Written Composition and (Mem)oral Decomposition: The Case of "The Suffolk Tragedy"

Abstract

For the study of verbal performance culture in late medieval and early modern England--that significant triangular continuum between a literature, theatre, and folklore that had yet to negotiate their modern borders--oral tradition in its purest form has limited relevance. On the one hand, in a culture in which "oral, scribal and printed media fed in and out of each other as part of a dynamic process of reciprocal interaction and mutual infusion" (Fox 2000:410), a given narrative's complete trajectory from composition, through transmission, to performance and reception, altogether independent of writing, print, or reading, will certainly have occurred, but will not necessarily have been typical, and while audible then would be invisible now: the wordcraft of the past is accessible to us in the present only by virtue of having undergone material textualization at some point in the meantime. On the other hand, it is evident that ignoring nontextual processes would severely hamper a fully historical appreciation, even at the more literary end of the spectrum.1

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 2 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.