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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.