Playing alone: Dramatic literature in the English Renaissance (Ben Jonson, John Marston, William Shakespeare)

The common distinction between orality and literacy is both historical and theoretical: historical in the sense that there were actual cultures in which the transmittal of information was wholly or mostly verbal, and theoretical in the sense that as cultures have become almost universally literate, orality has increasingly become an abstraction imagined through literacy. Orality in literate societies is not an epistemological alternative, but a literate construction and a repository of both fear and desire for language's signifying potential.; This distinction between orality and literacy is often used to conceptualize the differences between performing and reading a dramatic text (and finds its modern institutional equivalent in the separation of departments of theater and English). But how was the oral-literate binary confronted at the time and place in which English drama was just beginning its canonization as literature in the early seventeenth century? This dissertation looks at the ways in which English Renaissance drama, dramatists, and readers responded to the different demands and opportunities created by literacy and to the very possibility of a category like "dramatic literature."; Chapter 2 considers Ben Jonson's strong support for dramatic literature and John Marston's ready subversion of Jonson's efforts through textual reminders of orality's resistance. In Chapter 3, three Shakespearean plays are examined for clues to his apparent ambivalence about the transition of his spoken scripts to studied books. Chapter 4 presents the material evidence of contemporary commonplace books to to show how readers of drama articulate practices that confirm the drama's textuality and that recollect its oral potentiality.