Abstract
Critics have established that there is ‘not a simple, hierarchical relation¬ship between orality and literacy’ in early modernity, or in other periods.1 Moreover, there is no simple divide between speaking and writing, particu¬larly when we think about the production, performance, and publication of drama: rather, in Carla Mazzio’s words, there is a ‘crossroads of oral and textual cultures’.2 The intersections between the oral and the literate in early modernity, a fruitful subject also for Adam Fox, are relevant to my discussions on barber-surgeons and indeed are dramatized through the respective rhetorical situations of both barbers and surgeons.3 Early mod¬erns’ representations, metaphorical construction, and critiques of language drew on their attitudes to barbers’ and surgeons’ practical work on bodies (to depilation, removal of excrement, bleeding and amputation) as well as the contested forms of expression that shaped impressions (cultural, civic, and medical) of their professions. Barbers’ and surgeons’ relationship to these cultures of language is markedly different, but it is not a clear-cut case of one only being associated with one culture. As my analysis has demon¬strated, compounded and problematic notions of barbery and surgery are pervasive. That said, barbers’ and surgeons’ association with artistic (as well as medical) cultures are, at least idealistically, at odds, enabling writers to play on the divisions between orality and literacy implicit in the ‘barber-surgeon’: barbers and surgeons conceptualize the ambiguous relationship between words spoken and written.
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Notes
Neil Rhodes, ‘Orality, Print and Popular Culture’ in Literature and Popular Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Matthew Dimmock and Andrew Hadfield (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 29–44 (p. 40).
Carlo Mazzio, The Inarticulate Renaissance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), p. 167.
Also see Tiffany Stern, Making Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 137–58, who traces the stages of theatrical production and discusses the issues of stage and page.
Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700 (Oxford: OUP, 2000).
Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy (London; New York: Routledge, 2002), see pp. 39–41.
See Neil Rhodes, The Power of Eloquence and English Renaissance Literature (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1992), pp. 41–50.
John Lyly, Midas in Galatea/Midas, ed. George K. Hunter and David M. Bevington (Manchester: MUP, 2000).
William C. Carroll, The Great Feast of Language in Love’s Labour’s Lost (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1976), p. 63.
Later generations of English humanists were increasingly writing in English. See Mary Thomas Crane, ‘Early Tudor Humanism’ in A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture, ed. Michael Hattaway (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 13–26 (pp. 16, 25).
On ‘textualizing the body’ as a political motif in dealing with rebellion and subversion, see William W. E. Slights, ‘Bodies of Text and Textualised Bodies in Sejanus and Coriolanus’, MaRDiE 5 (1991), 181–93.
David Hillman, Shakespeare’s Entrails (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 34.
See Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, 3rd edn (Cambridge: CUP, 2004), pp. 159–60.
On the voice and its history, as a material site of agency, of production, ownership and exchange, see Gina Bloom, Voice in Motion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).
For discussions of theatrical representations of credit relations, debt, and capitalism in the period (and theatre’s own participation in the early modern economy), see Theodore B. Leinwand, Theatre, Finance and Society in Early Modern England (Cambridge: CUP, 1999).
Ben Jonson, Epicoene, ed. Roger Holdsworth (London: A & C Black; New York: WW Norton, 2002).
On the tongue as an ambivalent member in early modernity, see Carla Mazzio, ‘Sins of the Tongue’ in The Body in Parts, ed. David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (New York; London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 53–79. Also see later in this chapter on the tongue in Titus.
Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 29.
See Peter G. Platt, ‘Shakespeare and Rhetorical Culture’ in A Companion to Shakespeare, ed. David Scott Kastan (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 277–96 (p. 292).
Charles Nicholl, A Cup of News (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), pp. 234–5.
John Marston, The Dutch Courtesan, ed. David Crane (London: A & C Black; New York: W W Norton, 1997).
Julian Koslow, ‘Humanist Schooling and Ben Jonson’s Poetaster’, ELH 73:1 (2006), 119–59 (p. 120).
See Janet Clare Art Made Tongue-tied by Authority (Manchester; New York: MUP, 1990). Cf. Richard Dutton, ‘Licensing and Censorship’ in Companion to Shakespeare, pp. 377–91.
Richard Hart, ‘Jonson’s Late Plays’ in The Cambridge Companion to Ben Jonson, ed. Richard Harp and Stanley Stewart (Cambridge: CUP, 2000), pp. 90–102 (p. 91).
Will Fisher, ‘Staging the Beard’ in Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama, ed. Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda (Cambridge: CUP, 2002), pp. 230–57 (p. 234).
Bruce Thomas Boehrer, ‘The Ordure of Things’ in New Perspectives on Ben Jonson, ed. James Hirsh (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP; London: Associated University Presses, 1997), pp. 174–96 (pp. 177, 191).
Tiffany Stern, Making Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 34–61.
Anthony Munday and Henry Chettle, Sir Thomas More, ed. John Jowett, The Arden Shakespeare (London: A & C Black, 2011), p. 392.
See Charles Clay Doyle, ‘The Hair and Beard of Thomas More’, Moreana XVIII 71–72 (1981), 5–14.
