Some Be Merry and Some Be Sad (Women, Women, Love of Women)

DESCRIPTION: "Some be merry, and some be sad, And some be busy and some be bad, Some be wild, by Saint Chad. Yet all be not so, For some be lewd, and some be shrewd, Go, shrew, wherever you go." The characteristics of many sort of women are listed
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: before 1537 (Hill MS., Balliol Coll. Oxf. 354)
KEYWORDS: nonballad drink wife MiddleEnglish
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (9 citations):
Greene-TheEarlyEnglishCarols, #401, pp. 267-208, "(no title)" (2 texts plus variants)
Sidgwick/Chambers-EarlyEnglishLyrics CXXIV, pp. 214-215, "(no title)" (1 text)
Brown/Robbins-IndexOfMiddleEnglishVerse, #3171
DigitalIndexOfMiddleEnglishVerse #4956
ADDITIONAL: Roman Dyboski, Songs, Carols, and Other Miscellaneous Poems from the Balliol Ms. 354, Richard Hill's Commonplace Book , Kegan Paul, 1907 (there are now multiple print-on-demand reprints), #96, pp. 113-114, "[Women, women, love of women)" (1 text); an addiional tet is on pp. 188-189
Maxwell S. Luria & Richard Hoffman, _Middle English Lyrics_, a Norton Critical Edition, Norton, 1974, pp. 72-73, #74 (no title) (1 text)
MANUSCRIPT: {MSEngPoetE1}, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. Poet. e.1 (Bodley 29734), folio 56
MANUSCRIPT: {MSRichardHill}, The Richard Hill Manuscript, Oxford, Balliol College MS. 354, page 507
MANUSCRIPT: London, Lambeth Palace Library MS. 306, folio 135
NOTES [236 words]: Clearly not a ballad, and perhaps not a folk song either, but it is found in two manuscripts, two of them very significant, the Richard Hill manuscript (Balliol 354) and Bodleian MS. Eng. Poet. e.1. These two have similar enough texts that Greene simply prints the Hill text and notes the variations in Eng. Poet. e. 1. The third manuscript, the Lambeth Palace manuscript, has a very, very different text. The manuscript was written by several scribes, and is very miscellaneous (a romance, "Libeaus Desconus"; some Lydgate; various religious works; some historical poetry, and two carols). Greene, p. 334, says the two carols are in the same hand, which he dates to the late fifteenth century -- i.e. about contemporary with Eng. Poet. e. 1, and predating Hill.
Greene, p. 431, suggests that "The two widely differing versions of this carol [i.e. Lambeth on the one hand and the other two manuscripts on the other] probably represent the activities of at least two different authors, writing to the same air and according to an easy and suggestive formula."
This makes sense to me, and it also suggests that the source song was a folk song, even if at least one of the surviving versions is not. So I've indexed this as a sort of shadow entry for the song behind the song.
For more about the famous anthology Bodleian MS. Eng. Poet. e.1 (Bodleian 29734), see the notes to "The Golden Carol (The Three Kings)." - RBW
Last updated in version 5.3
File: MSSBMSBS

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