Oral-Formulaic Theory: Annotated Bibliography

Marion Trousdale. "Shakespeare's Oral Text." Renaissance Drama, 12:95-115.

Interested in the oral nature of Shakespeare's plays. Uses as an analogy George Gascoigne, an Elizabethan poet who composed among other works a contribution to a masque. This piece leads him to "call Gascoigne an oral poet principally because the verbal conventions which seem to control the smaller and larger verbal patterns of his composition are conventions which logically and historically attach themselves to the artistic and cultural concerns of an oral age" (101). Goes on to say the same of Shakespeare, pointing out what he takes to be formulas, themes, sound-patterns, and ring-composition, collectively "a kind of evidence that Shakespeare in fact composed in the way in which oral poets appear to have composed" (105).
Area: BR