The Broadside Ballad in Early Modern England Moving Media, Tactical Publics : Moving Media, Tactical Publics

Featuring more than 80 illustrations and easy access to related music files, this magisterial work argues that a ballad cannot be read as a fixed artifact, independent of its illustrations, tune, and movement across time and space. Featuring more than 80 illustrations and easy access to related music files, this magisterial work argues that a ballad cannot be read as a fixed artifact, independent of its illustrations, tune, and movement across time and space.

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.

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. "A survey of the cultural aesthetics involved in the practice of making and consuming broadside ballads in the early modern period in England. The author focuses on the historical and cultural aesthetics of the ballad-as-experience and as a multimedia object. Experiential ballad aesthetics includes appreciation of the made objects as well as of the set of processes involved in their making (pressed sheets of paper, voiced narratives and dialogues, carved woodblocks of scenes and portraits, fictional identities, and collective memories, to name only a few). An experiential ballad aesthetic also requires understanding the multimodal group of individual and collaborative roles involved in such makings (author, printer, hawker, singer, auditor, reader, collector). Experiential ballad aesthetics is, furthermore, generative and protean, capable of seemingly endless shifts and renewals. Constantly moving with the political and social times, it thrives and can be appreciated today much as in early modern England: as text, song, art, and cultural record"-- Provided by publisher Cover The Broadside Ballad in Early Modern England Title Copyright Dedication Contents Note on Audio Tracks and Citation Conventions Introduction Chapter 1. The Critical and Theoretical Parts: Moving, Assemblage, Publics, and Tactics PART I ASSEMBLING BY DISASSEMBLING: ARCHIVES, DATABASES, AND BALLAD BITS Chapter 2. Accessing the Artifact, Now and Then Chapter 3. Random Tactical Hits PART II REMEMBERING BY DISMEMBERING: BLACK LETTER, CALLIGRAPHY, AND PRINT HISTORY Chapter 4. The Network of Black-Letter Broadside Ballad Collectors Chapter 5. The Passing Present of Black Letter and Calligraphy PART III FROM NETWORKS TO PUBLICS: SAMUEL PEPYS Chapter 6. Pepys and the Making of Gendered Publics Chapter 7. Pepys and the Making of Political Publics PART IV DIACHRONIC AND SYNCHRONIC BALLAD PUBLICS: CROSSING SOCIETY, HISTORY, AND SPACE Chapter 8. The Moving Violations of “The Lady and the Blackamoor” Conclusion: The Limits of the Shakespearean Stage: Ballading The Winter’s Tale Notes Bibliography Sources for Music Notations Index Acknowledgments