Unreal Characters: Technology and Orality in the Seventeenth Century

Abstract

In this chapter, Fleming returns to the historical basis for his investigation. With an eye on giving an account of John Wilkins’s great Essay towards a real character (1668), Fleming first of all tells the story of unreal characters: methods of shorthand, which were invented in England in the late sixteenth century, and took the next one by storm. Fleming gives an unusually extensive survey of what remains a neglected historical field. He also finds occasion for phenomenological reflection in the technology of shorthand, as it confronts and challenges seventeenth-century oral discourse. The very category of language, Fleming suggests, may owe something to this period synthesis. The chapter ends with a discussion of the seventeenth-century craze for “Theophrastan” character sketches, which, Fleming argues via Ben Jonson, may in the first place have been a reaction against the previous emergence of shorthand.