Keynote Topics

Details about the talks from our visitors are coming in. Bruce Smith's title will be "Within, Without, Withinwards: The Circulation of Sound in Shakespeare's Theater," and Christopher Marsh will speak on "Balladry as a Multi-Media Matrix: Best-Selling Songs and Their Significance in Seventeeth-Century England."

Here is a synopsis of Christopher Marsh's paper:

The humble broadside ballad was many things: a song for singing; a text for reading; a picture to look at; a script for dramatic performance; and a piece of music for dancing (ballads were also recycled as linings for tins, fillers for book spines, and toilet paper). In this talk, an attempt will be made to reconstruct the multi-faceted system of signification through which early modern English people composed and comprehended ballads. It will focus in particular on the links between ballads and the capacity of this interconnectedness to generate meaning. Tunes moved from text to text. Pictures were used again and again in shifting combinations. Ballads were full of verbal references to one another. Successful songs were imitated and satirised. Rival composers engaged in ding-dong dialogues. In all these respects, the significance of a particular song cannot be imagined merely by reading its silent and unmoving text. This observation will be developed through an exploration of the period’s top 100 songs, as identified by the leading ballad publishers of the seventeenth century.