Transformation or Conformation? The English Broadside Ballad and the Playhouse, 1797–1844

ABSTRACT:This article considers the migration of theatre music into the English broadside ballad tradition from 1797 to 1844, the most prolific era of the broadside during which the fierce professional competitors John Pitts (active 1797–1844) and James Catnach (active 1813–41) operated their presses in the Seven Dials, near London's patent theatres. The discussion is based on the findings of a database that was constructed systematically to cross-reference 520 theatrical works from the London stage with 11,432 broadside songs of this period from the Bodleian Library's broadside collections. By considering the scale and mechanism of the migration of theatre music into the broadside tradition—as well as examining the characteristics of the songs themselves—this article explores the effects of theatre music on nineteenth-century street literature and song, evaluating the ways in which theatre songs transformed the broadside tradition, and the ways in which they conformed to it.


TRANSFORMATION OR CONFORMATION? THE ENGLISH BROADSIDE BALLAD AND THE PLAYHOUSE, 1797-1844
By Georgina Bartlett * The English broadside ballad is a deceptive tradition. As a form of cheap literature, it is deceptively evanescent: a typical broadside ballad consists of just a printed sheet of strophic verses, woodcut illustrations, and perhaps a tune reference. In its day, it was common and 'ephemeral'-a term coined by broadside collector John Johnson (1882-1956 to describe street literature, implying that the pertinency, if not the actual survival, of a broadside would be of a limited duration. 1 Yet the flimsiness of the broadside's physical form can be misleading: the tradition enjoyed remarkable longevity in England, thriving from the sixteenth century through to the start of the twentieth century. Furthermore, the individual printed sheets proved more durable than the term 'ephemeral' would lead one to expect: modern and historical generations of the broadside coexisted for much of the tradition's long history, the former being purchased on the streets by the wage-earning classes as entertainment of fleeting interest, while collectors amassed vast quantities of the old and new varieties in their libraries, carefully pasting them into books and preserving them as relics of cultural history. The broadside ballad is also deceptively silent. As a sheet of paper featuring verses but no musical notation, it appears to be divorced from the realm of sound, music, and performance, yet the broadside ballad tradition actually straddled cultures-material, textual, and oral. It did so by being a musical tradition whose longevity attests to the vibrancy of English song and its practices. Though tens of thousands of individual broadside sheets still exist in library collections, the broadside tradition has proven a complicated one to study. Experts on English literature have historically led broadside research: the creators of the English Broadside Ballad Archive of the Early Modern Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara, for example, have contributed greatly to our understanding of early broadsides. 2 But the words of broadsides have always been the easiest object of investigation Cox Jensen has posited that a significant proportion of songs from late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century broadsides came from the London theatres and other performance venues, including the pleasure gardens. 9 Broadside printers, who operated largely outside the copyright regulations of the Stationer's Company, could easily have pirated songs from theatrical productions to sell as a form of unlicensed merchandise on the street, trading on the popularity of songs from the stage. This was hardly innovative: a bidirectional musical dialogue between stage and broadside had, as Claude Simpson shows, long existed; indeed, John Gay's The Beggar's Opera of 1728 and the later ballad operas it spawned traded precisely on this musical exchange. 10 Scholars such as Sarah F. Williams and Roy Lamson-in addition to Cox Jensen-have identified some playhouse tunes used in nineteenth-century broadsides. 11 However, without a methodical examination, we cannot know the scale of the crossover of stage music to the street in the nineteenth century. Research dedicated to finding stage songs in later broadsides would significantly improve our understanding of the nineteenth-century broadside tradition and its music, while illuminating more of the long and fascinating relationship between the playhouse and street song in England. As I show below, the playhouse had a strong influence on the songs that were sung on the streets in the early nineteenth century, even though broadside verses could deviate from playhouse originals, implying that singers of these broadsides adapted rather than duplicated the original music. In this study, I seek to contextualize 'theatrical broadsides'-as I have termed these songs-within the vast, dynamic, English 'broadside ballad' trade of the nineteenth century, during which the true (i.e. single sheet) broadside was the most prominentbut not the only-printed form. The 'broadside ballad' came in a range of formats, including the traditional one of a single ballad on the recto of an oblong ballad sheet. More commonly, however, two 'broadsides' were printed on a single recto leaf in standard book format, which the printer cut down the middle; the resulting single ballad was then sold as a so-called 'slip ballad'. Ballads were also printed as 'long song' broadsides and 'garlands': both were issued as a series of ballads packed tightly on a single side of the sheet. Another medium for ballad literature was the chapbook, which consisted of nested or sewn leaves that created a booklet (though chapbooks could also be sold as uncut, unfolded sheets that customers would construct themselves). 12 Chapbooks would typically contain between twenty and forty ballads, with a title page (or its equivalent) and occasionally a list of contents. While broadside printers often included an imprint, they did not include a date.
