Moving Tales: Narrative Drift in Oral Culture and Scripted Theater

Abstract

In folklore and literature, plots and deeds can move around amongst historical protagonists--being attributed to one figure at one time, and to another later on. Beginning with accounts of "Jack Tales" and singing-games transmitted (and transmuted) through oral culture, I then discuss the (literate and oral) text of the slaying of Goliath in Hebrew Scripture. Having discussed the oral-memorial handy-dandy these traditions play with nouns and names, I examine certain aspects of George Peele's play of King Edward I (c. 1593), showing how the text's manifold confusions can be seen as resulting from the interface of the written and the oral. Throughout the essay, there recurs the figure (meaning both "character" and "cipher") of Jack: as a name, as a fortuitous syllable, and as a trickster hero whose ingenuity and uncanny ubiquity finally puncture the explanatory character of the essay itself.