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 Shakespearean tragedy, no less than popular ballads and folk wondertales, is performed from memory and can be transmitted from one performer to another without the intervention of a written or printed text (Graves 1922; Troubridge 1950-51). And while not all oral tradition involves improvisation, improvisation is invariably oral, and as late as the nineteenth century a stroller performing in English provincial fairgrounds reported that he had more than once been “told what character he’s to take, and what he’s to do, and he’s supposed to be able to find words capable of illustrating the character.” The same informant reckoned that for one actor who learned his part ten did not (Rosenfeld 1960:149). Much if not most of even nondramatic verbal culture was experienced as performance, as activity rather than artifact, deep into the early modern period, and a gentleman visiting Devon in the early nineteenth century was startled to find that the poetry of the seventeenth-century cavalier-clergyman Robert Herrick had been preserved in local memory among his parishioners, passed down orally from parent to child for a century and a half (Marcus 1986:140). In such a “para-literate” culture (Bennett and Green 2004:10), those non-textual processes will have been involved to greatly varying degrees (over time; between cultural systems; among genres) and will have had varying impacts on the verbal material subjected to Oral Tradition, 24/2 (2009): 429-454