I focus on broadsides from 1797 to 1844 because these dates bookend the domination of the broadside trade by two printers: John Pitts (1765-1844, active in the broadside trade from 1797 to 1844), and James Catnach (1792-1841, active in the broadside trade from 1813 to 1841). 13 Pitts, as the elder of the two printers, started his press during the decline of the London presses of John Evans and William Dicey-the pillars of the cheap print trade in the last half of the eighteenth century. Catnach, while younger than Pitts, competed with him fiercely. Both printers-along with some minor publishers of broadsides like Thomas Birt-were based in the Seven Dials, located in the parish of St Giles in the Fields and within several minutes' walk of London's two patent playhouses, Drury Lane and Covent Garden. Pitts and Catnach ceased to direct their respective presses within five years of each other; from mid-century, their successors ushered in a new, distinctive, and perhaps final, generation of broadside printing in London. 14 My study looks exclusively at the Bodleian Library's holdings of broadsides, digitized for the open-access resource Broadside Ballads Online (henceforth BBO). There are six collections within the Bodleian's broadside holdings that include items dating between 1797 and 1844: these are the John Johnson Collection, the Harding Collection, the Firth Collection, the Curzon Collection, the Douce Collection, and the Bodleian's own Rare Books Collection. Together, these six collections include 11,432 broadsides from this period in a variety of print formats. 15 One of the great advantages of BBO is that the first lines of the ballad songs are searchable, and variants of search results are grouped together as a 'ballad work', in accordance with Steve Roud's earlier ballad-indexing system. This allows first lines (incipits) to be cross-referenced against other materials with remarkable accuracy, compensating to some extent for the absence of consistent song titles across most broadside ballads. Searches can also be made by date and date span. Because printers did not usually date their broadsides, I have had to date them by comparing the printer's mark and address to what we know about the history of printing houses. For broadsides without imprint, I use material evidence-song provenance, typeface, style of presentation-to assess if the broadside might have been printed from 1797 to 1844; if yes, I have included the broadside in this study.
For this study, I built a database that allowed me to cross-reference the 11,432 BBO broadsides apparently produced from 1797 to 1844 with the songs from 520 musical productions mounted at London playhouses (serious and comic opera, pantomime, ballad opera, and comedy with occasional song). In terms of the dates of 12  the theatrical works I included in the database, my scope had to be quite flexible: I included entertainments that incorporated music and were staged in London during the period in question (1797-1844), tracing their dates from press notices and theatre annals, as well as other, earlier productions that influenced social or musical culture to the end of the eighteenth and into the nineteenth century (the songs of some theatrical works that had themselves disappeared from the stage remained popular in concerts and on the street for years afterwards). Significantly, I found that theatrical broadsides tended to be drawn from English comic operas-that is, sentimental stage works whose dialogue is interlaced with self-contained vocal numbers. Save for a chorus from Carl Maria von Weber's Der Freischütz (premiered 1821), few broadside melodies came from all-song operas, whether from the Continent or London's Italian operas at the King's Theatre. 16 At its completion, the database that I compiled shows that 205 songs from 132 theatrical works were reprinted as broadsides, on 932 broadsides in BBO. These figures are not comprehensive, of course: many broadside sheets probably were lost, and my project cannot account for broadsides outside those catalogued for BBO. My study required a searchable, systematized database of nineteenth-century broadsides, which is rare. For instance, the collection of Sir Frederick Madden (1801-73) held at the Cambridge University Library contains around 30,000 broadsides-about the same as those in the Bodleian's entire collection. Unfortunately, Cambridge has not digitized their ballads; to consider the Madden Collection alongside BBO in a meaningful way, I would have had single-handedly to design an online searchable database equivalent to the Bodleian's before building my database to cross-reference theatre songs with the digitized broadsides-an impossible task. The Madden collection also transmits its creator's preferences and collecting habits: seemingly, Madden bought up printers' stock to build his large collection. 