As for the second and the third and the fourth--well, I am not more
than common vain, I trust, but I see no occasion to write them _all_
down.
It was perhaps the greatest opportunity that I had yet had at the
Lyceum. I studied the part at my cottage at Hampton Court in a bedroom
looking out over the park. There was nothing wrong with _that_. By the
way, how important it is to be careful about environment and everything
else when one is studying. One ought to be in the country, but not all
the time.... It is good to go about and see pictures, hear music, and
watch everything. One should be very much alone, and should study early
and late--all night, if need be, even at the cost of sleep. Everything
that one does or thinks or sees will have an effect upon the part,
precisely as on an unborn child.
I wish now that instead of reading how this and that actress had played
Juliet, and cracking my brain over the different readings of her lines
and making myself familiar with the different opinions of philosophers
and critics, I had gone to Verona, and just _imagined_. Perhaps the most
wonderful description of Juliet, as she should be acted, occurs in
Gabriele d'Annunzio's "Il Fuoco." In the book an Italian actress tells
her friend how she played the part when she was a girl of fourteen in an
open-air theater near Verona.
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