Audio Companion to “The Broadside Ballad in Early Modern England”

In its seventeenth-century heyday, the English broadside ballad was a single large sheet of paper printed on one side with multiple woodcut illustrations, a popular tune title, and a poem. Inexpensive, ubiquitous, and fugitive--individual elements migrated freely from one broadside to another--some 11,000 to 12,000 of these artifacts pre-1701 survive, though many others have undoubtedly been lost. Since 2003, Patricia Fumerton and a team of associates at the University of California, Santa Barbara have been finding, digitizing, cataloging, and recording these materials to create the English Broadside Ballad Archive.

In this magisterial and long-awaited volume, Fumerton presents a rich display of the fruits of this work. She tracks the fragmentary assembling and disassembling of two unique extant editions of one broadside ballad and examines the loose network of seventeenth-century ballad collectors who archived what were essentially ephemeral productions. She pays particular attention to Samuel Pepys, who collected and bound into five volumes more than 1,800 ballads, and whose preoccupations with black-letter print, gender, and politics are reflected in and extend beyond his collecting practices. Offering an extensive and expansive reading of an extremely popular and sensational ballad that was printed at least 37 times before 1701, Fumerton highlights the ballad genre's ability to move audiences across time and space. In a concluding chapter, she looks to Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale to analyze the performative potential ballads have in comparison with staged drama.

A broadside ballad cannot be "read" without reading it in relation to its images and its tune, Fumerton argues. To that end, The Broadside Ballad in Early Modern England features more than 80 illustrations and directs its readers to a specially constructed online archive where they can easily access 48 audio files of ballad music.

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 48
  • Publication
    Track 19
    (2020-12-11) Bell, Erik
    Stanza 2, lines 5–8, of first “Mock-Beggar Hall” ballad; sung to “Northern Nancy” (minor), by Erik Bell
  • Publication
    Track 29
    (2020-12-14)
    Stanza 2 of Charles Sackville’s retitled “Song, Written at Sea”; sung to “Shackley Hay,” by Erik Bell. Text transcription from Representative Poetry Online (RPO), https://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poems/song-written-sea
  • Publication
    Track 35
    (2020-12-14) Bell, Erik
    The earliest extant broadside copy of “The Lady and the Blackamoor” ballad, c. 1658‒64, Euing 197, EBBA 31955; sung to “The Ladies Fall” or “The Lady’s Fall” (standard tune title: “In Peascod Time”), by Erik Bell
  • Publication
    Track 24
    (2020-12-14) Bell, Erik
    “Greensleeves,” from earliest extant text, printed and published by Richard Jones, A Handeful of Pleasant Delites . . . by Clement Robinson and Divers Others, 2nd ed. (London: 1584); reprinted by Hyder E. Rollins, ed., A Handful of Pleasant Delights (1584) . . . (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1924); sung to “Greensleeves,” by Erik Bell
  • Publication
    Track 21
    (2020-12-14) Bell, Erik; Harlow, Helena
    “Loues Solace,” Roxburghe 1.202–203, EBBA 30139; sung to “Damask Rose,” by Erik Bell and Helena Harlow
  • Publication
    Track 42
    (2020-12-14) Bell, Erik
    Recording of “A pleasant new Sonnet intituled, mine owne dear Lady braue, To the tune of Rogero,” in Richard Johnson’s A crowne garland of goulden roses . . .” (1612); sung by Erik Bell
  • Publication
    Track 39
    (2020-12-14) Bell, Erik
    Stanza 7 of “The Lady Isabella’s Tragedy”; sung to “The Ladies Fall,” by Erik Bell
  • Publication
    Track 7
    (2020-12-11) Bell, Erik
    Stanza 2, lines 5–8, of first “Mock-Beggar Hall” ballad; sung to “Northern Nancy”(major), by Erik Bell
  • Publication
    Track 1
    (1635) Bell, Erik
    “Oh faine would I wive,” also cited in book as “Handprint Ballad,” First Part, Manchester Central Library 2.47, EBBA 36094; sung to “Drive the Cold Winter Away,” by Erik Bell
  • Publication
    Track 43
    (2020-12-14) Bell, Erik
    Recording of stanza 1 of “A most godly and comfortable Ballad of the glorious Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ,” published as early as 1624, Roxburghe 1.258‒259, EBBA 30184; sung to “Rogero,” by Erik Bell