Clegg, Roger. "“A Ballad Intituled a Pleasant Newe Jigge”: The Relationship between the Broadside Ballad and the Dramatic Jig."

Clegg, Roger. "“A Ballad Intituled a Pleasant Newe Jigge”: The Relationship between the Broadside Ballad and the Dramatic Jig." Huntington Library Quarterly 79, no. 2 (Summer 2016): 301-322.


Abstract:
Dialogues in song set to popular tunes describes both the broadside ballad and the dramatic jig, and no doubt both forms of popular entertainment are related. If the dramatic jig was a sung-drama featuring props, disguising, and dance, to be acted out on the common stage when a play was done, might the broadside ballad also be a script to be acted out as a dramatic performance? This article considers the relationship between ballad and jig and explores the extent to which the surviving broadside ballads from the seventeenth century may preserve in print vestiges of the stage jig.