‘An unnecessary flood of words’?

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.