Vintage canada edition, 1998 Copyright 1996 by Alberto Manguel

Troilus and Criseyde now in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, depicts a man standing at an outside
pulpit and addressing an audience of lords and ladies, an open book laid out in front of him. The man is
Chaucer; the royal couple next to him, King Richard II and Queen Anne.
Chaucer’s style combines devices borrowed from the classical rhetoricians with the colloquialisms and
catch-phrases of the minstrel tradition, so that a reader following his words from across the centuries
hears as well as sees the text. Because Chaucer’s audience were going to “read” his poems through their
ears, devices such as rhyme, cadence, repetition, and the voices of different characters were essential
elements of his poetic composition; reading out loud, he would be able to alter these devices according to
the audience’s reaction. When the text was set down in written form, whether for someone else to read
out loud or for someone to read silently, it was obviously important to retain the effect of these aural
tricks. For that reason, just as certain punctuation marks had been developed through silent reading,
equally practical signs were now developed for reading out loud. For instance, the diple — a scribe’s mark
in the shape of a horizontal arrowhead, placed in the margin to draw attention to some element in the
text — now became the sign we recognize today as inverted commas, to indicate first quotations, and
then passages of direct speech. As well, the scribe who copied out The Canterbury Tales in the late-
fourteenth-century Ellesmere manuscript resorted to slashes (the solidus) to mark the rhythm of the verse
spoken out loud:
In Southwerk / at the Tabard / as I lay
Redy / to wenden on my pilgrimage
By 1387, however, Chaucer’s contemporary John of Trevisa, who was translating an immensely popular
epic, the Polychronicon, from the Latin, chose to render it into English prose rather than verse — a
medium less adapted to a public reading — because he knew that his audience no longer expected to
listen to a recitation, and would instead, in all probability, read the book by themselves. The death of the
author, it was thought, enabled the reader to have freer commerce with the text.

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And yet the author, the magical creator of the text, retained an incantatory prestige. What intrigued new
readers was meeting that maker, the body that lodged the mind that had dreamt up Dr. Faust, Tom Jones,
Candide. And for the authors there was a parallel act of magic: meeting that literary invention, the public,
the “dear reader”, those who for Pliny were well- or ill-behaved people of visible eyes and ears and who
now, centuries later, had become a mere hope beyond the page. “Seven copies,” reflects the protagonist
of Thomas Love Peacock’s early nineteenth-century novel Nightmare Abbey, “have been sold. Seven is a
mystical number, and the omen is good. Let me find the seven purchasers of my seven copies, and they
shall be the seven golden candlesticks with which I will illuminate the world.” To meet their allotted seven
(and seven times seven, if the stars were lucky), authors started once again to read their work in public.
Chaucer reading to King Richard II, in an early fifteenth-century manuscript of Troilus and Criseyde.
(photo credit 18.1)
As Pliny had explained, public readings by the author were meant to bring the text not only to the public
but back to the author as well. Chaucer no doubt emended the text of The Canterbury Tales after his
public readings (perhaps putting some of the complaints he heard into the mouths of his pilgrims — such
as the Man of Law, who finds Chaucer’s rhymes pretentious). Molière, three centuries later, habitually
read his plays out loud to his housemaid. “If Molière ever did read to her,” the English novelist Samuel
Butler commented in his Notebooks, “it was because the mere act of reading aloud put his work before
him in a new light and, by constraining his attention to every line, made him judge it more rigorously. I
always intend to read, and generally do read, what I write aloud to someone; any one almost will do, but
he should not be so clever that I am afraid of him. I feel weak places at once when I read aloud where I
thought, as long as I read to myself only, that the passage was all right.”
Sometimes it was not self-improvement but censorship that led the author back to reading in public. Jean-
Jacques Rousseau, forbidden by the French authorities to publish his Confessions, instead read
throughout the long cold winter of 1768, in various aristocratic Paris households. One of these readings
lasted from nine in the morning until three in the afternoon. According to one of his listeners, when
Rousseau came to the passage describing how he had abandoned his children, the audience, at first
embarrassed, was reduced to tears of grief.
Throughout Europe, the nineteenth century was the golden age of authors’ readings. In England the star
was Charles Dickens. Always interested in amateur theatrics, Dickens (who did in fact act on stage a
number of times, notably in his own collaboration with Wilkie Collins, The Frozen Deep, in 1857) used his
histrionic talent in readings of his own work. These, like Pliny’s, were of two kinds: reading to his friends
to polish his final drafts and gauge the effect of his fiction on his public; and public readings,
performances for which he became famous in later life. Writing to his wife, Catherine, about reading his
second Christmas story, The Chimes, he exulted, “If you had seen Macready [one of Dickens’s friends] last
night — undisguisedly sobbing, and crying on the sofa, as I read — you would have felt (as I did) what a
thing it is to have Power”. “Power over others,” one of his biographers adds. “Power to move and to sway.
The Power of his writing. The Power of his voice.” To Lady Blessington, regarding the reading of The
Chimes, Dickens wrote, “I am in great hopes that I shall make you cry, bitterly.”
Dickens reading “The Chimes” to a group of friends. (photo credit 18.2)
At about the same time, Alfred, Lord Tennyson began haunting London drawing-rooms with readings of
his most famous (and very long) poem, Maud. Tennyson sought not power in the reading, as Dickens did,
but rather continued applause, confirmation that his work did indeed have an audience. “Allingham,
would it disgust you if I read Maud? Would you expire?” he asked a friend in 1865. Jane Carlyle recalled
him going about at a party asking people if they had liked Maud, and reading Maud aloud, “talking Maud,
Maud, Maud” and “as sensitive to criticisms as if they were imputations on his honour”. She was a patient
listener; at the Carlyle home in Chelsea, Tennyson had forced her to approve the poem by reading it to
her three times in succession. According to another witness, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Tennyson read his
own work with the emotion he sought in his audience, shedding tears and “with such intensity of feeling
that he seized and kept quite unconsciously twisting in his powerful hands a large brocaded cushion”.
Emerson missed that intensity when reading Tennyson’s poems aloud himself. “It is a pretty good test of a
ballad, as of all poetry,” he confided in his notebooks, “the facility of reading it aloud. Even in Tennyson,
the voice grows solemn and drowsy.”
Dickens was a much more professional performer. His version of the text — the tone, the emphasis, even
the deletions and amendments to make the story better suited to an oral delivery — made it clear to
everyone that there was to be one and only one interpretation. This became evident on his celebrated

