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Ballad Business by Tiffany Stern (Hardback)
£110.00
Available
Product Ref. (e.g. ISBN, SKU)
9781107179677
Published:
31 Dec 2025
Format:
Hardback
Number of pages:
350 pages
Weight:
0.000kgs
Author:
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.
About the Author: 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.
| Number of pages | 350 |
|---|
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