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
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> [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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