Shakespeare’s Plays and Broadside Ballads

Abstract

As projects in the digital humanities make early modern broadside ballads more accessible to modern readers, these cheap print songs and poems are becoming an increasingly important tool for literary and cultural criticism. How might our attention to “low” texts, like ballads, change the way that we read and think about Shakespeare’s plays? First, Shakespeare’s references to ballads in As You Like It and A Winter’s Tale show the author’s engagement with the growing sixteenth and seventeenth century ballad market. Second, ballad adaptations of Shakespeare plays like the The Taming of the Shrew and Titus Andronicus show the ways that ballad writers and sellers responded to and adapted the plays. In each of these cases, the street and the theater are closer than they might otherwise seem; Shakespeare’s plays respond to the growth of the Renaissance print market by making ballads a part of performance and script, while ballad street literature interprets theatrical plots through the genre of popular song.