Ballad Business

An enlightening study into broadsheet ballad merchandise sold outside playhouses for plays by Shakespeare, Jonson, Marlowe, Kyd and more.

In this first-ever account of the broadsheet ballads sold outside playhouses, Tiffany Stern reveals how ballads were product-placed in the plays of Shakespeare and Jonson, after plays as jigs by Tarlton, Kemp and Armin, and merchandised as plot summaries for plays by Marlowe, Kyd, Shakespeare and others.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.