"How the old carling did so crack": Volubility, Aging, and Obscenity in Two Ballad Reimaginings of the Wife of Bath

Since the Wife of Bath’s initial appearance in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, readers in different eras have often found her to be—in the words of John Dryden—“too licentious,” in terms of both the topics she discusses and her frankness in discussing them. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century adapters and modernizers working with the Wife of Bath’s Prologue responded to this perceived licentiousness in different ways. This article examines two eighteenth-century ballads: The Wanton Wife of Bath and a later Scottish variant The Wife of Beith. By shifting the focus from the Wife of Bath’s sexual unruliness to her vocal unruliness, and, later, to her status as an old woman, these ballads mark the Wife as a socially obscene figure in need of correction. Deploying misogynistic and ageist tropes, these ballads respond to an ongoing eighteenth-century preoccupation with controlling women’s voices and lives, a preoccupation reflected in popular novels, conduct books, and periodicals of the time. This preoccupation continues to this day.