17 Such preferences risk distorting the historical picture: printers' stock might represent what had failed to sell. BBO, as an amalgam of several smaller collections, probably represents the broadside trade more accurately than does a single, large collection like Madden's. I cannot, and do not, claim to have captured in full the legacy of the early nineteenthcentury theatrical broadside. Rather, my findings indicate what music migrated from playhouse to street and imply why and how it did so, providing a basis for future investigation and broadside scholarship. In cross-referencing 520 stage works with 11,432 broadside ballads, I have gathered data from broadsides of a diverse set of printers and collectors that is significant in size. Having collated theatrical broadsides in BBO and identified their source theatrical songs, I will focus on three characteristics of this repertory: favoured song subjects, verse forms, and productions, considering how theatre music transformed and assimilated to the broadside ballad tradition of the early nineteenth century.

SUBJECTS
The vast majority of theatrical broadsides from 1797 to 1844 that I found in BBO fall into one of six categories: songs that are instructive, songs that are about describing a character ('character song)', and songs about patriotism, drinking, hunting, and love. The borders between these categories are often blurred, and several theatrical broadsides do not neatly fit into any of them. But using descriptive categories for the songs' subjects helps us to understand the collection of theatrical broadsides as a whole. A good example of an instructive theatrical broadside is 'Trotting Along the Road': issued by Pitts between 1802 and 1819, it comes from the popular comic opera Family Quarrels (1802) by the playwright Thomas Dibdin. William Reeve composed the original song, though John Braham also contributed to the score-as well as Charles Incledon or John Davy, according to some sources. 18 GAFFER Grist, Gaffer's son, and his little Jack Ass, Trotting along the road, Thro' a gossiping straggling village must pass, Before they could reach their abode; Master Johnny rode Jacky which old Gaffer led, The villagers thought the boy monstrous ill bred, So they made honest Gaffer get up in his stead, Trotting along the road, trotting, &c.
They didn't go far e'er they heard people talk, Trotting along the road, As how it was stupid for either to walk, Before they could reach their abode, So they both rose, when proud of his horse and his self, A farmer cries down would you kill the poor elf If you was an ass, would you like it yourself, Trotting along the road, trotting, &c.
Next they carried the jack ass who never said nay Trotting along the road, But all changes endured like the Vicar of Bray, Before he would quit his abode; Yet e'en this wou'dn't please ev'ry ill natur'd tyke And therefore this moral must forcibly strike, We should manage our jack ass just as we like Trotting along the road, trotting, trotting along the road. 19 I categorize a song such as this one as instructive because it teaches a lesson-about love, courtship, marriage, honesty, or in the case of 'Trotting Along the Road', about the benefit of keeping one's own counsel ('manage our jack ass just as we like'). The lesson usually keys off of the preceding dialogue in the drama, halting the plot's progress to do so. Significantly, broadsides had traditionally been a medium for public instruction; this practice embedded itself deeply in playhouse entertainment once ballad operas, from The Beggar's Opera onward, made the street ballad's instructive address typical English stage fare. 20 Instructive theatrical broadsides drew directly on this precedent. A second category of theatrical broadsides is the 'character song'. The term 'character song' was used by one of the ballad sellers interviewed by the Victorian journalist Henry Mayhew for his four-volume book London Labour and the London Poor, written during the 1840s. 21 These songs centre on a single character (which may or may not be the narrator) and his/her defining experiences or characteristics. The events described in the song do not always follow each other neatly, or progress to a conclusion; rather, they provide vignettes through which a character is described to the audience. Very often, this character did not appear as a dramatis persona in the original entertainment and the events in the song did not relate directly to the plot (much like with the instructive songs above). These songs did have a strong narrative element, however-linking with the narrative mode of the Early Modern broadside.
