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.

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.

To recite is to understand

Ruby, of Freehold 2, after seeing my post about her post on recitation, kindly expanded on her reflections about her experiences with recitation as a student. Her teacher Miss Evans believed that only by acting Shakespeare could one truly understand him. I am of the opinion of Miss Evans, in regards to understanding and feeling (see my posts on Enoch Arden and Jerome McGann’s essay in the “Poets reading Poets” post). Recitation is an interpretative method, but it is hardly used today.

Ruby quotes a very difficult passage from A Midsummer Night’s Dream that she chose to recite in class. Read it aloud — it really does give the mouth a full workout. And regards the value of recitation as a tool for memory retention, I will add to my last personal note that I can still recite Duke Orsinio’s lines from the first scene of The Tempest, even though, in the intervening years, I can’t remember how may things I’ve forgotten.

Mr Wopsle

Mr Wopsle is the church clerk in Pip’s home town in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations (1860-1). He is prone to delivering poetic and dramatic pieces at the drop of a hat, particularly Shakespeare and “The Passions: An Ode to Music” (1746), by William Collins. Even a newspaper story becomes fodder for a dramatic recitation:

“A highly popular murder had been committed, and Mr Wopsle was imbrued in blood to the eyebrows. He gloated over every abhorrent adjective in the description, and identified himself with every witness at the Inquest. He faintly moaned, “I am done for,” as the victim, and he barbarously bellowed, “I’ll serve you out,” as the murderer. He gave the medical testimony, in pointed imitation of our local practitioner; and he piped and shook, as the aged turnpike-keeper who had heard blows, to an extent so very paralytic as to suggest a doubt regarding the mental competency of that witness. The coroner, in Mr Wopsle’s hands, became Timon of Athens; the beadle, Coriolanus.” (Chapter 18)

Mr Wopsle’s excessive fondness for recitation leads him to quit his clerkship to become an actor (under the name ‘Waldengarver’). At a small metropolitan theatre in London, Pip attends a hilariously appalling performance of Hamlet, with Wopsle in the role of the melancholy Dane (Chapter 31). Pip later sees him in the deus ex machina role in a nautical melodrama (the genre parodied in Gilbert & Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore) and in a Christmas pantomime (Chapter 47).

Video killed the radio star…

…but radio killed the recitation star.

That’s the verdict of “Reciters: Kind, Genial, Harmless Creatures — Their Day Is Done.” Time (11 June 1923). What is odd about the article is that it reviews two presumably recently-published recitation anthologies while simultaneously eulogizing the demise of the practice of recitation: “But the reciter of our forefathers — the reciter magnificent — the lady of the awe-inspiring brow and graveyard contralto who tore “The Raven” to tatters on the slightest provocation, the cadaverous youth who was so comic delivering “Farmer Corn-tassel at the County Fair” — these, with the hansom-cab-driver and the professor of penmanship who drew little birds with flowing scrolls in their beaks, are rapidly passing into oblivion. Alas!”

The two anthologies reviewed are:

Pertwee, Ernest, ed. The Comic and Humourous Reciter. London: G. Routledge, n.d.

Potter, Cora Urquhart, comp. My Recitations. Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott Co., 1886. [This is the first edition bibliographic information; the anthology was republished a number of times; Google Books has a limited preview of a reprint of the first edition, including the table of contents.]

The reviewer sums up the contents of Potter’s book thus: “Death, Villainy, Madness, the Grave here find their own. The soldier of the Legion is dying in Algiers, Sir Ralph the Rover visits the Inchcape Rock, “Charge Chester, charge!” “‘We are lost!’ the captain shouted as he staggered down the stairs.” Less well known morceaux deal with Blood (in quantity), with Wicked Atheists, with the Last Few Remarks of Pious Children.”

Ernest Pertwee (who appears to have also published under the name “Guy Pertwee”) edited a number of other recitation anthologies:

The Reciter’s Treasury of Verse, Serious and Humourous, with an Introduction on the Art of Speaking. London: George Routledge & Sons & Swan Sonnenschein & Co; New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1907. Available at the Internet Archive.

The Art of Speaking. London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co.; New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1902. [Pertwee is described in this book as "Professor of Elouction, City of London School".] Available at the Internet Archive.

[Co-edited with Alfred Perceval Graves] The Reciter’s Treasury of Irish Verse and Prose. London: George Routledge & Sons; New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., [1915]. Available at the Internet Archive.

Pertwee also seems to have published under the name “Guy Pertwee” (he appears as “Ernest Guy Pertwee” in some Google Books and library catalogue entries). Facing the title page of Guy Pertwee’s Scenes for Acting from Great Novelists (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1913) (available at the Internet Archive) is an advertisement for “New Reciters,” which includes Scenes from Dickens for Amateur Acting, “arranged by Guy Pertwee, and Edited by Ernest Pertwee,” so I guess he kept his actor and professor personae distinct. (Mrs. Ernest Pertwee also seems to have had her hand in the recitation anthology trade: she is listed in the same advertisement as the author of A Second Book of Duologues and Dialogues for Recitation — unless this another nom de plume of Ernest’s!

Cora Urquhart Potter is better known as Cora Brown Potter (1857-1936), a well-known actress in the later 19th century. A brief biography of her can be read at Shakespeare and the Players.