NAVSA 2008 Panel – Vox Populi: Recitation and Reciters in Victorian Britain

Presenters: Susan Schuyler, Stanford University
Joanne Nystrom Janssen, University of Iowa
Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, Harvard University

Chair: Jason Boyd, University of Toronto

Panel Summary: These three papers explore the practice of recitation and its influence on personal and social identity. More particularly, they explore how Victorian recitation operates both as an instrument of social control and conformity and as a medium of self-expression, self-knowledge and empowerment for women, children, and the ‘common man.’

Reforming the Stage: Genre, Gender, and Parlor Recitation (Susan Schuyler)

During those decades when the public theatre was considered a dangerous space, rather than banish theatricality altogether, the middle-classes indulged in alternative types of performance which were considered appropriate for the production and consumption of “respectable” Victorians-particularly bourgeois women. The parlor recitation, a form of parlor drama, was a generic compromise; in this form of entertainment, poetry, prose, and drama, reading and spectatorship intersected. At the same time, parlor recitation effected an ideological compromise by using the bourgeois female, the embodiment of middle-class domesticity, to challenge the allurements of the “public” actress of the large, commercial theatres.

The growing industry of parlor drama manuals and collections made domestic recitation a central part of the theatrical experience of the middle-class. For example, volumes such as Charles Tennyson Turner’s Small Tableaux are intended to be read only; Turner’s volume of poems does not include any performance instruction. At the same time, however, we cannot conclude that dramatic performance was always subordinated to reading, or that performance and spectatorship were merely supplements to reading practices. Since the texts of these guidebooks were dramatic in nature, they implicitly authorized dramatic performance.

Parlor recitation is a particularly interesting form of parlor drama because it most obviously merges genres and the practices with which they are associated. The divorce of poetry and drama-the replacement of poetic verse drama with melodramatic prose-was one of the most common themes of the ubiquitous nineteenth-century assertions of the death of the British Drama. Although it claimed to be non-theatrical, recitation is, of course, a performative act, and some parlor recitation handbooks, including manuals written by elocutionist Alexander Melville Bell, used rhetorical theories influenced by Francois Delsarte to reinvent performance as recitation. Dramatic recitations and parlor poetic dramas therefore restored the traditional union of poetry, drama and performance, lending recitation an increased level of respectability.

“In Defense of Memorization”

Mark Bauerlein, in his article on Poetry Out Loud, has a link to an article by Michael Knox Beran, “In Defense of Memorization,” City Journal (Summer 2004), a conservative quarterly.

In the process of giving the reader a broad overview of the antiquity of memorization and its importance for historical figures like Augustine and Shakespeare, Beran makes some grandiose claims about the benefits of memorizing great literary and historical texts, and defends memorization against attacks by “progressive” educators, whose position he sums up in this wise:

Kids, in other words, should be free to do as they please; the teacher, in the role of “guide on the side” rather than “sage on the stage,” should cater to their whims; anything else is galley slavery. For progressive educators, to require students to recite “Daffodils” or memorize the Gettysburg Address is a relic of a “drill and kill” culture that inhibits the development of the self and is the educational equivalent of a chain gang.

In response to these educators, Beran argues that memorization, rather than being enslaving, is, on the contrary, liberating:

But the progressives’ educational philosophy is only superficially a philosophy of liberty. The progressive exercises in “guided fantasy” and “sensitivity training” that have replaced memorization and recitation do little to free kids’ selves. The older techniques, by contrast, are genuinely liberating. They build up in the child a more powerful mental instrument, one that will allow him, in later life, to make good use of his freedom. They cultivate those critical powers that enable an educated adult to question authority intelligently. The older techniques also unlock doors in the interior world of the soul. Classic poetry and rhetoric give kids a language, at once subtle and copious, in which to articulate their own thoughts, perceptions, and inchoate feelings. They help awaken what was previously dormant, actualize what was before only potential, and so enable the young person to fulfill the injunction of Pindar: “Become what you are.”

I think Beran’s view of the merits of memorization is as dogmatic as his depiction of views on memorization held by “progressive” educators. Memorization as a good in and of itself is as simplistic a belief as the belief that memorization per se is pernicious. Memorization combined with recitation is a way of both absorbing the content and interpreting the meaning of a text, by having to determine how it is to be read in order to render its meanings, an act with is both analytical and creative. Memorization alone will not develop critical faculties, just as creative faculties cannot develop in a void, apart from the texts that comprise our cultures and our pasts.

Mendelssohn, Shakespeare and Concert Readings

Wilson Kimber, Marian. “Reading Shakespeare, Seeing Mendelssohn: Concert Readings of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ca. 1850-1920.” The Musical Quarterly 89: 199-236.

Packed with concrete detail, Wilson Kimber’s essay gives a comprehensive overview of readings of Shakespeare’s play accompanied by Felix Mendelssohn’s incidental music composed for the play, which created in effect a melodrama (for melodrama, see the earlier entry on the Tennyson/Strauss Enoch Arden).

