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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