Excerpt from Short Comedies for Amateur Players, as Given at the Madison Square and Lyceum Theatres, New York, by Amateurs Most amateurs should put their faith in graceful stage group ing and efective tableaux. These cover a multitude of sins, and may best be relied on by the untried aspirant, together with Hamlet's forest of feathers, and two provincial roses in his razed shoes, to get him a fellowship in a cry of players. I have found that simple dances, sometimes introducing volunteers not cast for the play, are, when possible, desirable at the end of a performance. When, for instance, Two Strings to Her Bow was first given in Sedgwick Hall, at Lenox, Massachusetts, a calcium light in the gallery, thrown in various tints upon a rustic dance of beautiful young girls grouped in an out-door scene, made an efiect as charming as anything I remember on the stage. The same idea was realized at the performance of the same play by amateurs at the Lyceum Theatre, New York. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.