Many Victorian commentators viewed A Midsummer Night’s Dream as unstageable, in that the stage could not adequately depict fairyland, thus destroying the beauty or magic of Shakespeare’s play (or “poem”). The solution? “Concert readings,” a form which, it was believed, could enhance appreciation of both Shakespeare’s text and Mendelssohn’s music.

Thus, concert readings were, in part, an attempt at a solution to the aesthetic problems posed by the critics…. Transferred to the concert hall, Mendelssohn’s music provided with readings presented a novelty for concertgoers that was a far less expensive undertaking than an actual theatrical performance. Having the text of the play allowed conductors to program more selections from the incidental music, including those not typically heard in concerts, the sections of melodrama where text was spoken during the music.

Thus a reading of the play would offer the audience Shakespeare’s poetry stripped of any danger of theatrical excess, while Mendelssohn’s music could evoke a fairy world in the listener’s imagination without vivid reality impinging on the dream-like state.

Wilson Kimber focuses on the actress Fanny Kemble’s readings of Shakespeare’s play to Mendelssohn’s music (premiered in New York, 1850, and in London in 1852, accompanied by “fifty instrumentalists and a chorus of twenty”) and on reciters who followed in her footsteps (Fanny Clifton Stirling, Mary Frances Scott-Siddons, George Riddle, David Bispham). One interesting observation Wilson Kimber makes in the course of this history concerns Victorian elocution’s association with music:

Although the most common term for the performances of Kemble and others was “reading,” the actual sound of their performance would have been far from that—a stylized performance that had many of the characteristics of music. Elocutionary practices of the Victorian period created Shakespeare “readings” that in no way resembled a natural speaking voice, but took place in a formal recitation style; nineteenth-century reviews of actors and elocutionists frequently describe their speech as “musical.”

Wilson Kimber then goes on to describe how “[p]eriod acting treatises and elocution books included extensive analogies to music.”

The essay concludes with an examination of the decline of the concert reading as embodied in the performances of Kemble et al. Wilson Kimber notes that even in Kemble’s day critics grumbled about what they regarded as the excessive length of the performance. Also, such concert readings were taxing on the performer, who had to contend with length, speaking over a piano, organ, or orchestra, in often large halls, and with having to perform all the parts, which put such readings beyond the abilities of all but the most skilled actor-reciters.

More interestingly, the concert readings’ hybrid form was a target of criticism. Complaints were made about the spoken text “interrupting” the music, implying that one went either to listen to music or see a play, not both at once. Instead of enhancing Shakespeare’s and Mendelssohn’s work, such as pairing now seemed to devalue by simultaneously distracting from both. This not only marks a shift away from the pairing of music and recitation, but as Wilson Kimber notes, forms part of larger cultural shift away from oratory as a major cultural phenomenon in social life.

Blog Progess Report

I thought this would be a good as time as any to reflect on how this experiment is going (see the “What’s the purpose of this blog?” post). I’m quite sanguine, for the most part. Basically, I’m doing exploratory research on the phenomenon of recitation, but instead of amassing jottings and comments on paper or on a computer file, I’ve been recording the research on this blog. One advantage of doing this on a blog is that it compels one to further explore, process and compose a useful synopsis and comment on the material, rather than just collect a mass of citations and quotations, the significance of which might be forgotten in the process of collecting evidence.

A second advantage is that, with tools like Categories and Tags and hyperlinking, you can manipulate and access your research materials in ways not possible in more traditional formats. Although, in a sense, a blog can be viewed as a variation on the most traditional of research tools: the index-card system, where research is written down on index cards and then filed according to whatever cataloging system the researcher has devised. The blog, unlike the index-card mode of research, is much easier to use and can deal with unforeseen changes, additions, revisions in research trajectories, in a way that would be a nightmare if one were using the index-card system. (Blog posts can also be revised, supplemented, new tags and categories added, without wielding a big eraser or having to cram some new information along the side of an index card in vision-cripppling minuscule script.) Which leads me to ponder: How many scholars became the prisoners of, because of the effort they put into, their indexing-card systems, thereby limiting their intellectual mobility because of a preconceived system they had devised for structuring their data?

What’s the purpose of this blog?

This blog is an experiment. Can a blog be an effective tool for recording, retrieving and sharing research? Can it be a way for conference panel members (see ‘About’) and others to communicate — exchange ideas, give feedback, keep informed about the development of the work of members? And can a blog be the means by which the ‘ephemeral’ work done in the process of research and participating in conferences is made into a useful, lasting (and evolving?) resource for others? I envision a blog like this being a repository that makes accessible valuable (and usually unpublished) work even after the original creators have finished with it. What use are a collection of research notes gathering dust on a high shelf or sealed away in a computer file on a hard drive?