The English political broadside ballad in the second half of the Seventeenth Century

Abstract

__More solid things do not show the complexion of the times so well as Ballads and Libels__. This is how the lawyer and scholar John Selden (1584__1654) described an important characteristic of the songs that he collected in printed form, the so-called broadside ballads. This study is an examination of an aspect of popular culture that reached its zenith in the mid-seventeenth century. Among the issues under discussion are the ways in which broadside ballads acted almost as a subversive subculture, with writers, engravers and printers drawing on a shared and allusive body of subject matter. Thus, while the broadside ballad may be a popular and unsophisticated form of literature, it is not a simple and straightforward song. Its message is often shaped to a considerable extent by allusions and references to other broadside ballads, and the seventeenth-century ballad audience was apparently expected t o be familiar with a wide range of ballads in order to be able to interpret the __ sometimes subversive __ references to ballad literature. Issues such as the choice of a tune, and the printers__ decisions on illustrations and layout are of great importance in this respect as they may considerably influence the message of the political broadside ballad.