Publisher Description

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.

Author Biography

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.

Table of Contents

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

Review

"[T[his is a stimulating and wide-ranging book that will enrich our understanding of the early modern broadside ballad, augment the invaluable research tool that the English Broadside Ballad Archive has become, and stimulate further scholarship on this important 'multimedia artifact' of early modern culture." * Journal of British Studies *
"In this substantial study, Patricia Fumerton draws on more than a decade of working closely with early modern printed texts to analyze English black-letter broadside ballads of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, approaching them as material artifacts...The strength of Fumerton's book resides in her analysis of the techniques of assemblage whereby publishers produced black-letter ballad sheets, freely reprinting and often cannibalizing their own prior publications so as to offer fresh versions or combinations of a ballad's constituent elements." * Journal of American Folklore *
"Drawing on formidable experience with gathering, editing, teaching, thinking about, and writing about ballads, Patricia Fumerton has produced a comprehensive synthesis of all the scholarly work on broadsides that has been done to date. Her book will be the starting point for all future research on the subject." * Bruce R. Smith, University of Southern California *

Promotional

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.

Long Description

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.

Review Quote

"Drawing on formidable experience with gathering, editing, teaching, thinking about, and writing about ballads, Patricia Fumerton has produced a comprehensive synthesis of all the scholarly work on broadsides that has been done to date. Her book will be the starting point for all future research on the subject."--Bruce R. Smith, University of Southern California

Promotional "Headline"

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.

