Ballads and Performance: The Multimodal Stage in Early Modern England

Welcome to
Ballads and Performance


B
allads and Performance: The Multimodal Stage in Early Modern England takes up Bruce R. Smith's call, in "Shakespeare's Residuals," for much-needed new inroads into thinking about broadside ballads within theater history/performance studies. The collection at the same time answers the call made by the two early modern genres themselves, or at least by their authors/producers and--to the extent they were also participatory makers of meaning--their audiences. Public broadside ballads and the public theater were not only the most popular, indeed affordably mass-marketed, of early modern performative multimedia. They also evince an intense consciousness of the many ways of capitalizing on their own and on each other's media through a variety of performative modes. The essays in this collection explore what we shall describe as the "intertheatricality" and "remediation" of such interaction by themelves capitalizing on the multimedia synergy of the world-wide web channeled through the EMC Imprint to afford us as moderns to actively engage with early modern ballads and performance.
 
The Introduction by Patricia Fumerton describes the critical stakes of the volume.  You might prefer to start with the Table of Contents.
Edited by Patricia Fumerton

 

1. Introduction: Multimedia and Multimodal Theatricality

By Patricia Fumerton Read


I: Remediating Ballads and Plays

2. Shakespeare in Snippets: Ballads, Plays, and the Performance of Remediation

By Lori Humphrey Newcomb, with Michelle M. Chan, Hilary Gross, Kyle R. Johnston, Sabrina Y. Lee, Kathryn E. O’Toole, Michael J. Ruiz, and Stacy Wykle, University of Illinois. Read


II. Marketing Theatricality: Producers and Consumers of/in Ballads and Plays

3. “Hear for your love, and buy for your money”: Ballads and Theater as Experiential Commodities

By Claire M. Busse Read
 

4. She’s Crafty, She Gets Around: Women’s Craft and Commodification in Ballads

By Kris McAbee Read


III: Performing Knowledge, Senses, and Emotions

5. Dangerous Conjectures: Ophelia’s Ballad Performance

By David Baker, with Travis Alexander, Adam Engel, Katharine Landers, Mary Learner, and Ashley Werlinich Read
 

6. Ballads on the Brain: A Neurobiological Hypothesis

By Pamela Reinagel Read


IV. Staging Deformity and Female Disease

7. The True Form and Shape of Caliban: Monstrous Birth at the Edge of the Human

By Rochelle Smith Read
 

8. “Greensickness carrion’: Re-reading Capulet through Broadside Ballads

By Jessica C. Murphy Read


V: Beyond the Last Act

9. Ballads+: The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet and its After-piece Jig

By Matthew J. Smith and Julia Reinhard Lupton Read
 

10. Afterword

By Bruce R. Smith Read

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