This chapter argues that the phrase ‘the merry world’ – and sometimes even the word ‘mirth’ – acquired a coded status in Reformation polemical print that then shadowed its use in other contexts: a way of expressing nostalgia for the pre-dissolution past that was proximate to, but not identical with, sedition and recusancy. There is evidence that these feelings were widespread, even amongst orthodox Protestants, but also that they remained potentially incendiary. Focusing on a series of disguised-king broadside ballads set in a pseudo-medieval ‘merry’ past, it suggests the historical fictions of cheap print recuperated the psychic materials of merry world complaint as a source of cosy and uncontentious pleasure.

Beginning with the wildly unsuccessful first performance of Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle in 1607, the introduction interrogates the idea of mirth in early modern England. It argues that ‘mirth’ was understood in three distinct but related senses: as a historically inflected hangover from the pre-Reformation past (‘the merry world’); as secular pastime; and as a generic category denoting certain kinds of entertainment. It sets out the emergence of nostalgia for the pre-Reformation past alongside the growth of a competitive professional theatre and print market. The Knight of the Burning Pestle dramatises the dynamic between the nostalgic desire of audience for past pleasures, both theatrical and historical, and the pressure of the competitive theatre towards novelty. The second half of the chapter situates this tension in relation to the historical rupture of the Reformation; to the explosion in cheap print; and contemporary cultures of performance.

This chapter reassesses the aesthetics of the early modern broadside ballad, arguing for the paradoxical readerly and writerly value of literary inadequacy. The authenticity gap, between the reality of the pre-Reformation past and the stylised conventions through which these broadsides approached it, offered an opportunity in which both writers and readers were complicit. One was the commodification of ‘northern-ness’ in popular literary culture in the years after the Northern Rising, which reveals in miniature the cultural and political work this kind of print could carry out: for example in William Elderton’s A New Yorkshyre Song. It also opened up creative possibilities ifor entrepreneurial writers and printers. These are very much at work in invocations of the cheap print merry world in William Kemp’s Nine Daies Wonder (1600) and Thomas Nashe’s Lenten Stuffe (1599), both from the disorderly world of commercial entertainment, who use these tropes both to shape and legitimate their authorial personas and as springboard for innovation.