Department of English

• Monday, April 3, 2017 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm

Class of 1978 Pavilion in the Kislak Center on the 6th Floor of Van Pelt-Dietrich Library

Please join us Monday, April 3rd, for this semester’s next meeting of the Workshop in the History of Material Texts<https://www.english.upenn.edu/graduate/working-groups/materialtexts>. We will convene at our usual time and place: 5:15pm in the Class of 1978 Pavilion in the Kislak Center on the 6th Floor of Van Pelt-Dietrich Library.

We will be welcoming Tiffany Stern (Royal Holloway, University of London), for a talk entitled: "Playing Songs and Singing Plays: Ballads and Plays in the Time of Shakespeare"

Tiffany writes:

My talk will be on two kinds of early modern ‘play ballads’: ballads that are sung in plays; and ballads that tell the stories of plays. It will consider the way play ballads were traded at playhouses, performed as post-play entertainments, and sold to promote playbooks. Given how frequently ballads advertised Shakespeare on page and stage – while Shakespeare’s plays, in performance and in playbooks, frequently advertised ballads – is it possible that Shakespeare himself was a ‘balladmonger’?

Tiffany Stern is Chair of Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London, having previously been Professor of Early Modern Drama at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan (2000), Making Shakespeare (2004), Shakespeare in Parts (with Simon Palfrey, 2007) and Documents of Performance in Early Modern England (2009). She has edited the anonymous King Leir (2001), Sheridan’s The Rivals (2004), Farquhar’s Recruiting Officer(2010), and Brome’s Jovial Crew (2014), and co-edited, with Farah Karim-Cooper, Shakespeare’s Theatres and the Effects of Performance (2013). She is general editor of New Mermaids and Arden Shakespeare 4.