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²⁷ Costello, , Scholastic Curriculum, p. 147Google Scholar; on Latin dialogue and declamation, cf. Baldwin, T.W., William Shakspere's Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, 2 vols. (Urbana, Ill., 1944), 1:721-53; 2:1-28, 355–79Google Scholar; Bornstein, Diane, “Performing Oral Discourse as a Form of Sociability during the Renaissance,” in Performance of Literature, pp. 211–30.Google ScholarPubMed

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⁴⁶ The Colloquies of Erasmus, trans. Thompson, Craig R. (Chicago and London, 1965), pp. 50, 460Google Scholar; cf. the more favorable assessment in De ratione studii, p. 671; Colet, Aeditio, sig. D6v-D7; Yates, , The Art of Memory, pp. 133, 137-9, 160-62, 233, 256.Google Scholar

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⁵¹ Erasmus, , De ratione studii, p. 691Google Scholar; Plato, , Phaedrus, 275a.Google Scholar

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⁵⁵ The apologye ofsyr Thomas More knyght, Complete Works of St Thomas More, 9, ed. Trapp, J.B. (New Haven, CT., and London, 1979), pp. 18-19, 25Google Scholar; cf. the editor's introduction to this work, pp. xli-lxvii, for its political and religious context.

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⁵⁸ Ibid., fos. xciiii-xcvii, xcix. The sensitivity of Tudor governments, especially Henry VIII's, to oral as well as printed expressions of dissent has been well documented in Elton, G.R., Policy and Police: the Enforcement of the Reformation in the Age of Thomas Cromwell (Cambridge, 1972), pp. 46-82, 285.Google Scholar

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⁶⁶ The notion that protestantism, with its emphasis on the vernacular Bible and on sola scriptura salvation, was necessarily predisposed to value the eye over the ear seems effectively negated by the value placed on preaching. Elizabeth Eisenstein tells us of a twelfth-century prior who urged his silent order to spread the word through writing. Luther, on the other hand, regarded print as a providential gift in the service of reformation, but he still saw it as merely an “amplifier” and both he and Melanchthon emphasized the importance of hearing sermons: Eisenstein, , Printing Press, 1:374Google Scholar. On the rhetoric of preaching, see O'Malley, J.W., “Content and Rhetorical Form in Sixteenth-Century Treatises on Preaching,” in Renaissance Eloquence: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Renaissance Rhetoric, ed. Murphy, James J. (Berkeley and London, 1983), pp. 238–52Google Scholar. For some contemporary references to the benefits of preaching and/or the deficiencies of printed sermons or homilies, see the following: Gosson, Stephen, The trumpet of warre (1598), fos. 64v, 69Google Scholar; Gee, Edward, Two sermons (1620)Google Scholar; Greenwood, John, An answer to George Giffords pretended defence of read prayers and devised leitourgies (1590), sig. A3, B2v, p. 5Google Scholar. Some, however, saw no difference between preaching and the printed sermon: Rollenson, Francis, Sermons preached before his Majestie (1611), sig. A2, p. 32Google Scholar; Shelford, Robert, Five pious and learned discourses (Cambridge, 1635), pp. 67, 78.Google Scholar

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⁶⁸ Breton, Nicholas, The courtier and the countryman, p. 10Google Scholar, in The Works of Nicholas Breton, ed. Grosart, A.B., 2 vols. (1879), 2Google Scholar; Brinsley, John, Ludus Hterarius, or the grammar schoole (1612), pp. 70–73Google Scholar; cp. Holdsworth, , “Directions” in Fletcher, , Intellectual Development of John Milton, 2:653Google Scholar. There is a good deal of evidence—much of it undoubtedly ironic—of a certain hostility to print, as a vulgarizer of knowledge better confined to speech or manuscript. Erasmus's views have already been noted. Henry Peacham observed that many famous scholars “love not to be seen in print” and repeats their view that there are so many books that “among the learned and wise it is a great question, whether printing hath done more hurt or good in the world”: Peacham, , The truth of our times (1638), pp. 29–30Google Scholar. As avid a bibliophile as Montaigne could on occasion poke fun at popular reverence for the printed book: “Of Experience,” Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Frame, Donald M. (repr., Stanford, Cal., 1965), III, xiii, p. 828.Google Scholar

⁶⁹ Bacon, , Sylva Sylvarum (1627)Google Scholar, in Works of Francis Bacon, ed. Spedding, J., Ellis, R.L. and Heath, D.D., 7 vols. (1857–1859), 2:389Google Scholar; see also Bacon's, Historia soni et auditus, Works, 3:659–80Google Scholar. Bacon's interest in the echo was not unique: many Renaissance masques feature “echo songs” (for example, Milton's Comus). Erasmus made Echo the subject of one of his Colloquies, pp. 373-77. The echo was, of course, literally a phenomenon which allowed one to hear past sounds and utterances, and quite unique as such in the pre-electronic age.

