British Shakespeare Association Biennial Conference 2005
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Programme : Panels - Seminars - Workshops
Seminar - Shakespeare and Oral Culture
Saturday 3rd September 2005, 2.00-4.00pm,
Bedson Teaching Centre LG35
Participants | Call for Papers
Participants
Convenor - Neil Rhodes, University of St Andrews
Fiona
Benson, University of St Andrews
‘Ophelia and the Popular Ballads’
William Spates, University of St Andrews
Charles Chester and Shakespeare’s Oral Satirists
Dr. Ann Kaegi, University of Hull
Oral and Literary
Dr. Richard Meek, University of Reading
‘Telling the Unsatisfied’: Shakespeare’s
Spoken Endings
Kareen Klein, University of Geneva
Shakespeare's "Bad" Women on Stage
Dr. Lene Peterson, University of West of England
Actor meet Author: A Reconsideration of Method in Shakespearean
Text and Attribution Studies.
Call for Papers
Below is the original Call for Papers, as circulated. Please note that the date for submissions has passed and the successful participants and the titles of their papers are listed above.
Convenor: Neil Rhodes (University of St Andrews)
In recent years early modern print culture has been extensively studied, and much has also been done to recover the conditions of manuscript circulation, but relatively little attention has been paid to the most fundamental medium of communication, that of speech. This is perhaps surprising, because while late sixteenth-century England could no longer be described as an oral society, it was certainly not a fully literate one. Many aspects of Elizabethan culture demonstrate a residual orality: its stock of commonplaces, for example, which were ‘the equivalent of the epic singer’s stock of formulas and themes’. While these were embedded in education, other oral elements, such as proverbs, ballads, and the stories of oral tradition, are more obviously from the province of popular culture. The purpose of his seminar is to identify those aspects of Shakespeare’s work that we might describe as being part of oral culture, but also to ask questions about their relationship both to the conditions of the theatre and to the conditions of literate culture.
In discussing oral culture we need to make a distinction between the verbal strategies employed by pre-literate societies, i.e. various kinds of formulae or patterning and the aural mnemonic devices of verse and the broader field of acoustemology which deals with the ‘soundscapes’ that may or may not be the products of an oral culture in the primary sense of the term. Yet even as we bear this distinction in mind we must be aware that the kind of soundscapes experienced by Shakespeare and his contemporaries will have been conditioned by the degree to which theirs was a residually oral culture.
So the questions the seminar will debate are:
• Which elements of Shakespeare’s work might be studied as aspects
of oral culture?
• Is orality essentially an aspect of popular culture or is it equally
a product of a learned culture that advocated the development of rhetorical
skills in education? Which of the two is more important to Shakespeare?
• Since the theatre is an oral medium are its playtexts structured by
the mnemonic devices of oral tradition and do the texts that we have exhibit
different stages of oral and more literary construction?
• Is Shakespeare’s language ‘a ritual poetry, an almost oral
art’ that will disintegrate into prose during the seventeenth century
or is it already a fully literary art, albeit one that is transferable to the
stage?
Contact: Neil Rhodes (nppr@st-andrews.ac.uk)
