Ballad Business
Ballad Business
Looking for an inspection copy?
This title is not currently available for inspection. However, if you are interested in the title for your course we can consider offering an inspection copy. To register your interest please contact [email protected] providing details of the course you are teaching.
$145.00
USDPlaywrights, including Shakespeare, often started out as song writers and regularly product-placed ballads within their dramas. In this enlightening study, Tiffany Stern asks who wrote, financed, published and marketed theatrical broadsheet ballads and investigates the migrants, women, and individuals with disabilities who sung and sold them outside playhouses – in striking contrast to the white, able-bodied and male actors who performed inside. With case-studies ranging from ballads in plays by Shakespeare and Jonson, sung after plays as jigs or 'themes' by the clowns Tarlton, Kemp and Armin, and performed about the plays of Marlowe, Kyd, Shakespeare and others, Ballad Business argues that broadsheet ballads were often the first and sometimes only parts of the performance to be published. Advertisements and souvenirs, ballads constituted a crucial though now forgotten form of theatrical merchandise and musical paratext.
- The fullest account ever of the connection between early modern ballads and plays, investigating in-play ballads, after-play ballads, and about-play ballads
- Shows that major playwrights such as Shakespeare, Jonson, as well as many other early modern playwrights, partook of the ballad business and had their ballads published as broadside
- Brings to light a diverse community of theatre ballad sellers – often women, racial minorities and people with disabilities – and compares their world to the able bodied, white, male world of the theatre
Reviews & endorsements
'For anyone who thinks that merchandising and fanfictions are a recent development, Tiffany Stern's remarkable book will show that they were part of the business of theatre and the business of ballad-mongering in Shakespeare's London. Stern brilliantly explores how the two trades – making theatre and selling ballads – collaborated as she explores ballads before, during and after play performances. She transforms our sense of the playhouse culture of Early Modern London and our view of playgoing will never be the same again.' Peter Holland, McMeel Family Professor in Shakespeare Studies, University of NotreDame
'Tiffany Stern's exciting new book will transform our understanding of the interrelationship between theatrical culture and popular song in the early modern period. It offers the most comprehensive study of the theatre ballad to date, and a masterclass in deft, patient, historical research of an ephemeral source that not only outlasted many of the plays they speak to but can also lead us to the men and women of a rarely heard theatrical soundscape: the balladmongers, the ballad writers and their printers, and, of course, the would-be spectators queuing outside the playhouses.' Jennifer Richards, English (2001) Professor, University of Cambridge
Product details
December 2025Hardback
9781107179677
350 pages
228 × 152 mm
0kg
Not yet published - available from December 2025
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- 1. Balladmongers
- 2. Publishing and writing ballads
- 3. In-play ballads and more: Shakespeare
- 4. In-play ballads: Ben Jonson
- 5. After-play ballads: Jigs and more
- 6. About-play ballads: Marlowe and others
- 7. About-play ballads: Shakespeare
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index.
