ABSTRACT
The Comedy contains innumerable references to the poem, and to works by other poets, as speech or song, and hence to its receiver as a hearer rather than as an individual reader. For Dante Alighieri a poem consists essentially of speech; the product of the act of 'dire' or 'parlare', produced by the 'lingua'. In the society, the principal means of diffusion of a poem such as the Comedy among the people as a whole would have been by public recitation or by public reading out loud, perhaps with some commentary. Until the invention of printing put copies of the poem into many private hands, the vast majority of the earliest receptors of Dante's masterpiece would have experienced it as an oral–aural work, and its recitation would have been a public, indeed a social, act. In Dante's day the chivalric romances in vernacular dialect forms were circulating in the streets and might even have been declaimed on a stage.