Many character songs on stage concerned a British sailor, or 'Jack Tar' as he was often named in popular culture. The lionizing of the maritime/naval commoner was an important cultural movement in Britain around the turn of the nineteenth century. As Betty T. Bennett explains, 'the epithets once reserved only for officers of the army and navy were applied to ordinary fighting men. They were ennobled not only in their military role, but given credit for excellent, albeit rough, intelligence, and sensitivity as well.' 22 Charles Dibdin Sr often featured these 'ennobled' yet 'rough' sailors; to quote Cox Jensen, Dibdin's 'patriotism was sentimental, introverted, and inclusive, focusing on the heroism of the ordinary British sailor'. 23 Dibdin's songs were assiduously pirated by the broadside press, and his model for the character of the British seaman was widely emulated by other writers. A fine example of a Dibdin-inflected Jack Tar character song is 'When at War on the Ocean' from The Glorious First of June (1794), by Richard Sheridan, James Cobb, and possibly others, with songs composed and selected by Stephen Storace. 24 'When at War on the Ocean' was one of Storace's selections, being the c.1785 'Favorite Sea Song', titled When in War on the Ocean. 25 From its song sheet, we know it was performed at one of the professional, fashionable concerts of the Anacreontic Society (1766-92) during the 1780s. 26 In this air, the character and nature of the British sailor crystallizes in an account of a sea battle: WHEN in war on the ocean we meet the proud foe, Tho' with ardour for conquest our bosoms may glow, Let us see on their vessels Old England's flag wave, They shall find British sailors only conquer to save.
And now their pale ensigns we view from afar, With three cheers they are welcome by each British tar, Whilst the genius of Britain still bids us advance, And the guns hurl in thunder defiance to France. Now yard-arm and yard-arm we've come along side, See our guns are well pointed we'll soon lower their pride, While the blood from the scuppers began for to run, See their fire is slackened the fight is just done.
But mark our last broadside she sinks down she does, Quickly man all your boats they no longer are foes, To snatch a brave fellow from a watery grave, Is worthy a Britain who conquers to save. 27 Like the instructive ballad discussed above, the character song often bore little or no relation to the action or other characters; that Storace had interpolated the original song's verses into The Glorious First of June wordbook emphasizes this.
Patriotic songs resonated with character songs about Jack Tar and other martial commoners, but, in their calls to arms, they were a part of a longer history of rousing, patriotic stage songs, stretching back to Henry Purcell's 'Britons strike Home' in Bonduca, or the British Heroine of 1695. 28 The demand for action distinguishes the patriotic from the character song: these numbers tell what Britons will achieve for their country, rather than of past glories. During such numbers, dramatis personae and audience members may both be stirred to action. Metrically strict, with striding melodic lines, the nineteenth-century patriotic stage song typically ended the work in an uplifting collective number. This was the case for 'Behold upon the Swelling Wave' taken from the 24 The Glorious First of June was premiered at Drury Lane on 2 July 1794. 25  Because leaping intervals usually dominated a patriotic song's melody, and because vocal and instrumental lines were often entwined, patriotic songs were unlikely candidates for becoming theatrical broadsides. Indeed, there are not many. But, once turned into a broadside, patriotic theatre songs circulated broadly: according to BBO holdings, from 1797 to 1844, 'Rule Britannia' earned fourteen print runs, 32 while 'Come All You Jolly Sailors Bold' (known as 'The Arethusa' or 'The Saucy Arethusa') had eleven, 33 and 'Stand to Your Guns' had eight. 34 Besides loyalty to country, another hallowed subject of theatrical broadsides was alcohol consumption-the drinking song. 35 Some drinking songs were integrated into the action of their theatrical works; others were incidental to the plot. At times, drinking songs told a story, in keeping with their 'tall tale' tradition. This is the case for the theatrical broadside published between 1828 and 1829 by Thomas Birt, based on 'Dear Sir, This Brown Jug' from the highly successful pastiche opera, The Poor Soldier words he reportedly fitted to a common tune. The drinking song was not in the Poor Soldier manuscript submitted to stage censors, implying that it was added shortly after The Poor Soldier opened on 4 November 1783: 37 DEAR Tom, this brown jug, that now foams with mild ale, (Of which I will drink to sweet Nan of the vale) Was once Toby Philpot, as thirsty a soul, As e'er crack'd a bottle, or fathom'd a bowl, In boozing about'twas his pride to excel, And among jolly topers he bore off the bell.
