erpretation, good or bad, impossible.

I admit that the way in which most actors speak verse is so deplorable
that there is much to be said for a purely mechanical method, even if it
should turn actors into little more than human phonographs. Many actors
treat verse as a slightly more stilted kind of prose, and their main aim
in saying it is to conceal from the audience the fact that it is not
prose. They think of nothing but what they take to be the expression,
and when they come to a passage of purely lyric quality they give it as
if it were a quotation, having nothing to do with the rest of the
speech. Anything is better than this haphazard way of misdoing things,
either M. Silvain's oratory or the intoning into which Mr. Yeats' method
would almost certainly drift. But I cannot feel that it is possible to
do much good by a ready-made method of any kind. Let the actor be taught
how to breathe, how to articulate, let his voice be trained to express
what he wants to express, and then let him be made to feel something of
what verse means by being verse. Let him, by all means, study one of Mr.
Yeats' readings, interpreted to him by means of notes; it will teach
him to unlearn something and to learn something more. But then let him
forget his notes and Mr. Yeats' method, if he is to make verse live on
the stage.

GREAT ACTING IN ENGLISH

Why is it that we have at the present moment no great acting in England?
We can remember it in our own time, in Irving, who was a man of
individual genius. In him it was the expression of a romantic
temperament, really Cornish, that is, Celtic, which had been cultivated
like a rare plant, in a hothouse. Irving was an incomparable orchid, a
thing beautiful, lonely, and not quite normal. We have one actress now
living, an exception to every rule, in whom a rare and wandering genius
comes and goes: I mean, of course, Mrs. Patrick Campbell. She enchants
us, from time to time, with divine or magical improvisations. We have
actresses who have many kinds of charm, actors who have many kinds of
useful talent; but have we in our whole island two actors capable of
giving so serious, so intelligent, so carefully finished, so vital an
interpretation of Shakespeare, or, indeed, of rendering any form of
poetic drama on the stage, as the Englishman and Englishwoman who came
to us in 1907 from America, in the guise of Americans: Julia Marlowe and
Edward Sothern?

The business of the manager, w