⁷⁰ Sermons of John Donne, ed. Potter, G.R. and Simpson, E.M., 10 vols. (Berkeley, 1953–1962), 1:229.Google Scholar

⁷¹ Puttenham, George, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Willcock, G.D. and Walker, A. (Cambridge, 1936), p. 264Google Scholar; Phillips, George, The embassage of Gods angell (1597), unfoliated [fo. 10v\.Google Scholar

⁷² Barlow, William, One of the foure sermons … concerning the antiquitie and superioritie of bishops (1606), sig. A.Google Scholar

⁷³ Laud, William, A speech delivered in the starr-chamber, (1637), sig. A3vGoogle Scholar; The lectures of Samuel Bird of Ipswich, (Cambridge, 1598), p. 125.Google Scholar

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⁷⁵ As for printing, Hobbes thought it an ingenious invention, but “no great matter”: Hobbes, , Leviathan, I, iv (ed. C.B. Macpherson, 1968, pp. 100, 106).Google Scholar

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⁷⁷ Ralegh's classical image of Fame with a horn is emulated in the frontispiece to William Burton's The description of Leicestershire (1622). Francis Kynaston refers to fame's trumpet in Corona minervae (1635). An anonymous poem from 1595, in memory of Drake and Hawkins, is entitled The trumpet of fame. Anthony Munday refers to history as “the onely trumpet that soundeth in the eares of all noble personages, the famous deeds of their worthy progenitors”: The historie of the famous and fortunate Palmerin of England, part ii (1616), dedication.

⁷⁸ Churchyard, Thomas, cited in Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth, ed., Nichols, J., 3 vols. (1823), 2:234.Google Scholar

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⁸⁰ Ibid., 11. 781-85, 808-25, 850-52, 881-82, 1153-56, 1354-55.

⁸¹ Ibid., 11. 1233-34, 1243-46, 1403-5, 1520-22; Delaney, Sheila, Chaucer's House of Fame: the Poetics of Skeptical Fideism (Chicago and London, 1972), p. 87–122.Google Scholar

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⁸⁶ For one such description, see Peyton, Thomas, The glasse of time (1620), p. 63.Google Scholar

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⁸⁹ North, , English Bells, pp. 84, 87, 128Google Scholar; Grindal, Edmund, The Remains of Edmund Grindal, D.D., ed. Nicholson, W. (Parker Society, vol. 9, Cambridge, 1843), p. 133Google Scholar. The medieval custom of commemorative bell-ringing on the anniversary of a person's death (or, occasionally, even monthly) continued in the provinces after the Reformation, despite ecclesiastical condemnation of the practice as superstitious.

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⁹⁷ Starkey, Thomas, A dialogue between Reginald Pole and Thomas Lupset, ed. Burton, Kathleen M. (1948), p. 71Google Scholar; the oral form of this work is balanced by the author's attention to visual evidence of the evils afflicting the commonwealth, which are “open to every man's eye.” Similarly, in Toxophilus, Ascham frames his discourse as a dialogue but complains periodically that there has not been more written on the art of archery; writing, as he argued in The Scholemaster (English Works, pp. 243, 285), was a form of memory, and the most effective means “for sure keeping of all that is learned.”

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¹⁰⁴ The rare objections to the practice have received more attention than they deserve. William Camden's refusal to invent speeches in his Annales (1615), sig. A4v, was less likely the result of a theoretical objection—Camden had a remarkably untheoretical mind—than of a fear that any words he put into the mouths of historical characters might be denied by the people themselves, many of whom were still living, or by their friends and family. The only thorough rejection of set speeches to appear in the period is Thomas Blundeville's translation of Patrizzi's, FrancescoDella historia diece dialoghi (Venice, 1560)Google Scholar as The true order and methode of writing and reading hystories (1574), ed. Dick, H.G., Huntington Library Quarterly 1 (1940): 164Google Scholar. Most writers would have followed Erasmus, who endorsed the fabrication of such speeches in pagan history, but not in Christian (i.e., biblical): De copia, Collected Works, 24:649.Google Scholar

