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.
Tabela de Conteúdo
Note on Audio Tracks Website 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
Sobre o autor
Patricia Fumerton is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she is the founder and director of the English Broadside Ballad Archive.