English Broadside Ballad Archive

Clowne. What hast heere? Ballads?

Mopsa. Pray now buy some: I loue a ballet in print, a life, for then we are sure they are true.

Autolicus. Here’s one, to a very dolefull tune, how a Vsurers wife was brought to bed of twenty money baggs at a burthen, and how she long’d to eate Adders heads, and Toads carbonado’d.

Mopsa. Is it true, thinke you?

Autolicus. Very true, and but a moneth old.

William Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale (1609)

Broadside ballads, single-sided printed pages with woodcut illustrations, a poem and the name of the tune that a...