Ballads as Theatre “Merch” in Shakespeare’s London
PROFESSOR TIFFANY STERN
The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham
Why were theatrical broadsheet ballads sold outside The Rose and other playhouses?
Who wrote them, printed them, and sung them?
And why and how were they connected with the plays performed inside?
Playwrights often started out as song-writers, and regularly product-placed ballads within their dramas. Acting as both advertisements and souvenirs, ballads constituted a crucial – though now largely forgotten – form of theatrical merchandise and musical paratext.
Join Professor Tiffany Stern of the Shakespeare Institute as she introduces the ballad merchants – or ‘balladmongers’ – who sung and sold ballads, and the printers who published them, and provides examples of ballads to be found in plays by Ben Jonson, sung after plays as jigs or ‘themes’ by clowns, and performed as summaries for the plays of Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd.
Tiffany Stern is Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama at The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, having previously been Professor of Early Modern Drama at Oxford University.
Her new book, Ballad Business: Selling Early Modern Theatre, was published by Cambridge University Press in February this year.
Her other books are Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan (2000), Making Shakespeare (2004), Shakespeare in Parts (with Simon Palfrey, 2007), Documents of Performance in Early Modern England (2009), and Shakespeare, Malone and the Problems of Chronology (2023). She has edited five plays, one anthology, and two scholarly collections, and written over sixty chapters and articles on theatre history, book history, literary criticism and editing.
Currently general editor of Arden Shakespeare: Fourth Series, she is a Fellow of the British Academy.
PRESENTED IN CONJUNCTION WITH LITERATURE WORKS AND THE PAGE OF PLYMOUTH PROJECT
Literature Works is a charity and an Arts Council England National Portfolio organisation in Southwest England.
This Page of Plymouth project is centred on the lost play by Ben Jonson & Thomas Dekker (performed at The Rose in 1599), and explores stories about gender, justice and ordinary lives in Plymouth both then and now.
The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham
Why were theatrical broadsheet ballads sold outside The Rose and other playhouses?
Who wrote them, printed them, and sung them?
And why and how were they connected with the plays performed inside?
Playwrights often started out as song-writers, and regularly product-placed ballads within their dramas. Acting as both advertisements and souvenirs, ballads constituted a crucial – though now largely forgotten – form of theatrical merchandise and musical paratext.
Join Professor Tiffany Stern of the Shakespeare Institute as she introduces the ballad merchants – or ‘balladmongers’ – who sung and sold ballads, and the printers who published them, and provides examples of ballads to be found in plays by Ben Jonson, sung after plays as jigs or ‘themes’ by clowns, and performed as summaries for the plays of Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd.
Tiffany Stern is Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama at The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, having previously been Professor of Early Modern Drama at Oxford University.
Her new book, Ballad Business: Selling Early Modern Theatre, was published by Cambridge University Press in February this year.
Her other books are Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan (2000), Making Shakespeare (2004), Shakespeare in Parts (with Simon Palfrey, 2007), Documents of Performance in Early Modern England (2009), and Shakespeare, Malone and the Problems of Chronology (2023). She has edited five plays, one anthology, and two scholarly collections, and written over sixty chapters and articles on theatre history, book history, literary criticism and editing.
Currently general editor of Arden Shakespeare: Fourth Series, she is a Fellow of the British Academy.
PRESENTED IN CONJUNCTION WITH LITERATURE WORKS AND THE PAGE OF PLYMOUTH PROJECT
Literature Works is a charity and an Arts Council England National Portfolio organisation in Southwest England.
This Page of Plymouth project is centred on the lost play by Ben Jonson & Thomas Dekker (performed at The Rose in 1599), and explores stories about gender, justice and ordinary lives in Plymouth both then and now.
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Ballads as Theatre “Merch” in Shakespeare’s London
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