¹⁰⁵ Holmes, Martin, Shakespeare and Burbage (1978), p. 2.Google Scholar

¹⁰⁶ If one wants to find unconscious “oral residue” of the type Fr. Ong discusses (Rhetoric, Romance and Technology, pp. 23-47), a better place to look is in the later novel, with its common salutation, “Dear Reader”: the author-reader dialogue in Tudor and Stuart prose seems, as William Nelson points out, quite serious and intentional—hardly residual at all: Nelson, William, “From ‘Listen Lordings’ to ‘Dear Reader’,” University of Toronto Quarterly 46 (1976–1977): 110–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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¹¹⁰ For example, Nabbes, Thomas, Hannibal and Scipio (1637), V, ii, sig. Kv.Google Scholar

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¹¹⁷ Parker, Martin, Times alteration (1635?)Google Scholar is typical of the sentimental attitude to “time of yore”; for an example of the encounters between kings and country folk, see the various ballads in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, collection Wood 401; modern editions of ballads, by Rollins, H.E., include: Old English Ballads, 1553-1625 (Cambridge, 1920)Google Scholar; The Pack of Autolycus (Cambridge, Mass., 1927)Google Scholar; The Pepys Ballads, 8 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1929–1932)Google Scholar. On the popular perception of the past see Thomas, Keith, The Perception of the Past in Early Modern England (Creighton Trust lecture, 1983), pp. 14 ffGoogle Scholar. I wish to thank Mr. Thomas for sending me a copy of his lecture.

¹¹⁸ Anon., The wofull lamentation of Mistris Shore, n.d., in Bodleian collection Wood 401.

¹¹⁹ Lloyd, , Folk Song in England, p. 16Google Scholar, suggests that Parry and Lord over-rated the importance of illiteracy as a condition for oral composition; he points out the parallel development, for four centuries after 1500, of printed and “traditional” ballads and folk songs. For the symbiotic relationship between printed and oral romance in the sixteenth century and after, see Spufford, Margaret, Small Books and Pleasant Histories (1981), pp. 12, 68, 229.Google Scholar

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¹²² Ascham, , Toxophilus, English Works, p. 45Google Scholar; cf. Clanchy, , From Memory to Written Record, p. 215 ffGoogle Scholar. The Cambridge reader, Isaac Dorislaus, was silenced for what he said to his students rather than for anything he had written. See Sharpe, Kevin, “The Foundation of the Chairs of History at Oxford and Cambridge: an Episode in Jacobean Politics,” History of Universities, 2 (1982): 127–52.Google Scholar

¹²³ Queen Elizabeth had a professional reader, while her grandfather, Henry VII, had been praised by Claude Seyssel for his love of hearing and reading histories: Nelson, , “‘Listen Lordings,’” pp. 110–24Google Scholar. Again, this was merely the continuation of a medieval tradition. Galbraith, V.H., “The Literacy of the Medieval English Kings,” Proceedings of the British Academy 21 (1935): 201–38Google Scholar; Crosby, Ruth, “Oral Delivery in the Middle Ages,” Speculum 11 (1936): 88–110CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Thompson, James Westfall, The Literacy of the Laity in the Middle Ages (2nd edn., N.Y., 1960), pp. 116-22, 166–97.Google Scholar

¹²⁴ Sidney, , An Apology for Poetry, ed. Shepherd, Geoffrey (2nd edn., Manchester, 1973), pp. 101, 107Google Scholar; Howard, W.G., “Ut Pictura Poesis,” Publications of the Modern Language Association, 24 (1909): 40–123CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Buxton, John, Elizabethan Taste (1963), p. 108.Google Scholar

¹²⁵ Jonson, Timber, edn. cit., pp. 609-11. John Dryden made the similarities between painting and poetry the subject of an essay in 1695, but in his case there is little sign of an aural sense of poetry: the parallels drawn are between the physical drawing of the artist and the verbal drawing of the poet or dramatist: A Parallel of Poetry and Painting, in Essays of John Dryden, ed. Ker, W.P., 2 vols. (Oxford, 1900), 2:115–53.Google Scholar

¹²⁶ Everyman, 1, 867Google Scholar, in English Morality Plays and Moral Interludes, p. 138; Hamlet, II, ii. 560Google Scholar; III, ii. 1-10; Holmes, , Shakespeare and Burbage, p. 83.Google Scholar

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