SOURCE: “Literary and social conditions for the rise, distribution and textual structure of the street ballad,” in The Rise of the English Street Ballad, 1550-1650, translated by Gayna Walls, Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 1-27.

In the following excerpt, Würzbach analyzes the relationship between English ballads, theater, and commerce between 1550 and 1650.

1.1 Performance and Rendition

The text of the street ballad, available to us in broadsides and in edited collections, some of which are annotated, was usually sung and sometimes read to the audience of the time as part of the selling process. Performance and sale were closely linked, and it is only later analyses which artificially separated these two integral aspects of the street ballad.

‘Performance’ and ‘rendition’ are extremes of possible textual realization. They denote on the one hand dramatic role-play, which is evidently required in many of the texts, and simple rendition on the other. The...