Excerpt from Book

Introduction On a March afternoon in 2015, I felt the frisson of being touched by the hand of time. Seated with a colleague inside Manchester Central Library in England, having tracked to that unlikely locale two slim volumes of early modern broadside ballads (135 in total, most of them unique), and wondering how the heck they ended up in a public library in the mid-North of England, I was struck, as if physically, by a handprint some 400 years old. Small in size--only about 3" at the widest part of the palm''s darkest impression and 6" to the height of the middle finger--the seventeenth-century hand could have belonged to a female helpmate or to a young male apprentice. The inked hand is caught in motion: as it was being laid down with a slight rolling of the fingers from left to right (you can see a partial thumbprint just above and to the right of the blackest part of the hand''s palm-mark); then again as a part of the hand was placed on the sheet a second and maybe even a third time. The inky hand now touches the paper more lightly and only partially imprints itself, leaving just traces of the right edge of the palm, with more thumbprints, and smudges of possibly the index and bent middle fingers (Figure 1). Then what? We don''t know for sure, of course; I don''t even know for sure whether the sequence of hand actions I have described so far is accurate. But to paint a larger imaginary scenario: Perhaps the perpetrator had distractedly (or tiredly) placed his--let''s go with the best guess and say his --inky hand on a pile of printed ballad sheets, quickly lifted his hand on realizing his error, then tried, and ultimately succeeded, to lightly pick up the marred top sheet with as little touching as possible. Let''s further suppose that, alarmed at leaving his inky marks on the paper, the apprentice surreptitiously slipped the sheet deeper into the stack of broadsides, where it would not be seen by his master, or at least not right away. In this admittedly imaginative re-creation, the broadside ballad then ended up being distributed to a publisher or directly to a consumer at the printer''s shop, who thought it worth buying the imperfect, multiply imprinted ballad for the going rate of a pence or halfpence, or perhaps--if both distributor and consumer acknowledged its imperfection--accepting it for free. The new owner repeatedly folded, unfolded, and refolded the sheet, probably carrying it on his or her person to show off to friends in passing, as evidenced by the much-torn vertical crease running through the palm and second finger of the handprint and the less damaging horizontal crease running just below the woodcut illustrations. Then more hands--whose hands?--at some point cut the whole sheet in half, and the second half (the better half?) subsequently disappeared. What remains of the original whole sheet--or what our archival searching hands have so far uncovered--is just the first half of the ballad, with handprint, pasted in what looks like an act of handy restoration onto a single piece of backing paper beside the second half of another cut-apart ballad sheet. It is as if the collector were attempting not only to preserve these individual bedraggled ballad parts but, in placing the halves side by side, to restore the look of a whole ballad (although the sheet fragments are unrelated and have not been pasted onto the album pages in the typical first-part/second-part order). The half sheet on the left, facing our half sheet with the handprint on the right, has been boldly numbered in ink from a previous assemblage (as was probably the case of the now-disappeared second half of our marred ballad). Perhaps at the same time that the fragments were restored into the likeness of a coherent whole, or perhaps later, they were pasted together with their restorative backing paper onto their current album pages (the watermark on the album pages shows the date 1883). And at some point subsequently, they were bound together with other album pages sporting ballad sheets--some, but not all, of the sheets also with inked numbers on their second halves--into two volumes. The books were fashioned at the hands of the late nineteenth-century bookbinder Charles Winstanley (18511934), whose shop was located, not surprisingly, in Manchester (Figure 2). Manchester Central Library--freely serving the general public of Manchester--opened in 1934, and the binding was likely commissioned by the library around that time. Soon after the library''s acquisition of the volumes, a small seven-page printed pamphlet, authored by Robert Langton, Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, was inserted at the front of the first volume; it mostly focuses on a sampling of ballad woodcuts and the dates of some of the ballads in the volumes. Probably around this same time a librarian also added, in faint pencil, a number in the upper right-hand corner of each album page that has a ballad sheet pasted onto it (the numbers count the pages sequentially within each volume but not consecutively between the two volumes). Yet another librarian has written, more assertively in ink, though in a small hand, numerals that run consecutively between both volumes. While such multiple numbering by collectors and curators is by no means uncommon, this last additional set of numbers on the assembled ballads stands out as quite odd. They are written between one of the columns of verse printed on each half sheet (regardless of whether the sheet''s two halves are cut apart and whether they belong to the same ballad) and thus record the total count of ballad halves in the volumes, running in sequence from 1 to 190. It is as if the librarian had become so unsure of which halves belonged to which ballad wholes that she or he determinedly recorded all halves of the ballad sheets as independent units. Finally, the same or yet another librarian pasted onto a blank album page at the front of each volume hand-mimeographed sheets with yet a different numerical system. Under each number is detailed the first lines of both ballad halves appearing on an album page, even when those halves are mismatched; the lists are numbered 1 through 56 for the first volume and 1 through 57 for the second. So many hands in motion over so many hundreds of years, leaving so many marks; so many differently assembled, disassembled, and reassembled ballad parts! And we have yet even to consider closely the constituent printed pieces that made up the broadside ballads themselves as aesthetic, multimedia, and cultural artifacts. We have yet to study the extant fragment of black-letter text in the ballad half that carries our handprint, wherein the speaker expresses desire for, but more worry about, taking a wife ("Oh faine would I marry," EBBA 36094). Coincidentally, such anxiety is physically represented in the youth''s inked hand blackening out much of the text''s imprinted desire. We have also yet to consider the woodcut impressions, in which the arm of a "man''s man"--a man in full late Tudor armor (despite the English Short Title Catalogue ''s, or ESTC''s, dating of the ballad to c. 1635, the Caroline era)--gripping a staff of support and weaponry while at the same time extending that arm toward not just one but two look-alike "sisters"--interchangeable potential wives?--also wearing Elizabethan-period style dress. Our doubled ladies derive from a popular set of woodcuts used well into the seventeenth century; they appear more than fifty times in the Samuel Pepys ballad collection of more than 1,800 ballads alone, sometimes simply reused, and sometimes entirely recut. The wear and tear on these woodblocks in their many journeys through the press is evident in the impressions they made on the sheet: the woman in the first is missing her left eye; in the second, she''s lost her signature fan (Palmer, "Cutting Through the Wormhole"). The middle finger of our inked handprint points to the first lady; the armed man looks and gestures to her as well, but his gaze also takes in her look-alike sister, and the fact that the woman''s role is doubled by the two look-alike impressions apparently raises no concern for him, as if all potential wives are the same--in a word, interchangeable. Nor--and here we witness firsthand the need to inhabit ballad aesthetics and culture--does their interchangeability apparently raise concern for the audience/viewers. Or perhaps, given the popularity of the cuts, their recurrence provoked double the delight. At the same time, the well-worn woodcuts connect this ballad to a long tradition of printed ballad reassemblage that makes the pieces seem ever more promiscuous. Such loose arrangements (whether ironically unintentional or deliberate) further illustrate the speaker''s anxious dilemma: I fain would marry, he tells us, but for the fear that, in marriage, "I doe my single life double : / The care of a young man" (st. 1; my emphases). In fact, we might entertain a tripling of this young man''s doubt, by way of the tune named on the ballad sheet. The tune title is prominently announced on its own line near the top of the page: " To the tune of Drive the cold Winter away ." This melody, over the course of the early modern period, undergoes numerous rearrangings, reassociations, and renamings. Though the tune is in the minor mode, its renamings alone suggest a similar upbeat optimism to our sheet''s version of the title. Not only can the tune, we''ve comfortingly heard, "Drive the cold Winter away"; its alternate namings suggest the melody can also capture an idyllic time " When Phoebus did rest " (EBBA 30024), greet the glorious past with the exuberant " All Hail to the dayes " (EBBA 33327), and capture the momentous moment when " General Monk had advanc''d himself since he came from the Tower" (EBBA 31860). Perhaps this sense of optimism as

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