Living English Broadside Ballads, 1550–1750: Song, Art, Dance, Culture

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of scholarly citation, none of this work may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. For information address the University of Pennsylvania Press, 3905 Spruce Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112.Dialogues in song set to popular tunes describes both the broadside ballad and the dramatic jig, and no doubt both forms of popular entertainment are related. If the dramatic jig was a sung-drama featuring props, disguising, and dance, to be acted out on the common stage when a play was done, might the broadside ballad also be a script to be acted out as a dramatic performance? This article considers the relationship between ballad and jig and explores the extent to which the surviving broadside ballads from the seventeenth century may preserve in print vestiges of the stage jig