Critics regularly cite Jonson’s masque, News from the New World (1620), as the dramatic precursor to Staple, but it does not contain a barber (see Ben Jonson, The Staple of News, ed. Anthony Parr (Manchester: MUP, 1988) p. 9,
and Martin Butler, The Stuart Court Masque and Political Culture (Cambridge: CUP, 2008), pp. 247–52).
On Jonson’s engagement with the development of news media, see Mark Z. Muggli, ‘Ben Jonson and the Business of News’, SEL 32:2 (1992), 323–40.
William Andrews, At the Sign of the Barber’s Pole (Cottingham: J. R. Tutin, 1904), p. 8.
John Ford, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore in Three Plays, ed. Keith Sturgess (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985).
Catherine Rockwood, ‘Know Thy Side’, ELH 75:1 (2008), 135–49 (p. 135).
Jonson, ‘An Expostulation with Inigo Jones’ in Ben Jonson ed. Charles Harold Hertford, Percy Simpson, and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1925–1952 [1947]), VIII, pp. 402–6, lines 85, 17–18, 96.
See Jeremy Wood, ‘Inigo Jones, Italian Art, and the Practice of Drawing’, The Art Bulletin 74:2 (1992), 247–70;
John Peacock, ‘Inigo Jones as a Figurative Artist’ in Renaissance Bodies, ed. Lucy Gent and Nigel Llewellyn (London: Reaktion Books, 1990), pp. 154–79.
On the beard as an ‘Ensigne of Manhood’, see Fisher, ‘Staging the Beard’, esp. 233–4. On the length of women’s hair and its ornamentation, see Kate Fisher, Materializing Gender in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (Cambridge: CUP, 2006), pp. 129–58.
See Benjamin Griffin, ‘Nashe’s Dedicatees’, N&Q 44:1 (1997), 47–9; Nicholl, pp. 233–6.
Marie Claire Randolph, ‘The Medical Concept in English Renaissance Satiric Theory’, SP 38:2 (1941), 125–57 (pp. 125, 145).
Peregrine Horden, ‘Medieval Medicine’ in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Medicine, ed. Mark Jackson (Oxford: OUP, 2011), pp. 40–59 (pp. 42–5).
Margaret Pelling, ‘Compromised by Gender’ in The Task of Healing, ed. Hilary Marland and Margaret Pelling (Rotterdam: Erasmus, 1996), pp. 101–33 (p. 109);
Kate Giglio, ‘Female Orality and the Healing Arts in Spenser’s Mother Hubberds Tale’ in Oral Traditions and Gender in Early Modern Literary Texts, ed. Mary Ellen Lamb and Karen Bamford (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 13–24.
David Gentilcore, Medical Charlatanism in Early Modern Italy (Oxford: OUP, 2006), see esp. chapt. 9 on ‘Performance’, pp. 301–34.
See Hillary Nunn, Staging Anatomies (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 195–209.
Christopher Marlowe, ‘The Massacre at Paris’ in The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, ed. Fredson Bowers, 2nd edn, 2 vols (Cambridge: CUP, 1981), I.
Kerwin refers to surgery’s affiliation with ‘broader conflicts of authority within early modern culture’ (p. 99). Cf. Lee Bliss, ‘Destructive Will and Social Chaos in “The Devil’s Law-Case”’, MLR 72:3 (1977), 513–25: ‘Around the central family whirls an assortment of … tainted relationships. In the widest sphere, the comically inverted health-giving functions of medicine and law reflect a deep-seated social malaise’ (p. 517).
See A. K. McIlwraith, ‘Did Massinger Revise The Emporour of the East?’, RES 5:17 (1929), 36–42;
Peter G. Phialas, ‘The Sources of Massinger’s Emperour of the East’, PMLA 65:4 (1950), 473–82;
J. E. Gray, ‘The Source of The Emperour of the East’, RES 1:2 (1950), 126–35.
Todd H. J. Pettigrew, Shakespeare and the Practice of Physic (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007), p. 133.
Ben Jonson, Volpone, ed. Robert N. Watson, 2nd edn (London: A & C Black; New York: WW Norton, 2003).
Court Minutes, B/1/2, 14r. Cf. Sidney Young, The Annals of the Barber-Surgeons of London (London: Blades, 1890), p. 187.
See Florike Egmond, ‘Execution, Dissection, Pain and Infamy’ in Bodily Extremities, ed. Florike Egmond and Robert Zwijnenberg (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 92–3. Egmond finds evidence that the lay person might have had a view to anatomizations in other European countries than England. The ‘publicity’ argument, the cornerstone in her article, works for Tyburn-like crowds but is forced upon her discussion of dissections.
Anon, ‘The Return from Parnassus’ in The Three Parnassus Plays, ed. J. B. Leishman (London: Nicholson & Watson, 1949).
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© 2016 Eleanor Decamp
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Decamp, E. (2016). ‘An unnecessary flood of words’?. In: Civic and Medical Worlds in Early Modern England. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137471567_6
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