Playwrights, including Shakespeare, often started out as song writers and regularly product-placed ballads within their dramas. In this enlightening study, Tiffany Stern asks who wrote, financed, published and marketed theatrical broadsheet ballads and investigates the migrants, women, and individuals with disabilities who sung and sold them outside playhouses – in striking contrast to the white, able-bodied and male actors who performed inside. With case-studies ranging from ballads in plays by Shakespeare and Jonson, sung after plays as jigs or 'themes' by the clowns Tarlton, Kemp and Armin, and performed about the plays of Marlowe, Kyd, Shakespeare and others, Ballad Business argues that broadsheet ballads were often the first and sometimes only parts of the performance to be published. Advertisements and souvenirs, ballads constituted a crucial though now forgotten form of theatrical merchandise and musical paratext.

‘For anyone who thinks that merchandising and fanfictions are a recent development, Tiffany Stern's remarkable book will show that they were part of the business of theatre and the business of ballad-mongering in Shakespeare's London. Stern brilliantly explores how the two trades – making theatre and selling ballads – collaborated as she explores ballads before, during and after play performances. She transforms our sense of the playhouse culture of Early Modern London and our view of playgoing will never be the same again.'

Peter Holland - McMeel Family Professor in Shakespeare Studies, University of NotreDame

‘Tiffany Stern's exciting new book will transform our understanding of the interrelationship between theatrical culture and popular song in the early modern period. It offers the most comprehensive study of the theatre ballad to date, and a masterclass in deft, patient, historical research of an ephemeral source that not only outlasted many of the plays they speak to but can also lead us to the men and women of a rarely heard theatrical soundscape: the balladmongers, the ballad writers and their printers, and, of course, the would-be spectators queuing outside the playhouses.'

Jennifer Richards - English (2001) Professor, University of Cambridge