He said:
“You must correct your perspective, Mr. Corkey, and remember that the dramatist designed Bernardo for an honest but simple soldier. He is, we see, punctual and we have every reason to believe him an efficient member of the corps to which he belonged. He is, moreover, an officer; but more we do not know. You impart to him an air of mystery and importance that are calculated to arrest the audience and make them expect wonderful things of him, which he is not going to perform. In the matter of deportment, Mr. Corkey, a man of your inches cannot be too careful. Your legs—you understand I don’t speak offensively, but practically—your legs are long and thin. They are, in fact, the sort of legs that challenge the groundlings. It behoves you, therefore, to manage them with perfect propriety; to tone them down, as it were, and keep them as much out of the picture as possible.”
I very soon found, when it came to stage deportment in earnest, that I had not time left to overact Bernardo. In fact, when I once began to grasp the great difficulties of walking about on the stage with the art that conceals art, I had no intelligence left for acting the part at all, and my second rendering of Bernardo was colourless, though my legs were better.
After a third rehearsal Wilford Gooding took my place, and he gave a very different reading. In fact, when he and his friend Harold Crowe found themselves together on the stage, they showed a decided inclination to repeat their former imitation of the “Two Macs,” and Mr. Merridew reproved them angrily.
“You are here to work, not to fool, gentlemen,” he said, “and if you think the battlements of Elsinore by moonlight at the beginning of Hamlet is the proper place to be funny, then let me tell you you have mistaken your vocation.”
A rehearsal, in fact, has to be conducted with deadly earnestness, and for beginners to take it in a casual or lightsome spirit is a very great mistake. There is nothing lightsome about it.
Mr. Merridew directed us to buy a further book, written by himself, on the subject of voice production. It contained throat exercises for strengthening the larynx and diaphragm and vocal chords, and so on; and among other things, for a full hour every day we had to go into some private place and shout the vowels with the full blast of our lungs.
“It will make a great deal of noise, and people won’t like you for doing it,” prophesied Mr. Merridew, “but you must not mind a little opposition. Your voices naturally want quality and tone, and these can only be got with severe practice. Recollect that merely to speak is useless; you must shout.”
He told us where to buy his book, which fortunately cost no more than sixpence—in fact, only fourpence-halfpenny in reality.
During this lesson Mr. Merridew had to leave us for a short time, to attend a meeting of the Directors of the Dramatic School; and while he was away I ventured to show Leonard Brightwin my poem entitled “The Witches’ Sabbath.” He read it with great interest and was much struck by it.