C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Acting
All the world’s a stage.
All the world practices the art of acting.
A fool cannot be an actor, though an actor may act a fool’s part.
The part was aptly fitted and naturally performed.
An actor should take lessons from a painter and a sculptor.
Where they do agree on the stage, then unanimity is wonderful.
They wear the livery of other men’s fortunes; their very thoughts are not their own.
The concealment of art by the actor is as great a mark of genius as it is in the painter.
Let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them.
To see Kean act was like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning.
Let gorgeous Tragedy, in sceptred pall, come sweeping by.
Comedians are not actors; they are imitators of actors.
Even kings but play; and when their part is done, some other, worse or better, mounts the throne.
See, how these rascals use me! They will not let my play run; and yet they steal my thunder.
To-day kings, to-morrow beggars, it is only when they are themselves that they are nothing.
The most difficult character in comedy is that of the fool, and he must be no simpleton that plays that part.
God is the author, men are only the players. These grand pieces which are played upon earth have been composed in heaven.
The play bill which is said to have announced the tragedy of Hamlet, the character of the Prince of Denmark being left out.
The stage is a supplement to the pulpit, where virtue, according to Plato’s sublime idea, moves our love and affection when made visible to the eye.
In really good acting we should be able to believe that what we hear and see is of our own imagining; it should seem to us as a charming dream.
Is it not a noble farce wherein kings, republics, and emperors have for so many ages played their parts, and to which the vast universe serves for a theatre?
Everybody has his own theatre, in which he is manager, actor, prompter, playwright, sceneshifter, boxkeeper, doorkeeper, all in one, and audience into the bargain.
I have seen no men in life loving their profession so much as painters, except, perhaps, actors, who, when not engaged themselves, always go to the play.
It is their province to make the public weep and smile, tremble and resent, and to light all the passions of the human breast in their enthusiastic audiences.
Who rant by note, and through the gamut rage; in songs and airs express their martial fire; combat in trills, and in a fugue expire.
Notwithstanding all that Rousseau has advanced so very ingeniously upon plays and players, their profession is, like that of a painter, one of the imitative arts, whose means are pleasure, and whose end is virtue.
Johnson told Garrick that he and his profession were mutually indebted to each other. “Your profession,” said the doctor, “has made you rich; and you have made your profession respectable.”
It is with some violence to the imagination that we conceive of an actor belonging to the relations of private life, so closely do we identify these persons in our mind with the characters which they assume upon the stage.
The actor is in the capacity of a steward to every living muse, and of an executor to every departed one: the poet digs up the ore; he sifts it from the dross, refines and purifies it for the mint; the actor sets the stamp upon it, and makes it current in the world.
Few men of any modern nation have a proper sense of an æsthetical whole: they praise and blame by parts; they are charmed by passages. And who has greater reason to rejoice in this than actors, since the stage is ever but a patched and piecemeal matter?
Players, sir! I look upon them as no better than creatures set upon tables and joint-stools to make faces and produce laughter, like dancing dogs.—But, sir, you will allow that some players are better than others?—Yes, sir; as some dogs dance better than others.
Remember that you are but an actor, acting whatever part the Master has ordained. It may be short or it may be long. If he wishes you to represent a poor man, do so heartily; if a cripple, or a magistrate, or a private man, in each case act your part with honor.
Victor Hugo makes one of his heroines—an actress—say, “My art endows me with a searching eye, a knowledge of the soul and the soul’s workings; and, spite of all your skill, I read you to the depths.” This is a truth more or less powerful, as one is more or less gifted by the good God.
There is one way by which a strolling player may be ever secure of success; that is, in our theatrical way of expressing it, to make a great deal of the character. To speak and act as in common life is not playing, nor is it what people come to see; natural speaking, like sweet wine, runs glibly over the palate, and scarcely leaves any taste behind it; but being high in a part resembles vinegar, which grates upon the taste, and one feels it while he is drinking.
Good, my lord, will you see the players well bestowed? Do you hear, let them be well used; for they are the abstract and brief chronicles of the time: after your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live.
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.
I think I love and reverence all arts equally, only putting my own just above the others; because in it I recognize the union and culmination of my own. To me it seems as if when God conceived the world, that was Poetry; He formed it, and that was Sculpture; He colored it, and that was Painting; He peopled it with living beings, and that was the grand, divine, eternal Drama.
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. 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.