“Ye Tories round the nation”: An Analysis of Markers of Interactive-involved Discourse in Seventeenth Century Political Broadside Ballads

Abstract

The period of the English Civil War saw an exponential increase in the number of political broadsides. In a time when the printed word acted as a powerful weapon in the hands of the opposing forces, the balladeer constructed his propaganda exploiting the involving potential of the written-spoken genre. In this paper I shall investigate markers of interactive-involved discourse in Royalist broadsides and highlight their strategic function as builders and bearers of ideological consensus within a heterogeneous cross-section of English society. I shall also consider the direct reporting of other characters‟ speeches, showing how the authorial authenticity of their idiom reinforced the validity of the author‟s political claim. The analysis will show that some of the propagandistic principles of modern journalism were already at work in the ideologically-oriented discourse of seventeenth-century cheap-print.