It chanced in the dog days, as he sat at his ease, In his flow'r woven arbour, as gay as you please With a friend and a pipe, quaffing sorrow away, And with honest old stingo was smoaking his clay, His breath-doors of life on a sudden were shut And he died full as big as a dorchester butt.
When long in the ground his old carcass had lain, And time into earth had resolv'd it again, A potter found out, in his covert so snug, And with part of fat toby he form'd this brown jug; Now sacred to friendship, to mirth, and mild ale, So here's to my lovely sweet nan of the vale. 38 Printers of theatrical broadsides also embraced hunting songs, which since at least the 1730s had been part of playhouse and pleasure garden entertainments. Such airs recalled the pleasures of the hunt, such as those routinely organized at an English country house. Below is the long-lived popular song 'With Early Horn', composed by John Galliard for the 1736 pantomime The Royal Chace, written by Edward Phillips for Covent Garden's manager-dancer John Rich. 39 'With Early Horn', first sung by John Beard, soon became a favourite occasional song for playhouse tenors. 40 Catnach published 'With Early Horn' as a broadside in 1825 as follows: WITH early horn, Salute the morn, That gilds this charming place; With cheerful cries, Bid echo rise, And join the jovial chase. 37 The song was omitted not just from the manuscript submitted to the Lord Chamberlain, but also from the first wordbook. The editors note that while it is 'nearly impossible' to know whether Shield composed or arranged preexisting music, several wordbooks state that 'Dear Sir, this Brown Jug' was not Shield's composition. The vocal hills around, the waving woods, The chrystal floods, Return th'enlivening sound. 41 While, like the character song, the hunting song recalled an event-the chase rather than a battle-it urges listeners to revel in the joy of a collective action, as did patriotic song.
A small portion of BBO theatrical broadsides celebrate love. Unlike the verses of sentimental instructive songs, verses in love songs expressed a single subject's perspective and feelings. A typical theatrical broadside love song is 'Whither Art My Love Gone' from Stephen Storace's score for The Haunted Tower, 'the most successful full-length opera that Drury Lane staged in the entire century', to quote Roger Fiske. 42 Though its wordbook by James Cobb was reviled by critics, The Haunted Tower-which premiered at Drury Lane on 24 November 1789-launched the London career of the celebrated Nancy Storace. 43 She sang the number that John Jennings then issued as a theatrical broadside after 1790: Whither, my love! ah! whither art thou gone! Let not thy absence cloud this happy dawn. Say-by thy heart, can falsehood e'er be known? Ah! no, no, I judge it by my own.
The heart he gave with so much care, Which treasur'd in my breast I wear; Still for its master beats alone, I'm sure the selfish thing's his own. 44 Love songs from playhouse productions were rarely turned into theatrical broadsides, however: I have identified only seventeen in BBO. Perhaps because love songs were typically crafted for a reflective, melancholic and gender-conservative female part, and featured high-flown verses, printers found such numbers generally ill-suited to street performance. 45 Regarding subjects of theatrical broadsides, two trends stand out. First, instructive and character songs make up the largest segment of theatrical broadsides in BBO, suggesting that broadside printers preferred songs featuring some sort of a narrative (which some drinking songs also contained), echoing the historic broadside tradition. Secondly, theatrical broadsides usually came from songs that sat lightly within the stage action. The playhouse songs that printers chose for broadsides were either generic-patriotic, hunting, and drinking songs-or 'stories within a story'; in both cases, the song's autonomy within stage action seemingly helped to facilitate its transition from playhouse to street song.

