In any event, what Shapiro here describes as "Shakespeare's habit of presenting both sides of an argument" aligns with what Ong in the subtitle of his massively researched 1958 book refers to as the Art of Discourse.
For further discussion, see my OEN article "James Shapiro Urges Us to Reflect Further on Shakespeare" (dated March 21, 2020):
Incidentally, we Americans need to remember that our educated Founding Fathers founded our representative Republic (in honor of which the Republican Party takes its name) to commemorate the Roman Republic and named our Senate after the Roman Senate. But we should not forget that the Roman Republic was replaced by the Roman Empire. As everybody knows, the historical Jesus was crucified on trumped-up charges in Jerusalem under the authority of the Roman Empire.
Now, as noted above, Latin, learned as a second language, was the international lingua franca in the Renaissance, but Renaissance humanists such as Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536), author of The Praise of Folly (1511; in Latin), and Sir Thomas More (1478-1535), author of Utopia (1516; in Latin), preferred to emulate the ancient Latin poets and prose stylists rather than medieval exemplars.
The classic study of the Latin Middle Ages is the German scholar of Romance languages and literatures Ernst Robert Curtius' book in German translated into English as European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, translated by Willard R. Trask (1953; orig. German ed., 1948) -- a book he was prompted to write in response to the convulsions of Hitler and the Nazis in Germany and World War II.
The Romance languages are those languages that evolved over time from the Roman language, Latin. It is important to remember that the celebrated medieval Italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) did not write his celebrated Divine Comedy in Latin, but in his Tuscan dialectic of Italian, thereby establishing it as the standard dialectic of Italian just as the King James Bible (1611) and Shakespeare's posthumously published works established the standard dialectic of modern English (as distinct, say, from Chaucer's medieval English or from the earlier Anglo-Saxon or Old English dialectic in which Beowulf is written).
Because of Ong's long-standing interest in the history of the verbal arts of grammar, rhetoric, and logic (also known as dialectic) in Western culture, Ong repeatedly refers to Curtius' monumental literary study in various publications. But Ong also regularly critiques Curtius' otherwise impressive work for his failure to advert to the psychodynamics of orality and literacy in medieval Western culture.
For a massive categorized bibliography of more recent medievalists who do advert to the psychodynamics of orality and literacy, to one degree or another, see Marco Mostert's 650-page 2012 book A Bibliography of Works on Medieval Communication.
In Ong's estimate, in his 1967 encyclopedia entry that is reprinted as "Written Transmission of Literature" in An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry (2002, pages 331-344), H. M. Chadwick and Nora K. Chadwick's classic three-volume worldwide survey of pre-literate oral performance and early literature titled The Growth of Literature [Out of Oral Performance] (1932, 1936, and 1940) "no longer has an entirely up to date conception of oral culture" (page 343).
But Ong himself has an entirely up to date conception of oral culture primarily because he has learned so much from Albert B. Lord's 1960 book The Singer of Tales and from Eric A. Havelock's 1963 book Preface to Plato two books that Ong never tired of referring to.
Ong's reviews of Lord's and Havelock's classic books are also reprinted in An Ong Reader (pages 301-306 and 309-312, respectively).
For a deeply related study, see Michael N. Nagler's 1974 book Spontaneity and Tradition: A Study in the Oral Art of Homer. In Ong's 1977 book Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture, he says, "Nagler's work renders obsolete many of the disputes about definitions of formulas and themes. Here, I understand formulas or formulaic elements in no arcane sense but simply as expressions which are expected or highly predictable" (page 19, note 4).
But also see John Miles Foley's judicious book Homer's Traditional Art (2000).
Ah, did Shakespeare excel in putting "expressions which are expected or highly predictable" on the lips of the various characters he created from his plays to the extent that he is in a league with Homer at doing this?
Now, Ong's 1959 article "Latin Language Study as a Renaissance [Male] Puberty Rite" that he reprinted in his 1971 book Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture (pages 113-141) can help us further contextualize the lessons of a Renaissance education that Newstok celebrates.
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