“He is turned a ballad-maker”: Broadside Appropriations in Early Modern England
Fisher, Joshua B.
Early Modern Literary Studies 9.2 (September 2003)
Abstract
Responding to an enduring critical heritage that often restricts ballads to the hermetic and inferior realm of the popular sphere, I argue that appropriations of the broadside ballad across lines of social class and genre underscore the limitations of treating “popular” and “elite” categories as isolated spaces that exist solely in opposition to one another. While it is impossible to attribute any kind of unified intentionality to these appropriations within the space of drama, poetry, and coterie collections, I suggest that all share a certain degree of indeterminacy with regard to distinguishing between subversive uses and those uses that reiterate the authority of dominant hierarchies. Such indeterminacy stands as a complex response to the burgeoning print culture, whereby an author’s position is marked both by the anxiety provoked by a rapidly emerging (and less discriminating) reading and writing public and by a desire to announce at least some degree of artistic autonomy. Because the broadside ballad epitomizes both the anxieties and the possibilities that surround the growing print culture, the medium is an ideal site within which to explore the contradictory forces inherent in shaping literary and cultural identities.
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