ABSTRACT
Natascha Würzbach examines the English broadside ballad with particular attention to the social and economic conditions that gave rise to it and shaped its form. She contextualizes the ballad sheets that survive in archives, discussing marketplaces and market conditions for popular songs in that era to which Addison “looked back” for ballads. In the rambunctiously entrepreneurial milieu she depicts, the balladmonger performs and sells songs in the tradition of the minstrel, catering to a public taste that represents the middle and lower classes. Emphasizing the ballads as public performances, Würzbach sees the customer purchasing the printed copy “as an illustrated reminder of the performance experience and as a means of privately repeating it.” She thus opens to view an arena for the intersection of oral and written, commercial and noncommercial in a market simultaneously shaping and being shaped by public taste. In this context, we glimpse at the street level, so to speak, some of the fundamental changes in media, social structure, and governance that separated the capitalist nation of Addison, Percy, et al. from an earlier world.
