ACTING AND ACTORS

Related Subjects: Drama, Imitation, Oratory, Stage

1. An actor is a sculptor who carves in snow.—LAWRENCE BARRETT

2. To see Kean act was like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning.—COLERIDGE, Table Talk

3. Never meddle with actors, for they are a favored class . . . as they are merry folk who give pleasure, everyone favors and protects them.—CERVANTES, Don Quixote

4. On this great stage, the world, no monarch e'er
   Was half so haughty as a monarch player.—CHARLES CHURCHILL, The Apology

5. The Poet, to the end of time,
   Breathes in his works and lives in rhyme;
   But, when the Actor sinks to rest,
   And the turf lies upon his breast,
   A poor traditionary fame
   Is all that's left to grace his name.—WILLIAM COMBE, Dr. Syntax in Search of the
   Picturesque

6. No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
   Am an attendant lord, one that will do
   To swell a progress, start a scene or two.—T. S. ELIOT, The Love Song of I. Alfred Prufrock

7. Have patience with the jealousies and petulances of actors, for their hour is their eternity.—RICHARD GARNETT, De Flagella Myrteo

8. Everybody has his own theatre, in which he is manager, actor, prompter, playwright, sceneshifter, boxkeeper, doorkeeper, all in one, and audience into the bargain.—A. W. & J. C. HARE, Guesses at Truth

9. Actors are the only honest hypocrites.—HAZLITT

10. It worries me to beat the band
    To hear folks say our life is grand;
    Wish they'd try some one-night stand—
    Ain't it awful, Mabel?—J. E. HAZZARD, Ain't It Awful, Mabel?

11. Beggars, actors, buffoons, and all that breed.—HORACE, Satires

12. What pleases in a great actor, as in all arts that appeal to the imagination, is the unforeseen.—JULES JANIN

13. Though the most be players, some must be spectators.—BEN JONSON, Timber

14. Acting is therefore the lowest of arts, if it is an art at all.—GEORGE MOORE, Mummer-Worship

15. Like a dull actor now,
    I have forgot my part, and I am out,
    Even to a full disgrace.—SHAKESPEARE, Coriolanus

16. 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.—SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet

17. 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. Oh, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwigpated 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.—SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet

18. Suit the action to the word, the word to the action; with this special observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature.—SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet

19. To hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature.—SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet

20. To show the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.—SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet

21. Now this overdone, or come tardy off, though it make the unskilful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve; the censure of the which one must in your allowance o'erweigh a whole theatre of others.—SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet

22. 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.—SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet

23. The stock actor is a stage calamity.—BERNARD SHAW, Dramatic Opinions & Essays

24. A character actor is one who cannot act and therefore makes an elaborate study of disguises and stage tricks by which acting can be grotesquely simulated.—BERNARD SHAW, Dramatic Opinions & Essays

25. Our brains evidently work in the same way. At the same time I begin to doubt whether you can really be an actress. Most of 'em have no brains at all.—BERNARD SHAW, to Ellen Terry

26. In my ideal company there shall not be an actress who can read.—BERNARD SHAW, to Ellen Terry