VERSE FORM
Apart from categorization by subject, theatrical broadsides can be grouped according to preferred verse forms. Of the 205 theatrical broadsides identified in BBO, at least 120 are strophic (this number may be higher). Strophic stage songs tended to be written in ballad form like traditional broadsides-often eight lines in iambic tetrameter/trimeter following an ABABCDCD rhyme scheme (though rhyme schemes often included slant rhymes and could be quite loose). The resemblance between these strophic theatre songs and traditional broadside ballads probably encouraged nineteenth-century printers to turn multi-stanza playhouse songs into broadside prints. 46 Another attraction of strophic playhouse songs for broadside printers was audiences' familiarity with this form. Ballad opera, after its invention in 1728, cast a long shadow on playhouse productions: over the decades that followed, its popularity encouraged the use of ballads or balladstyle songs in other types of musical theatre. 47 Formally straightforward and musically economic, strophic musical numbers inserted into spoken dialogue came to be identified as part of 'English' comic opera. 48 This was due in part to politics: the tendency from 1728 of period critics to associate ballad-style song with 'Englishness' strengthened between 1797 to 1844, when Britain was at war with France. 49 As Cox Jensen observes: 'A plain, unadorned melody' during this period 'was "British" and a composition modulating through keys and experimenting with discords was "foreign" (if not necessarily French).' 50 Among theatrical broadsides, alternatives to strophic songs were few. The verse-chorus song-also typical of Early Modern broadsides-is the second most common form of theatrical broadsides in the Bodleian's broadside collections, of which I found eleven examples. These numbers, like 'True Blue' discussed above, had usually been sung in their original productions in vaudeville style, alternating solo with chorus.
I have found just four through-composed theatrical broadsides. Two performancerelated factors made through-composed songs less suitable for the street than strophic or verse-chorus songs: repetition, an aid in learning, was absent, while the length of through-composed melodies made it harder for street performers to memorize them. Nevertheless, some of these four through-composed theatrical broadsides were very popular. As already noted, the song 'Stand to Your Guns' (sometimes titled 'The Sea Fight') had at least twelve print runs from 1797 to 1844 according to BBO, despite its lengthy, through-composed melody. Its source was the 1777 comic opera The Milesian (music by Thomas Carter, wordbook by Isaac Jackman), and it is reprinted below as found in the wordbook printed in 1777: Stand to your guns my hearts of oak, Let not a word on board be spoke, Victory soon will end the joke; Be silent and be ready. Apart from a complex melody, through-composed theatrical broadsides posed for singers another problem: word underlay. Broadside printers presented the same song's words in diverse ways, obscuring both how verse lines had originally been grouped together and how words were set to music in the scores. Some printers, like Pitts, omitted stanza breaks as in this version, published between 1819 and 1844: Stand to your guns my hearts of oak, Let not a word on board be spoke, Victory soon will end the joke, Be silent and be ready Ram home your guns and spong [sic] em well, Let us be sure the balls will tell, The cannon's roar shall sound their knell, Be steady, boys, be steady! Not yet not yet, reserve your fire I do desire, Now the elements do rattle, The gods amazed behold the battle.
A Pitts made significant alterations to the song, omitting the climactic call for 'FIRE!' from the original-perhaps because it did not fit on the page. Interestingly, the publisher Thomas Birt did exactly the same in one broadside edition, but included the crucial call on another. 53  Harkness carved out from this unwieldy song two neat stanzas, excising two lines ('The cannon's roar shall sound their knell' and 'Conquer boys or bravely die') and the song's entire middle stanza ('Not yet, not yet, not yet, / Reserve your fire / I still desire, / Not yet, not yet, not yet-/ FIRE!'). He divided verse lines fairly evenly, so that, on paper, they could be mistaken for strophes. We see the difficulty printers had in transmitting these words; when typeset without stanza breaks, a through-composed theatrical broadside tended to look like a monologue whose structure was unclear. Formatting them into strophes made them look more typical of broadside song. Even short through-composed songs posed problems: with too few words to split into 'stanzas', they were often used as filler, sharing a broadside with another song on a slip ballad, rather than being printed independently. Such is the case with 'By My Shield and My Sword' from David Garrick's A Christmas Tale (1773) set by Dibdin Sr, and with 'The Blast of War May Loudly Blow' from Thomas Dibdin's Two Faces Under a Hood (1807), set by William Shield. 55 Both are printed below more substantial broadsides-a sort of 'bonus' song-on a slip ballad. 56 Interestingly, ternary-form songs can resemble verse-chorus or even strophic songs on a broadside sheet. I have found only six theatrical broadsides taken from ternary-form airs, and, as with through-composed songs, printers frequently reorganized their verse lines. Consider how 'The Hardy Sailor' from the 1782 Covent Garden hit The Castle of Andalusia first appeared in the wordbook, which was by John O'Keeffe: 57 The hardy sailor braves the ocean, Fearless of the roaring wind, Yet his heart, with soft emotion, Throbs to leave his love behind.
