The most important change in the format of the broadside ballad occurred with the regular inclusion of woodcuts and a greater effort to coordinate these images with the texts. Only one-fourth of extant sixteenth century ballads carry woodcuts, whereas five-sixths of religious ballads produced between 1600 and 1640 contain woodcuts—Watt confirming a similar proportion for secular ballads (Although she does not list the proportion of secular ballads, Watt does mention in her footnotes that “the same trend can be confirmed for the secular ballads” [78]). Certainly, woodcuts made a ballad more attractive, but they also broadened a ballad’s audience by providing a visual aid for the less literate. This development, Watt theorizes, “is one of the best indications of a growing commercial sense in the ballad trade, and an awareness of the demands of the public" (Watt 79).

In contrast to the addition of woodcuts, printers were dropping authors’ names more frequently from the ballads. This anonymity shifted the ballad from an authors’ instrument into what Watt calls “a publisher’s medium, governed by time-tested commercial dictates" (Watt 81). There were two primary exceptions to the authorless ballad. Some ballad writers, such as Martin Parker, maintained a popular following, and their names were printed on the ballads in an appeal to that popularity. In other instances, the main character and narrator of a ballad also, logically, was claimed to be the author; however, these narrator-authors were often fictitious creations.

A final significant change in ballad format was the more frequent naming of tunes on the ballads themselves. In the sixteenth century roughly one-third of ballads included a tune; the proportion increased to four-fifths by the seventeenth century (Watt 80). The greater need for specifying tunes points to the greater reach of the ballads, as sellers relied less on word of mouth or subtle indications to communicate a ballad’s corresponding melody.

All of these developments indicate that the ballads were reaching more people; as we might expect, with a larger audience, the ballads had to change in content to appeal to a broader array of tastes.

Originally seized on by both popular and sermonizing writers, the ballad came to be associated primarily with the secular, so that, according to Watt, “by 1624 it was a commonplace to situate the ballads in cultural opposition to the Bible; to portray them as an alternative sort of religion" (Watt 39). In the Early Elizabethan period at least one-third of the ballads dealt with religious themes, declining to less than one-tenth after 1624 (Watt 47).Yet, this does not correspond to a decline in the overall production of religious themed print, which maintained itself throughout the period (See Watt 69 for more detail). Rather, because the ballad increasingly called forth a variety of immoral associations—from the scandalous content usually drawn from outside the scriptures, to ‘prurient’ dances performed to the ballads, to the ‘vagrant’ ballad sellers themselves—the broadside ballad provided a less than ideal medium for delivering the Protestants’ religious doctrine. However, while educated Protestants might have recognized a contradiction between ballads and the practices of their religion, to the average person such a contradiction may not have been obvious. Religious themes did persist in the ballads, but those that remained in the popular stock tended to be parsed down to an emotional core or a cast of archetypal characters, and the complexity of the Protestant message had been lost.

The broadside ballad defined its audience inclusively, and even where it distanced itself or seemed to be distanced from the religious, it continued to circulate a religious message along with a secular one. Throughout Watt’s study, the ballad appears to have popular appeal. But, it was not until the seventeenth century that this fact led to the repackaging of the ballad into what perhaps can be called a more commercially sensitive and viable product.

~ Paxton Hehmeyer