‘Plays Inside Out’: Theatre, Marketing and Ballads

Watch the Shakespeare Institute's Professor Tiffany Stern present her inaugural lecture, recorded 9 May 2022 at the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon.

The Shakespeare Institute in Birmingham

‘Plays Inside Out’: Theatre, Marketing and Ballads

Professor Tiffany Stern,9 May 2022

This talk is on the mutual and complimentary relationship between plays and broadside ballads in Shakespeare’s theatre. Investigating who wrote ballads, who sold them and where, it asks us to rethink the relationship between theatre and retail, performance and print, high and low literature, song and dialogue. Shakespeare and Jonson, it suggests, are just two of the authors who used ballads as strategic cross-marketing – or what, these days, we call product placement.

Inaugural lectures are a landmark in academic life, held on the appointment of new professorships. Visit our College of Arts and Law Inaugural Lectures website to view the archive of previous talks from our academic staff.

‘Plays Inside Out’: Theatre, Marketing and Ballads