Part 17 (1/2)

_Tuesday_--Study of Models through Dictation.

_Wednesday_--Gathering of Material--Organization.

_Thursday_--Oral Discussion of First Drafts.

_Friday_--1. Present finished work to teacher.

2. Program.

VIII. A Shakespeare Program

If, for any reason, it seems unwise to send pupils to a play, they might be requested (1) to present the following program, or some modification of it, as typical of Shakespeare's best work, and (2) to write notices or critiques thereon. It is perhaps unnecessary to add that no more profitable or delightful exercise can be devised for a cla.s.s.

1. Mendelssohn's _A Midsummer Night's Dream_ Music.

2. Antony's Oration (with mob).

3. Songs from _As You Like It_.

4. Quarrel of Brutus and Ca.s.sius.

5. The Seven Ages of Man.

6. Hamlet's Soliloquy.

7. The Trial Scene from _The Merchant of Venice_.

8. Songs from Various Plays.

9. The Rude Mechanicals, from _A Midsummer Night's Dream_.

IX. Memorize

THE ART OF ACTING

_Hamlet._ Speak the speech, I pray you, as I p.r.o.nounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue: but, if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines.

Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently; for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, the whirlwind of pa.s.sion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness. O, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a pa.s.sion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb-shows and noise: I would have such a fellow whipped for o'erdoing Termagant; it out-herods Herod: pray you, avoid it.

_First Player._ I warrant your honour.

_Hamlet._ Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion be your tutor: suit the action to the word, the word to the action; with this special observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature: for anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure. Now this overdone, or come tardy off, though it make the unskillful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve; the censure of the which one must in your allowance o'erweigh a whole theatre of others. O, there be players that I have seen play, and heard others praise, and that highly, not to speak it profanely, that, neither having the accent of Christians nor the gait of Christian, pagan, nor man, have so strutted and bellowed that I have thought some of nature's journeymen had made men and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably.

_First Player._ I hope we have reformed that indifferently with us, sir.

_Hamlet._ O, reform it altogether. And let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them; for there be of them that will themselves laugh, to set on some quant.i.ty of barren spectators to laugh too; though, in the mean time, some necessary question of the play be then to be considered: that's villainous, and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it. Go, make you ready.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, _Hamlet_, Act III, Scene 2.

CHAPTER XIII

INTERVIEWS

”To be a well-favored man is the gift of fortune; but to write and read comes by nature.”--SHAKESPEARE.