Phoo on my co-editors! Spenser does read well. Several years ago I spent about an hour a week going over pronunciation with a man who was recording the FQ for the Blind. I never learned whether he finished or how good his recording was, but the real difficulty was those punny words that you can see on the page but do not know how to pronounce. Does any one know about this recording> tpr
----- Original Message -----
From: William Oram <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wednesday, October 11, 2006 2:07 pm
Subject: Re: FQ aloud
To: [log in to unmask]
> There's of course the reference in CCCHA to Spenser reading his poem
> aloud to Elizabeth I--something that probably happened, since the poem
> is at least partly aimed at the court it describes. I've always
> wondered, however, how much time Elizabeth gave him. And did he
> mainlyread the "April" eclogue? I doubt he spent much time on the
> Luciferapassages.
>
> I agree with Anne thatSpenser's poetry doesn't read aloud as well as
> Chaucer--or Milton, for that matter--though it's possible to read
> particular scenes to good effect. Bill Oram
>
> >>> <[log in to unmask]> 10/11/2006 1:33 PM >>>
> I read aloud a lot in class so I can ham it up, although not usually
> for
> specifically comic effect; Spenser isn't as much fun as Chaucer in
> this
> regard, but he still works--especially, I find, Despair's speech to
> Redcrosse. On reading aloud in the Renaissance there's a nice essay
> by
> Williamd Nelson with a title including the phrase "Listeth
> Lordings"--it
> should be in the MLA database somewhere. His point, as I recall, was
> the
> persistence of reading outloud--something that recent research on
> women
> has further uncovered. But then a lot of us still do that; a now
> deceased
> colleague of mine and his wife got through the entire Parliamentary
> series
> by Trollope. Anne.
>
> > Sidney-Spenser List --
> >
> > I am quite interested in reading aloud, whether the readers were
> > aristocrats in drawing rooms or some sort of mixture of people in
> the
> > taverns and guildhalls. Clearly segments of seventeenth-century
> drolls
> > were read aloud in these venues if title pages are to be
> trusted.
> One
> > could actually perform and not have to get lines by heart, according
> to
> > the
> > preface of one collection of drolls. . In Sociable Letters (1664),
> > Margaret Cavendish critiques the delivery of a male reader who may
> have
> > been Thomas Hobbes.
> >
> > "I heard a man who was a great scholar and a learned man, having
> read
> > much,
> > and one that pretended to be a good poet and eloquent orator read
> Mr.
> > W.Ns.
> > excellent works quite out of tune and time, neither humoring the
> sense nor
> > words but always persisting in the same tune, which was dull and
> flat, and
> > made my sense of hearing as dull as his reading."
> >
> > Pepys reports buying a play text and having his neighbors read it
> aloud
> > after supper. I would appreciate learning about other instances of
> people
> > reading aloud in seventeenth-century England.
> >
> > Jim Fitzmaurice
> > [log in to unmask]
> > [log in to unmask]
> >
> >
> > At 09:38 AM 10/11/2006, you wrote:
> >>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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