To dread of foreign foes a stranger Tho' the youth can dauntless roam, Alarming fears paint every danger In a rival left at home.
Here the A section is simply not indicated, making the song appear to consist of two strophes, rather than the ternary form indicated in the music score. 58 In his broadside version of this song (c.1840), the printer Orlando Hodgson introduced changes that made it appear to be strophic with a repeated last line: the first stanza's final line implies that the previous line ought to be repeated, whereas in the second stanza, the first stanza's first line is printed, implying a da capo return to the A section. So while Hodgson's broadside does in fact indicate that the song is in ABA form as per the musical score, to the casual observer, it looks to be in strophic rather than ABA form (which remained an unusual structure for broadside songs). Pitts arranged the words differently again, keeping the A section, jettisoning the B section entirely, and adding two wholly new stanzas (presumably to be sung to the tune of A), whose conceits mirrored those of the original A section. He also crafted refrains out of preceding verse lines. Other songs in ABA form, like 'With Early Horn' (discussed above), were printed as two stanzas or as a verse-chorus song. Because they were not long enough to warrant their own broadside, short, two-stanza songs were often wedged between other songs on a broadside, either on long-song sheets or garlands. Such was the case with Catnach's version of 'The Early Horn' (1825): With early horn, Salute the morn, That gilds this charming place; With cheerful cries, Bid echo rise, And join the jovial chase.
The vocal hills around, the waving woods, The chrystal floods, Return th'enlivening sound. 61

MUSIC, THEATRICAL BROADSIDES, AND PERFORMANCE
In BBO, 284 print runs of theatrical broadsides from 1797 to 1844 came from the presses of Pitts, Catnach, and Birt, all based in the Seven Dials. These printers' proximity to patent playhouses appears to have been crucial. Of 132 productions whose songs became BBO-held theatrical broadsides, ninety-nine were mounted at Covent Garden and Drury Lane; by contrast, songs from fringe theatres (including the Little Theatre in the Haymarket), located further from the Seven Dials, rarely became theatrical broadsides, according to BBO's representation. 62 But how did music migrate from the stage to the street, and how did urban topography influence this process? Audience members emptying out from playhouses while still humming their favourite tunes were perhaps one source of immediate transmission. In the early nineteenth century, the 'wage-earning' classes-to use W. G. Runciman's term 63 -attended the patent playhouses, designed to accommodate a range of social ranks. 64 Any audience member was a potential consumer of theatrical broadsides, 65 which, apart from facilitating street and domestic entertainment, could serve as souvenirs of a performance. Playhouse audiences might promote songs to those who did not attend the performance as well, giving word-of-mouth reports. Because reproducing a stage work's content was legal if done from memory, 66 printers of broadsides couldand in my view probably did-follow other theatre publishers in sending agents into playhouses to pirate songs from popular works. We know of this practice from Charles Mathews's 1832 testimony in front of a Select Committee of the House of Commons, where he reported how booksellers occasionally employed someone to attend the theatres and write up passages from popular productions for publication. 67 In the theatrical broadside trade, another kind of agent was the press-to-vendor 'middleman': an anonymous report of 1827 in The New Monthly Magazine recounts how an employee of Catnach called Bat Corcoran sold broadsides 'wholesale' to street sellers. 68 In other words, publishing 'middle men' contributed to the song's mediation as it passed from playhouse to street: words, and music too.
