Posy Ballad
Posy Ballad (Broadside Ballad), 1601-1640‘A delicate new Ditty composed of a / Ring: being I fancy none but thee alone: sent as a New-years gift / by a Lover to his Sweet-heart.’
A broadside ballad is a form of cheap print, readily available to most working people in the first half of the seventeenth century. It is a single, poster-sized page which combines text and tune. The verses were set to well-known tunes, often with striking woodcuts images which relate (loosely) to the story. The stories recounted in ballads were meant to entertain while delivering a moral message in the form of advice or warning. Common themes include love and courtship, the supernatural and warnings against vices. They circulated widely in their printed form as well as being memorised and re-sung. The tales told through ballads circulated widely as part of a rich oral and aural culture and derive from the same stock of stories as plays written for performance. As prints, they might be pinned on the wall in alehouses and domestic houses, where they might prompt people to sing. This ballad is a song about the words of affection and fidelity written on a ring.
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| Object Type | Broadside Ballad |
| Year | 1601-1640 |
| Material | |
| Owned By | University of Glasgow Library S113516 |
| Keywords | playing; socialising; reading; looking; consuming; collecting; decoration; domestic; leisure; gender; courtship; performance; literacy; visual arts; print |
| Image Credit | Posy Ballad, print, 1601-40, University of Glasgow Library, Euing; used by permission of English Broadside Ballad Archive at EBBA 31757, CC BY-NC 4.0 DEED Attribution-Non-Commercial 4.0 International |