Little Bo-Peep
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"Little Bo-Peep" or "Little Bo-Peep has lost her sheep" is an English language nursery rhyme. It has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 6487.
Words and melody
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As with most products of oral tradition, there are many variations to the rhyme. One modern version of the first verse is:[1] Template:Poemquote
Variants of the second line include "And can't tell where to find them", with the fourth line sometimes being given as "And bring their tails behind them".[2]
The melody commonly associated with the rhyme was first recorded in 1870 by the composer and nursery rhyme collector James William Elliott in his National Nursery Rhymes and Nursery Songs.[3]
Additional verses
The rhyme continues:[2] Template:Poemquote
This is an allusion of the common practice of docking lambs' tails.
Origins and history
The earliest record of this rhyme is in a manuscript of around 1805, which contains only the first verse which references the adult Bo Peep , called 'Little' because she was short and not because she was young.[2] There are references to a children's game called "bo-peep", from the 16th century, including one in Shakespeare's King Lear (Act I Scene iv), for which "Template:Linktext" is thought to refer to the children's game of peek-a-boo,[4] but there's no evidence that the rhyme existed earlier than the 18th century.[2] The additional verses are first recorded in the earliest printed version in a version of Gammer Gurton's Garland or The Nursery Parnassus in 1810, published in London by Joseph Johnson.[2]
The phrase "to play bo peep" was in use from the 14th century to refer to the punishment of being stood in a pillory. For example, in 1364, an ale-wife, Alice Causton, was convicted of giving short measure, for which crime she had to "play bo peep thorowe a pillery".[5] Andrew Boorde uses the same phrase in 1542, "Script error: No such module "Lang".".[6] Nevertheless, connections with sheep are early; a fifteenth-century ballad includes the lines: "Script error: No such module "Lang". // In every corner they play boe-peep".[7]
Notes
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- ↑ a b c d e I. Opie and P. Opie, The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (Oxford University Press, 1951, 2nd edn., 1997), pages 107–108.
- ↑ J. J. Fuld, The Book of World-Famous Music: Classical, Popular, and Folk (Courier Dover Publications, 5th edn., 2000), Template:ISBN, p. 502.
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