Instead of a Chauvinist manifesto
defiantly declaimed under the limelight, there was offered us the
quiet pathos of a dying patriot's lament over his beloved country's
misfortunes--an oracular warning from a death-stricken tongue,
foreshadowing with rare solemnity and dramatic irony the violent doom
of the reckless worker of the mischief. Any other conception of the
passage, any conscious endeavour to win a round of applause by
elocutionary display, would disable the actor from doing justice to
the great and sadly stirring utterance. The right note could only be
sounded by one who was acclimatised to Shakespearean drama, and had
recognised the wealth of significance to be discovered and to be
disclosed (with due artistic restraint) in Shakespeare's minor
characters.
III
The benefits to be derived from the control of a trained school of
Shakespearean actors were displayed very conspicuously when Mr Benson
undertook six years ago the heroic task of performing the play of
_Hamlet_, as Shakespeare wrote it, without any abbreviation. _Hamlet_
is the longest of Shakespeare's plays; it reaches a total of over 3900
lines. It is thus some 900 lines longer than _Antony and Cleopatra_,
which of all Shakespeare's plays most nearly approaches its length.
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