Although vastly different from Italian opera arias, the airs in English comic operas were nevertheless written for professional performers, and even strophic songs included 'operatic' features. 69 Mark Philp has suggested that some theatrical songs by Dibdin Sr and his contemporaries would have been 'too difficult' to cross over to the street. 70 But this study has found that songs of musical complexity with technical demands did cross over to the street. No theatrical broadsides had a range of less than an octave, Ex. 5. 'The Early Horn' with melodic edits (corresponding to bb. 32-62 in the original score) stage vocal professionals. Possibly some street singers may have received musical training or been associated with the playhouses themselves at some point; but even a trained vocalist might have struggled with a composition for a stage star. And then there are the broadside customers to consider: how did they engage with these songs after purchasing them from a street singer?
Theatrical broadsides and their music challenge our assumptions about the sophistication-in performing technique, but probably also in the ability to adapt music-of the broadside singer and customer. Broadside printers' changes to song verses obscured the melody (and sometimes words) of the playhouse original, and so to perform from broadside sheets, the ballad seller or purchaser had to exercise judgement and invention as well as memorization to reproduce a song from a broadside. And I would posit that the role of the performer as 'editor' or 'adaptor' went beyond this: for demanding numbers, I believe the performer altered the music to make it more manageable. Take, for example, a passage from 'With Early Horn', which I have transcribed from a 1736 score (see Ex. 4). 76 The vocal line is difficult: after a series of leaps, a melismatic passage extends from bar 44 for twelve bars. Such melismas were not just technically advanced but were also foreign to the idioms of English street song. However, pragmatic changes, such as those in Ex. 5, would render the music manageable, and possibly more suitable for street performance. In this version, the passagework is omitted; instead, the performer holds f ′ for a bar (to which a trill or turn might be added), and ascends stepwise to the g ′ of the dominant chord in the next bar.
The metrical integrity of the song need not be affected by the edits: in my version above, for example, the addition of three fermatas provides extra time for the singer to breathe, without affecting the pulse. Of course, the metre and rhythms of a broadside could have been changed-such latitude would align with practices of orally transmitted ballads in England. Thus, the theatrical songs that were reprinted on broadside sheets probably provided musical materials for street performers and their performance practices: broadside ballads were musical processes as well as peddled products. 76 John Ernest Galliard (music) and Edward Phillips (wordbook), The Early Horn (London, 1736). 683 CONCLUSION Scholars like Sarah F. Williams and Roy Lamson have shown that the English broadside ballad of the seventeenth century was connected to contemporaneous stage traditions. The findings of this project indicate that in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, this connection remained and even strengthened; in the BBO alone, I found 932 broadside sheets that transmitted 205 playhouse songs. While not comprehensive, this study suggests that these 'theatrical broadsides' constituted a significant minority of street ballads during the period.
Theatrical broadsides tended to tell a story, projecting action and characterization to create a stand-alone number. Most were strophic, like their forebears. Printers seem to have been partly responsible for this; so, too, were playhouse personnel who typically wrote strophic airs for stage productions. In fact, playhouse songs already fit the broadside ballad model, and printers tended in turn to fit ternary or through-composed playhouse songs to the theatrical broadside's more standard organization of words, either strophic or verse-chorus. More virtuosic theatrical songs, once adapted to the street, were probably less demanding than source scores might lead us to believe: performers may have adapted the music, while printers suggested, through their changes to words, simpler strophic forms. Such changes will have made theatrical broadsides better suited to amateurs, street balladeers, and singing in public houses. In short, the migration of early nineteenth-century English songs from the playhouse to the street is a story of musical assimilation and conformation as well as transformation.

ABSTRACT
This article considers the migration of theatre music into the English broadside ballad tradition from 1797 to 1844, the most prolific era of the broadside during which the fierce professional competitors John Pitts (active 1797-1844) and James Catnach (active 1813-41) operated their presses in the Seven Dials, near London's patent theatres. The discussion is based on the findings of a database that was constructed systematically to cross-reference 520 theatrical works from the London stage with 11,432 broadside songs of this period from the Bodleian Library's broadside collections. By considering the scale and mechanism of the migration of theatre music into the broadside tradition-as well as examining the characteristics of the songs themselves-this article explores the effects of theatre music on nineteenth-century street literature and song, evaluating the ways in which theatre songs transformed the broadside tradition, and the ways in which they conformed to it.