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This and the following two chapters look at the reciters and storytellers who would frequent the coffeehouses of Cairo and other towns in the evenings, particularly during religious festivals. This chapter focuses on the poets (“shoara”) who would recite, by memory, tales of the adventures of Aboo Zeyd, a story based on events that supposedly took place in middle of third century AH, but were composed later. These tales are said to be informative on the subject Bedouin customs and traditions. The recitations were half prose and half poetry, with some music. The poet would play a few notes on a viol after every verse, and was sometimes accompanied by another instrument. This chapter includes a summary of a volume of the story, plus a translation of some of the poetry and musical notation.

The third type of reciters, along with the storytellers and poets of the previous two chapters, mainly told the story of ‘Antar (Seeret ‘Antar) and were therefore known as “‘Antariah.” They also told other tales, such as Seerat Delhemeh or stories from A Thousand and One Nights. There were around six of them in Cairo. They performed without music, chanting the poetry from memory and reading the prose. This chapter also includes summaries of some of the tales told and translations of some of the poetry.

Chapter 1 analyzes the early promotional discourse surrounding the phonograph as a medium of natural fidelity and then situates the idea of the phonograph as a “pure voice” medium within the context of popular recitation anthologies in order to identify key elocutionary preconceptions that informed the vocal performances heard in early spoken recordings. In revealing the affinities that existed between late Victorian short spoken recordings and the brief texts meant for speaking aloud that were collected in nineteenth-century recitation anthologies, this opening chapter explains the preconceived notions about the phonograph as a new media technology and the significance of sound recording for the performance of literary texts, in particular.

Chapter 3 tells the story of the multiple recordings made between 1890 and 1920, both by the poet himself and by actors and elocutionists, of Tennyson’s poem “The Charge of The Light Brigade.” It analyzes the kinds of performance and genre that informed the production of these recordings and locates the speech sounds heard on them in debates of the period about elocution and verse speaking. An account of late Victorian methods of “dramatic” interpretation as elaborated by Samuel Silas Curry in Imagination and Dramatic Instinct opens into a longer genealogy of oral interpretation, and considers the import of New Criticism as a method of literary interpretation that worked to silence oral performance in the classroom. The close listening in this chapter also explores the potential of digital speech analysis tools to help us to fix and visualize elocutionary, prosodic features of these recordings of “Charge.”

The pseudo-Senecan historical drama Octavia now has a superb textual commentary by Rolando Ferri. This chapter argues against three of Ferri's assumptions: that the play was a ‘recitation drama’ (a genre invented in 1966 for which no ancient evidence exists); that it was written in the reign of Domitian; and that the performance of fabulae praetextae on stage had become obsolete because of ‘the lack of state patronage’ and ‘the corruption of popular taste’. What evidence there is suggests that it was performed very soon after the fall of Nero, in a long and continuous tradition of popular plays on topical political subjects; and that good authors regularly wrote for stage performance in the first century AD, just as they had under the republic.