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reading tours. The first extensive tour, beginning in Clifton and ending in Brighton, comprised some
eighty readings in more than forty towns. He “read in warehouses, assembly rooms, booksellers, offices,
halls, hotels and pump rooms.” At a high desk, and later at a lower one, to allow his audience to see his
gestures better, he entreated them to try to create the impression of “a small group of friends assembled
to hear a tale told”. The public reacted as Dickens wished. One man cried openly and then “covered his
face with both hands, and lay down on the back of the seat before him, and really shook with emotion.”
Another, whenever he felt a certain character was about to reappear, would “laugh and wipe his eyes
afresh, and when he came he gave a kind of cry, as if it were too much for him.” Pliny would have
approved.
The effect was laboriously obtained; Dickens had spent at least two months working on his delivery and
gestures. He had scripted his reactions. In the margins of his “reading books” — copies of his work which
he had edited for these tours — he had noted reminders to himself of the tone to use, such as “Cheerful.…
Stern.… Pathos.… Mystery.… Quick on”, as well as gestures: “Beckon down.… Point.… Shudder.… Look
Round in Terror.…” Passages were revised according to the effect produced on the audience. But, as one
of his biographers notes, “he did not act out the scenes, but suggest them, evoke them, intimate them. He
remained a reader, in other words, and not an actor. No mannerisms. No artifice. No affectations.
Somehow he created his startling effects by an economy of means which was unique to himself, so it is
truly as if the novels themselves spoke through him.” After the reading, he never acknowledged the
applause. He would bow, leave the stage and change his clothes, which would be drenched with sweat.
This was, in part, what Dickens’s audience came for, and what brings the audiences of today to public
readings: to watch the writer perform, not as an actor, but as a writer; to hear the voice the writer had in
mind when a character was created; to match the writer’s voice to the writing. Some readers come out of
superstition. They want to know what a writer looks like, because they believe that writing is an act of
magic; they want to see the face of someone who can create a novel or a poem in the same way that they
would want to see the face of a small god, creator of a little universe. They hunt for autographs, thrusting
books under the author’s nose in the hope that they will come away with the blessed inscription “To
Polonius, best wishes, the Author.” Their enthusiasm led William Golding to say (during the 1989 literary
festival in Toronto) that “one day, someone will find an unsigned William Golding novel and it will be
worth a fortune.” They are driven by the same curiosity that makes children look behind a puppet theatre
or take apart a clock. They want to kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses even though, as Joyce remarked, “it
did lots of other things, too.” The Spanish writer Dámaso Alonso was not impressed. He considered public
readings “an expression of snobbish hypocrisy and of the incurable superficiality of our time.”
Distinguishing between the gradual discovery of a book read silently, in solitude, and a quick
acquaintance with an author in a crowded amphitheatre, he described the latter as “the true fruit of our
unconscious haste. That is to say, of our barbarism. Because culture is slowness.”
At authors’ readings, at writers’ festivals in Toronto, Edinburgh, Melbourne or Salamanca, readers expect
that they will become part of the artistic process. The unexpected, the unrehearsed, the event that will
prove somehow unforgettable, may, they hope, happen in front of their eyes, making them witnesses to a
moment of creation — a joy denied even to Adam — so that when someone asks them in their gossipy old
age, as Robert Browning once asked ironically, “And did you once see Shelley plain?” the answer will be
yes.
In an essay on the plight of the panda, the biologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote that “zoos are changing
from institutions of capture and display to havens of preservation and propagation.” At the best of literary
festivals, at the most successful public readings, writers are both preserved and propagated. Preserved
because they are made to feel (as Pliny confessed) that they have an audience that attaches importance to
their work; preserved, in the crudest sense, because they get paid (as Pliny wasn’t) for their labours; and
propagated because writers breed readers, who in turn breed writers. The listeners who buy books after
a reading multiply that reading; the author who realizes that he or she may be writing on a blank page
but is at least not speaking to a blank wall may be encouraged by the experience, and write more.
Rilke at his window in the Hotel Biron in Paris. (photo credit 18.3)

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