wishes of her parents, accompanies her Highland suitor to London and is there married to him. Later, her husband goes to sea, abandoning Caroline, who finally drowns herself in the sea.
