Broadside Ballads

The broadside ballad was one of the most popular Renaissance genres of cheap print. In a general sense, a ballad is a story set to song. However, the term ‘ballad’ resists singular definition. Ballads intersect with many literary and artistic genres in the Renaissance, lending the term multiple meanings. In fourteenth‐ and fifteenth‐century references to ballads, it can be difficult to distinguish between the notion of a light, simple song and the more formalballade, a verse form consisting of two or three stanzas composed of seven or eight metrically consistent lines. The ballade form entails an envoy, or refrain, from stanza to stanza, yet many light songs that may be recognized as ballads also employ refrains, further blurring the lines between the two ostensibly distinct terms. Similarly, ballads of the Renaissance were frequently songs that accompanied dances, as in theOxford English dictionary'sexample from John Olde's 1594 translation of Erasmus: ‘That can stirre vs, not to wanton dauncynges or folyshe ballettes’. Because of this practice of joining song and dance, by the seventeenth century ballads can be easily conflated with the choreographed dramatic entertainments known as ‘ballets’. What tends to distinguish ballads from the myriad of musical, theatrical, and verse forms with which they intersect, is the perception of the genre as popular (as opposed to purely elite), if not downright frivolous. However, to think of ballads as merely ‘low’ culture would be to misread their tremendous reach across not only generic boundaries but social ones as well.