From 'Listen, Lordings' to 'Dear Reader'

Abstract

The great stories of the Renaissance, Orlando Furioso, Gerusalemme Liberata, Gargantua, The Faerie Queene, Don Quixote, were composed, not orally as we suppose the Homeric poems were, but with pen and ink, no doubt in book-lined studies. In this respect, if in few others, their authors were like novelists of our time. The novelist, however, not only produces his work in his study but expects that it will normally be consumed in similar privacy, each melnber of his audience in single communion with the whole book before him. Was that the kind of reading envisaged by the storytellers of the Renaissance? Or did they suppose that their tales would be read aloud to audiences large or small, canto by canto, chapter by chapter, perhaps on Tuesdays or Thursdays after dinner?