THE SPEAKING OF VERSE

Was there ever at any time an art, an acquired method, of speaking verse, as definite as the art and method of singing it?  The Greeks, it has often been thought, had such a method, but we are still puzzling in vain over their choruses, and wondering how far they were sung, how far they were spoken.  Wagner pointed out the probability that these choruses were written to fixed tunes, perhaps themselves the accompaniment to dances, because it can hardly be believed that poems of so meditative a kind could have themselves given rise to such elaborate and not apparently expressive rhythms.  In later times there have been stage traditions, probably developed from the practice of some particular actor, many conflicting traditions; but, at the present day, there is not even a definite bad method, but mere chaos, individual caprice, in the speaking of verse as a foolish monotonous tune or as a foolishly contorted species of prose.

An attempt has lately been made by Mr. Yeats, with the practical assistance of Mr. Dolmetsch and Miss Florence Farr, to revive or invent an art of speaking verse to a pitch sounded by a musical instrument.  Mr. Dolmetsch has made instruments which he calls psalteries, and Miss Farr has herself learnt and has taught others, to chant verse, in a manner between speaking and singing, to the accompaniment of the psaltery.  Mr. Yeats has written and talked and lectured on the subject; and the experiment has been tried in the performances of Mr. Gilbert Murray’s translation of the “Hippolytus” of Euripides.  Here, then, is the only definite attempt which has been made in our time to regulate the speech of actors in their speaking of verse.  No problem of the theatre is more important, for it is only by the quality of the verse, and by the clearness, beauty, and expressiveness of its rendering, that a play of Shakespeare is to be distinguished, when we see it on the stage, from any other melodrama.  “I see no reason,” says Lamb, in the profoundest essay which has ever been written on the acting of drama, “to think that if the play of Hamlet were written over again by some such writer as Banks or Lillo, retaining the process of the story, but totally omitting all the poetry of it, all the divine features of Shakespeare, his stupendous intellect; and only taking care to give us enough of passionate dialogue, which Banks or Lillo were never at a loss to furnish; I see not how the effect could be much different upon an audience, nor how the actor has it in his power to represent Shakespeare to us differently from his representation of Banks or Lillo.”  It is precisely by his speaking of that poetry, which one is accustomed to hear hurried over or turned into mere oratory, that the actor might, if he were conscious of the necessity of doing it, and properly trained to do it, bring before the audience what is essential in Shakespeare.  Here, in the rendering of words,