Huntington Library Quarterly

The woodcut impressions printed on broadside ballads have long been regarded as haphazardly chosen and ill suited to illustrate the songs they accompanied. This essay shows, instead, how sixteen broadside ballads used woodcuts to create sophisticated image–text relationships. The broadsides print three versions of a single song—a lament on the loss of love performed by birds—but their varied illustration programs guide readers to understand the avian speakers, and thus the meaning of the song’s lyrics, in very different ways.