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 Cassius.
  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 pronounced 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 passion, 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 passion 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 quantity 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.
[←Contents]

CHAPTER XIII
INTERVIEWS

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

I. Introduction

For most of his material a reporter must rely upon his success as an interviewer. This, it has already been pointed out, requires courage, tact, persistence, and some knowledge of human nature. Its performance is beyond the powers of most boys and girls, and besides, if they tried it, they would annoy people. As a substitute, the exercises that follow have been devised. They involve interviews, it is true, but only with the members of a pupil’s own family.

There are two ways to manage an interview. One may go directly at it, which is sometimes the best method, or one may approach the subject cautiously. It depends on the disposition of the person interviewed. The direct method will probably work well with mother, who is never out of sorts, but as to father—well, the case may be different; while sisters, brothers, cousins, aunts, and uncles present endless problems and opportunities.

Before interviewing anybody, it is a good plan always to write down the questions you wish to ask. But do not read them to the person interviewed. Get them so thoroughly into your own mind that you will forget none of them. As an exercise, make a set of questions such as you would need to ask in order to learn the facts contained in the following paragraphs from Franklin’s Autobiography.