mpler way of acting. But might not the experiment be tried? Might not
some stage-manager come forward and say: "For heaven's sake stand still,
my dear ladies and gentlemen, and see if you cannot interest your
audience without moving more than twice the length of your own feet?"

THE SPEAKING OF VERSE

Was there ever at any time an art, an acquired method, of speaking
verse, as definite as the art and method of singing it? The Greeks, it
has often been thought, had such a method, but we are still puzzling in
vain over their choruses, and wondering how far they were sung, how far
they were spoken. Wagner pointed out the probability that these choruses
were written to fixed tunes, perhaps themselves the accompaniment to
dances, because it can hardly be believed that poems of so meditative a
kind could have themselves given rise to such elaborate and not
apparently expressive rhythms. In later times there have been stage
traditions, probably developed from the practice of some particular
actor, many conflicting traditions; but, at the present day, there is
not even a definite bad method, but mere chaos, individual caprice, in
the speaking of verse as a foolish monotonous tune or as a foolishly
contorted species of prose.

An attempt has lately been made by Mr. Yeats, with the practical
assistance of Mr. Dolmetsch and Miss Florence Farr, to revive or invent
an art of speaking verse to a pitch sounded by a musical instrument. Mr.
Dolmetsch has made instruments which he calls psalteries, and Miss Farr
has herself learnt and has taught others, to chant verse, in a manner
between speaking and singing, to the accompaniment of the psaltery. Mr.
Yeats has written and talked and lectured on the subject; and the
experiment has been tried in the performances of Mr. Gilbert Murray's
translation of the "Hippolytus" of Euripides. Here, then, is the only
definite attempt which has been made in our time to regulate the speech
of actors in their speaking of verse. No problem of the theatre is more
important, for it is only by the quality of the verse, and by the
clearness, beauty, and expressiveness of its rendering, that a play of
Shakespeare is to be distinguished, when we see it on the stage, from
any other melodrama. "I see no reason," says Lamb, in the profoundest
essay which has ever been written on the acting of drama, "to think that
if the play of Hamlet were written over again by some such writer as
Banks or Lillo, retain