Fred asks where Lewis makes the distinction between Bards and Actors with regard to the recitation of poetry. As quoting from memory is a hazard with me, I went to find the original source, and discovered that that distinction is between Minstrels and Actors. Close … ah well.

The citation is Lewis’s essay entitled “Metre,” which I have in a volume called Selected Literary Essays (Cambridge UP, 1969). I had hoped to find it reprinted in the recent (2002, paperback) essay collection Literature, Philosophy and Short Stories, but it isn’t, at least not in the British edition (HarperCollins). We really do need a uniform scholarly edition of the complete works–but I digress. Here’s the relevant passage from the Cambridge UP volume:

Unfortunately, even after we have ruled out gross barbarisms, there remain different and defensible ways of reading poetry aloud and they do not coincide with differences of opinion about metre. The two main schools may be called Minstrels and Actors. They differ about the proper relations between the noises they make and something else; that something else being the thing we are looking for, namely metre. Minstrels, singing or intoning, make their utterance conform to this, leaving you to imagine the rhythm and tempo which the words would have in ordinary speech. Actors give you that rhythm and tempo out loud, leaving you to imagine the metre. Yet both may be fully agreed as to what the metre is. They differ by deliberately making, or refusing to make, an imaginary archetype or paradigm actual. This paradigm is metre. Scansion is the conformity, made audible by Minstrels and concealed by Actors, of the individual line to this paradigm. (280)

In ADAD 16 (below) I attempt to move back along that continuum in the direction of the Minstrels.

I may simply claim a scholar’s prerogative and change Lewis’s terms to what my faulty memory originally produced, since the word “minstrels” does not connote the same thing in American English as it does in other English-speaking cultures.