ABSTRACT
This chapter examines sort of oral performance that existed in seventeenth-century England, reading aloud by amateurs. Margaret Cavendish’s categories of criticism were probably those commonly used to assess the reading aloud of drama. Cavendish writes about the reading aloud of her chapters, as distinct from her plays, in a preface found in The Worlds Olio. The reading aloud of William Shakespeare’s plays, which were favourites with Cavendish and her husband, would have been frequent. The extent and sophistication of Cavendish’s criticism of reading aloud suggests a household where such reading and critiques of it were commonplace. Reading aloud in the household that included Cavendish, then, was situated between what was commonplace among the gentry, and probably the aristocracy, during the time of Jane Austen and what was usual when Sir John Harrington was living. Some audiences for oral readings in the Cavendish household would have been quite large and that situation might have resembled in some ways the public stage.
