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The diagrams show the positions, entrances,

etc.

The plays are cut to the length of an ordinary performance. Lines can be restored or further cut, if desirable, always remembering that a play given on what we will always call the Shakespeare stage should be given more rapidly, with no pauses between scenes or between entrances and exits, and with possibly only one intermission (of perhaps five minutes), as near as possible halfway through; and most of the plays can be acted in their entirety in about three hours, some of them in much less time — one or two of them take much more. If we cannot quite reduce ours to the happy medium of two hours, we must get as near it as possible. It is better to send your friends away wanting more, than to have them go home yawning! This is a word to the wise.

As to stage setting, it can be done in lots of ways: with scenery, or with screens, or curtains, or in the open air. Strange as it may appear, the plays of Shakespeare are equally effective whichever way we may choose to give them. I imagine most good plays will bear that test.

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RULES OR CUSTOMS OF ACTING

Remember that Shakespeare is the most perfect English. Do not imitate some of those professors, especially teachers of what is called Elocution and Expression, if by any chance they happen to pronounce it in up-todate American or cockney British, or tell you it was conceived in any other brogue, accent, or pronunciation than the purest of pure English. There are a few mistakes in his plays, and some printer's errors, about which volumes have been written. Study the humanity, the heart, the English of Shakespeare, as of the Bible those two wonderful Books of the same generation the one splendidly revised and perfected by many scholars, the other produced in a state of nature and yet almost perfect

study them, my young friends, inwardly digest your Bible and outwardly demonstrate your Shakespeare: you will then start in life pretty well equipped.