Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007
Activity 26.1
Unit 26 Literature in performance
Section 6 Media: from text to performance
1 Identify, in each of the five extracts below, any evidence you find in the form of the extract that the text it comes from has been specially composed for performance. At this stage, ignore whatever you know about any of the texts. In looking for signs of being ’written for performance’, consider four types of performance:
✵ reading aloud (e.g. in a public reading);
✵ musical performance (with the text used as words of a song or other musical composition);
✵ audio representation (e.g. as a radio drama, audio-book or CD);
✵ dramatic representation (including in the theatre, on television, or video/DVD).
Look for any kind of evidence you consider relevant, but pay particular attention to the following possible markers: layout, for instance division into lines; repetition of phrases, as in a musical chorus; implied identity of a specific speaker or narrator; and naming of various speakers as a cast or list of dramatis personae.
2 Are there features in any of the extracts that would make the text difficult, or even impossible, to perform in any of the four ways listed above?
[Tasks continue after the five extracts]
Text A
Can I not sing but ’hoy’
When the jolly shepherd made so much joy?
The shepherd upon a hill he sat;
He had on him his tabard and his hat,
His tar-box, his pipe and his flagat*;
His name was called Jolly, Jolly Wat,
For he was a good herdsboy.
With hoy!
For in his pipe he made so much joy.
[* = flask]
Text B
’Bill, Bill, for dear God’s sake, for your own, for mine, stop before you spill my blood! I have been true to you, upon my guilty soul I have!’
The man struggled violently to release his arms; but those of the girl were clasped round his, and tear her as he would, he could not tear them away.
’Bill,’ cried the girl, striving to lay her head upon his breast, ’the gentleman and that dear lady, told me to-night of a home in some foreign country where I could end my days in solitude and peace. Let me see them again, and beg them, on my knees, to show the same mercy and goodness to you; and this dreadful place, and far apart lead better lives, and forget how we have lived, except in prayers, and never see each other more. It is never too late to repent. They told me so - I feel it now - but we must have time - a little, little time!’
The housebreaker freed one arm, and grasped his pistol. The certainty of immediate detection if he fired, flashed across his mind even in the midst of his fury; and he beat it twice with all the force he could summon, upon the upturned face that almost touched his own.
She staggered and fell: nearly blinded with the blood that rained down from a deep gash in her forehead; but raising herself, with difficulty, on her knees, drew from her bosom a white handkerchief - Rose Maylie’s own - and holding it up, in her folded hands, as high towards Heaven as her feeble strength would allow, breathed one prayer for mercy to her Maker.
It was a ghastly figure to look upon. The murderer staggering backward to the wall, and shutting out the sight with his hand, seized a heavy club and struck her down.
Text C
FIRST VOICE
Blind Captain Cat climbs into his bunk. Like a cat, he sees in the dark. Through the voyages of his tears he sails to see the dead.
CAPTAIN CAT
Dancing Williams!
FIRST DROWNED
Still dancing.
CAPTAIN CAT
Jonah Jarvis.
THIRD DROWNED
Still.
FIRST DROWNED
Curly Bevan’s skull.
ROSIE PROBERT
Rosie, with God. She has forgotten dying.
FIRST VOICE
The dead come out in their Sunday best.
SECOND VOICE
Listen to the night breaking.
FIRST VOICE
Organ Morgan goes to chapel to play the organ. He sees Bach lying on a tombstone.
ORGAN MORGAN
Johann Sebastian!
cherry owen (Drunkenly)
Who?
ORGAN MORGAN
Johann Sebastian mighty Bach. Oh, Bach fach.
Text D
FIRST VOICE
’But tell me, tell me! speak again,
Thy soft response renewing—
What makes that ship drive on so fast?
What is the ocean doing?’
SECOND VOICE
’Still as a slave before his lord,
The ocean hath no blast;
His great bright eye most silently
Up to the Moon is cast—
If he may know which way to go;
For she guides him smooth or grim.
See, brother, see! how graciously
She looketh down on him.’
FIRST VOICE
’But why drives on that ship so fast,
Without or wave or wind?’
SECOND VOICE
’The air is cut away before,
And closes from behind.
Fly, brother, fly! more high, more high!
Or we shall be belated:
For slow and slow that ship will go,
When the Mariner’s trance is abated.’
Text E
And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England’s mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England’s pleasant pastures seen?
And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic Mills?
Bring me my Bow of burning gold!
Bring me my Arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!
I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land.
3 When you have listed all the evidence you can find in the form of the extracts, consider the following extra information:
Text A: First stanza of an anonymous Medieval poem or song; evidence about whether this text was sung rather than recited or read is conjectural, based on what we know and assume about how texts circulated during the period.
Text B: The final passage of Chapter 47 in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1837-8), the chapter in which Nancy is murdered by her companion in crime, Bill Sykes; see activity in Unit 3 (pp. 38-9) for context. Dickens started to prepare for public reading of this passage (which he read from earlier in the chapter than the extract reproduced here) in 1863, but only began performing it, to massive public acclaim, in 1868. So sensational was Dickens’s rendering of the passage considered to be that, during his farewell tour in 1869-70, the author included a special reading of the Nancy episode for an assembled audience of professional actors.
Text C: From towards the end of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood: A Play for Voices. This work was first broadcast by the BBC, January 1954, then presented on stage at the Edinburgh Festival and in London in 1956, with extracts also shown on television. A film of the play was released in 1972, and it has been produced in many different versions since.
Text D: The beginning of Part VI of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ’The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, a poem written in a combination of narrative and dramatic modes and included in Lyrical Ballads (1798). During the Romantic period, some poets wrote extensively in dramatic dialogue, or in mixed dramatic and non-dramatic modes, even where a work was not intended for the stage.
Text E: The poem ’Jerusalem’, from the Preface to William Blake’s Milton: A Poem (1804-8). This poem is more widely known as a hymn, with music composed in 1916 by Sir Charles Herbert Parry. Together, the words and music serve as the anthem of both the British Women’s Institute (since the 1920s) and also more recently of the far-right British National Party. The musical, hymn version has been released in cover versions by Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Iron Maiden vocalist Bruce Dickinson, The Fall, Billy Bragg and the Pet Shop Boys, as well as in instrumental versions including that by the Grimethorpe Colliery Brass Band.
4 How much does the form in which you have encountered a text before, or what you know about it, affect your view of its suitability for performance?
5 Finally, a version of each extract can probably be imagined in a multimedia environment combining still and moving images, written text, speech, sound effects and music. How would such adaptation of the texts presented here affect their literariness? How much of their quality as literature would you say is carried over into the new form of representation?
Reading
Finnegan, R. (2002) Communicating: The Multiple Modes of Human Interconnection, London: Routledge.
Jakobson, R. (1987) Language in Literature, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
Ong, W. (2002) Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, London: Routledge.
Thompson, J.B. (1995) The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media, Cambridge: Polity Press.