Sound Files (MP3 Format)

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Portrait of Edith Piaf

Songs by Edith Piaf

 

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "The Elf-King"

 

Heinrich Heine, Songs

 

 

Thomas Mann,
"Mario and the Magician

 

 

Henrik Ibsen,
Hedda Gabler

 

 

Jean Racine, Phèdre

 

Homer,
Odyssey

Plato

 

Passages from the Bible and Related Works

 

Euripides,
Medea

Ovid,
Metamorphoses

Old English (Anglo-Saxon)

 

Chaucer, "The Pardoner's Tale"

Passages from Chaucer read by Helge Kökeritz


Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Dante,
Inferno

 

Slide Lecture
on Dante's Divine Comedy

Elizabethan England, with Michael Redgrave, Dorothy Tutin, Donald Wolfit, and Michael Hordern

Ludovico Ariosto,
Orlando Furioso,
trans. Sir John Harington

Torquato Tasso,
Jerusalem Delivered,
trans. Edward Fairfax

 

Edmund Spenser,
The Faerie Queene

 

Titta Ruffo reading
"To Be or Not to Be"
in Italian, ca. 1920

Titta Ruffo reading Hamlet's address to the ghost in Italian, ca. 1920
(Shown costumed as Hamlet in 1912)

 

 


John Dryden,
Absalom and Achitophel

 

 

 

 

Shakespeare,
Venus and Adonis,
read by Max Adrian

 

 

 


Gilbert Highet,
"Rhythm in Poetry"
(To view the text while listening to the lecture, click here first.)

 


John Milton,
Works

 

 


Chrisopher Marlowe,
Hero and Leander


Richard Crashaw's "The Flaming Heart"
(To view the text while listening to the poem, click here first.)


First Three Meditations from the Third Century of Meditations, by Thomas Traherne (from Caedmon Treasury of English Prose, Vol. 2)
(To view the text while listening to it, click here first.)


"Three Generations
in a Court of Domestic Relations,"
by Ruth Draper


Hit Parade from 1951

Illustrations of the term "variant": Highly dissimilar variants of "Little Red Riding Hood," all humorous