And this also reminds me of Sears Jayne's wonderful readings aloud in
an effort to get Spenserian pronunciation (and he could really make
Spensier come alive), of which I have a tape somewhere.
Susanne
On Wed, 11 Oct 2006 17:20:47 -0400
"David L. Miller" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> As a question about teaching, rather than about historical
>practices,
> I'd like to say that I think hearing the poetry read aloud is an
> enormous aid to understanding for students who are struggling. I
>have
> CDs of a competent British reader doing large sections of the poem,
>and
> I regularly lend them to students having trouble--who regularly
>report
> that it helps enormously.
>
> Like you, Anne, I read aloud in class. A lot. I think that a great
> deal of what any Spenserian verse "means" is found it its
>*movement*,
> and the students just can't hear that unless you read passages to
>them.
>
> DM
>
>
>>>> [log in to unmask] 10/11/2006 5:05 PM >>>
> 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
> mainly
> read the "April" eclogue? I doubt he spent much time on the Lucifera
> passages.
>
> 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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