Sometimes students think literature written during the English Renaissance was written in “old English,” a natural mistake for beginners given the sometimes daunting difficulties of making sense of the language. In fact, Renaissance English is early modern English. Our contemporary English is much more like Shakespeare’s English than Shakespeare’s English is like Chaucer’s, and way closer than Shakespeare is to, say, Beowulf. But that’s not much comfort to a student struggling with unfamiliar idioms, odd-looking syntax, unexpected and often loose punctuation, and our old friend irregular orthography.

I tell my students that even scholars read the glosses in the notes, but my students still get that panicky look when they have to confront Milton’s prose, or almost anything in poetry. The only thing that reliably helps get them over that first “augh,” as they say in Peanuts, is to hear me read the passage aloud. I like to think I read pretty well–all professors like to think that, and who can blame them?–but I think the real key is reading aloud with comprehension. Which raises a paradox: if the students don’t understand the work, how are they helped by the fact I do? How can they even tell that I do? Why is my reading the passage aloud sometimes (not always) worth an hour of patient work on choosing interpretive strategies, mining the Oxford English Dictionary, and teasing the meaning out themselves in a close reading?

There’s something about the explaining voice, the voice that performs understanding, that doesn’t just convey information or narrate hermeneutics, but shapes out of a shared atmosphere an intimate drama of cognitive action in time. I’m reminded of Longinus on the sublime: for an instant, we believe that we have created what we have only heard. When we hear someone read with understanding, we participate in that understanding, almost as if the voice is enacting our own comprehension. We hear the shape of the emerging meaning, and intuit the mind that experiences that meaning even as it expresses it, and it’s all ours.

So this one’s going out to all you Miltonauts out there. You’ve heard L’Allegro on Podcast 1. Now here’s the other side. Contest or complement or lingering self-temptation? Let’s talk. (Special prize to those who catch my mistakes in what follows.)

Il Penseroso, by John Milton.

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