Ballad Business

Selling Early Modern Theatre
Erscheinungsjahr 2025
ISBN: 978-1-107-17967-7
Verlag: Cambridge University Press

Buch, Englisch, 350 Seiten

Playwrights, 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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Stern, Tiffany

Inhaltsverzeichnis

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.

Über Autor(innen)

Stern, Tiffany
Tiffany Stern, FBA, is Professor of Shakespeare at The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham. Her previous books include 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 is general editor of Norton Anthology of Sixteenth Century Literature, and Arden Shakespeare Fourth Series.