ABSTRACT
The Homeric epics, Elizabethan lyrics, performed poetry, folk tales, scripts for or from plays – all these have long been presented as written formulations, studiable as literary texts. Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe comments on the phases of the transformative process from written text to performance as it comes out in the sequential phases creating theatrical performance. Losing the security of the script makes the performers initially very vulnerable and temporarily weakens their portrayal of the character(s) they have to play. Overemphasizing the ‘oral’ can be a route to implicitly retaining the model of literature as essentially constituted in written texts. Time and time again performances of literature turn out to be multidimensional rather than purely or essentially oral in the narrow verbal sense of that term. ‘Literature’ in this light is a relative and plural concept. ‘Verbal artistry playing some significant part’ – that is a matter of degree.
