ABSTRACT
This chapter explores Annibal Caro's background and ideology in order to understand whether his standpoint in favour of natural language also had implications of orality in his literary writing. It investigates whether the inclusion of orality in literary practice led to a sort of literarization of orality itself. Orality has usually been conceived in opposition to literacy, as Walter Ong explained some thirty years ago; however, as Ong pointed out, literacy not only destroys orality, but also carries traces and hints of it. The two traditional criteria to interprets the polemic, Petrarchism vs anti-Petrarchism and nature vs artifice, the only criterion set by Caro is that of the opposition between living and dead language. Caro's Apologia was among the sources of Florio's dictionary, as we find in the table of the authors and books 'that have been read of purpose for the collecting of this Dictionarie'. Orality is clearly signalled by Caro himself with some orality markers.
