As projects in the digital humanities make early modern broadside ballads more accessible to modern readers, these cheap print songs and poems are becoming an increasingly important tool for literary and cultural criticism. How might our attention to ''low'' texts, like ballads, change the way that we read and think about Shakespeare's plays? First, Shakespeare's references to ballads in As You Like It and A Winter's Tale show the author's engagement with the growing sixteenth and seventeenth century ballad market. Second, ballad adaptations of Shakespeare plays like the The Taming of the Shrew and Titus Andronicus show the ways that ballad writers and sellers responded to and adapted the plays. In each of these cases, the street and the theater are closer than they might otherwise seem; Shakespeare's plays respond to the growth of the Renaissance print market by making ballads a part of performance and script, while ballad street literature interprets theatrical plots through the genre of popular song.Broadside ballads, songs and poems printed on a single folio sheet of paper (also called a 'broadside', or, if double-sided, a 'broadsheet'), were a cultural phenomenon made possible by the rapidly developing market for print literature in the 16th and 17th centuries in England. Popular and cheap -a ballad cost about a penny in the early 17th century -the printing of broadsides marked a shift from an oral folk ballad tradition towards a 'multimedia' print distribution of popular songs and stories. Ballads, which could be read as texts, sung aloud to familiar or new tunes, and displayed for the artistry of their woodcut print images, were printed for mass distribution in the black-letter (gothic) type in which children learned to read. They were sold in shops alongside pamphlets, plays, and books but were also famously peddled by singing 'criers' who sold their wares in the streets. In this manner, ballads saturated the market and were a phenomenon that reached all levels of society in a way that other print materials could not. 1 Ballads were visual (often pasted on walls as advertisements or for decoration) and aural (sung and heard) as much as textual, and their affordability made them easily (or more easily) accessible to readers, listeners, and consumers from a wide range of class and educational backgrounds.Recent critical interests in the field of literary studies have moved toward material and cheap-print texts, until recently ignored in favor of more canonical sources. With the rise of New Historicism and Cultural Materialism in the 1980s, critics devoted new attention to the study of literary texts as cultural artifacts, and of cultural and historical events as texts in and of themselves. This move made space in literary studies for previously ignored texts but primarily focused on the ways that these new materials illuminated our knowledge of the upper class and elite cultural players. More recently, this mode of scholarship has expanded to include more focus on working and middle-class subjects, primaril...
