By Martin Castro (Contributor) – Email
Print Edition: March 18, 2015
Satan, Beelzebub, and Death made appearances at UFV on Friday, March 13, when a dramatic reading of Milton’s Paradise Lost was held in room B121 on the Abbotsford campus. Seated behind an array of tables placed end-to-end, both UFV faculty and students dropped in to lend their voices to the various roles in Milton’s masterpiece. Published in 1667, the epic poem describes the biblical story of the war between Heaven and Hell and the ensuing fall of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden.
“[The event] was originally the idea of Melissa Walter, my colleague in the English department,” explained Tim Herron, who organized the event with Walter. “She thought we should put on a reading of Paradise Lost. We talked about it and came to the conclusion that a dramatic reading … made the most sense, where each character’s part would be recited by a different person.”
At 8:30 a.m., Melissa Walter set the scene for the first interaction of main characters in Paradise Lost. The sound of drip coffee being brewed punctuated an exchange between Satan and Beelzebub, voiced by Dhawan and Pitcher respectively. The reading was broken into the 12 books (sections) of Paradise Lost, with a five to 10-minute break between the ending of each book and the beginning of the next, allowing participants to change their seating or join those reading at the front of the room.
Herron noted that no recording of Paradise Lost being read by multiple voices exists.
“All recordings of Paradise Lost that you can find anywhere, really, on the web, or through Amazon, [will] be one person reading the whole work. But we were of the view that the intention of the work was to be dramatic, so that’s the thinking behind our version.”
Given its early starting time, the reading only saw a handful of people in the audience until around 9 a.m., when more people started trickling into the room, either eager to listen and participate, or curious as to why there was a crowd of people intently listening to a speech delivered by a man whose name-card labelled him as Satan.
Attendance for the reading peaked just before midday, where almost every table was occupied by spectators, many of which were following the dialogue and narration in their own copies of Paradise Lost.
Herron noted that reading the entire work in one sitting worked because it created continuity in the storyline.
“We thought it would make sense to do it all in one day,” he said.
The event finally wrapped up around 9:30 p.m. — a total of 13 hours of reading.
