Dear all,
I'd be curious to hear people's thoughts about the question of Spenser's
poetry read aloud -- either as something that his original readers might
have done or as something that anyone on the list has done. To what
degree was the poem meant to be read aloud (whether to others, as must
have been common in the Renaissance, or even by one person reading to him
or herself), or, on the other hand, to be absorbed silently, broodingly,
over time? Some of the work by Alberto Manguel and others about the slow
emergence of silent reading is relevant, here, I think. But the only
essay relating to this question in Spenser that I know is John Webster's
intriguing "Oral form and Written Craft in Spenser's Faerie Queene," which
suggests that the poem shows formal qualities which relate it to
oral-formulaic verse as defined by Milman Parry and A. B. Lord (in their
much-debated accounts of Homeric verse), and argues that our experience of
the poem, however intricate, depends a lot on its "large scale looseness"
of verbal texture, even as this also begets a necessary doubleness of
reading, by turns sensuous and intellectual or analytic.
Ken
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