This chapter is on ‘about-play ballads’ that might be sources, performance reflections or playbook reflections of plays. The first section is about the play-ballads of Christopher Marlowe’s Faustus, Tamburlaine, Jew of Malta. The second section is about ballads for other notable plays: William Sampson’s The Vow Breaker, The Puritan Widow, Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, Arden of Faversham; Mucedorus. The third section considers plays that relate to more than one ballad: Thomas Dekker, William Rowley, John Ford and John Webster’s lost The Late Murder in White Chapel or Keep the Widow Waking, and an anonymous play, perhaps by Thomas Heywood, King Edward the Fourth. The chapter shows that while some plays had ballads that told only a corner of their story, others had several linked ballads telling or retelling multiple bits of the narrative. Many more extant ballads are play ones than has been recognised before, and they all modify plays in extraordinary ways.

Travel or adventure drama became a staple of English theatre with British maritime expansion. Renaissance drama’s mercantile poetics lionized middle-class traders, but foreign exotica also provoked deep unease. The emergent imperial consciousness was at once ambitious and anxious. The nascent British Empire’s dynamic of emulation and disavowal produces “peripheral heroics.” Voyage drama’s glorification of English deeds abroad follows Marlowe’s Tamburlaine’s arc of heroic action with unlikely protagonists – women, middle-class adventurers, pirates, and merchants – rising from low social origins to claim a place at imperial centers. Their decidedly middle-class status is defensively justified by nobility of character. A strong Christian strain frames that valor in terms of humility and even martyrdom. Racialized encounters with Islamic characters abjure the foreign taint, by redirecting it at European rivals, the Spanish and the Dutch. Defined by English marginality, this heroism is marked by ambivalences, with shifting and flexible modes of gendering and racializations. Through transnational figures with malleable identities, Renaissance drama negotiated English marginality in an interimperial context, exploring through peripheral heroics English desires for and fears of transculturation, their emulation and disavowal of empire.