Professor Stern is available to meet with graduate students who would like to discuss their research with her. Please email [email protected] to book an appointment.
Tuesday, March 30, 2027, 4:00 pm
Victoria College Chapel
91 Charles St W.
Playwrights often started out as song writers and regularly product-placed ballads within their dramas. My talk will be about the theatrical broadsheet ballads sold outside early modern playhouses. It will introduce the ‘balladmongers’ (ballad merchants), who sung and sold ballads, and the printers who published them. And it will provide examples of ballads to be found in plays, about plays or after plays by Shakespeare, Jonson and others. Advertisements and souvenirs, ballads constituted a crucial though now forgotten form of theatrical merchandise and musical paratext.
Tiffany Stern
Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama, University of Birmingham
Tiffany Stern is Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama at The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, and a Fellow of the British Academy. A scholar of theatre and book history, she has written over sixty articles, edited five plays and two scholarly collections, and authored six major books: Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan (2000), Making Shakespeare (2004), Shakespeare in Parts (with Simon Palfrey, 2007), Documents of Performance (2009), Shakespeare, Malone and the Problems of Chronology (2023) and Ballad Business (2026). Her editorial leadership includes past roles with New Mermaids and the Norton Anthology of English Literature, alongside her current position as general editor of the Arden Shakespeare: Fourth Series.
