Ballads and Bad Quartos: Oral Tradition and the English Literary Historian

For the historian of late-medieval and Renaissance literature, oral tradition lies provocatively athwart one of the literary canon’s more problematic borders. In a fit of gothic enthusiasm ballads were admitted into literary history, but folktales, legends, folk plays, and lyric folksongs merit attention only as possible sources and analogues for literary works, rarely if ever as cultural achievements in their own right.1 And their admission would require a substitute (“illiterature”? “oraliterature”?) for a term closely associated with written and printed letters. (I have settled for “word-art,” which can have both visual, i.e. textual-read and oral/aural, i.e. uttered-heard modes, although a respected colleague has suggested that “word-craft” might be less pretentious). Indigenous English oral traditions independent of the written word were of course massively compromised by the eruption of the popular culture of cheap printing in the course of the early modern period. There is a grim consolation in the realization that slavery, followed by the virtua