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"Thereby hangs a tale": Recovering orality in Shakespearean drama
Ort / Verlag
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
Erscheinungsjahr
1997
Quelle
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I
Beschreibungen/Notizen
This project seeks to explore the ways in which Shakespeare's plays interrogate the effects of the early modern shift from orality to literacy on narrative processes by investigating the dialogue that exists between the play texts and the oral ballad tradition. Many of the cultural constructions that influenced the way Shakespeare and his audiences conceived of storytelling, playgoing, and performance have been lost precisely because they were oral and therefore impermanent. As performance-driven genres caught in the intersection of oral tradition and textual evolution, the ballads and the plays shared certain cultural constructions; by trying to determine, from still-existing ballads, as much as we can about early modern oral practices, we can identify the ways in which the plays and the ballads overlap in terms of rhetorical structure, conceptions and methods of composition, and plot content. In so doing, we can recover some of the ways that orality functions within Shakespeare's texts and can therefore posit what the idea of spoken text meant to his audiences. Whereas ballad scholarship tends to view oral ballads as "traditional," and therefore ahistorical, this dissertation historicizes the concepts of orality and tradition; instead of treating oral literature as a discrete entity, I propose to examine the ways in which orality circulates within a specifically early modern historical moment when the sudden availability of cheap print facilitates a shift from a primarily oral culture to a primarily print culture. In the context of such a moment, Shakespeare's plays problematize the tensions generated by transition, create a paradigm that acknowledges the lack of a clear-cut line between "oral" and "written' literature, and explores the best way to tell a story effectively within this paradigm.