| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Dream Life and Real Life by Olive Schreiner: tell why, she could not tell the reason, but a feeling of fear came over
her.
On the left bank rose a chain of kopjes and a precipice of rocks. Between
the precipice and the river bank there was a narrow path covered by the
fragments of fallen rock. And upon the summit of the precipice a kippersol
tree grew, whose palm-like leaves were clearly cut out against the night
sky. The rocks cast a deep shadow, and the willow trees, on either side of
the river. She paused, looked up and about her, and then ran on, fearful.
"What was I afraid of? How foolish I have been!" she said, when she came
to a place where the trees were not so close together. And she stood still
and looked back and shivered.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Altar of the Dead by Henry James: as she called it, he felt at last in real possession of her. The
place had the flush of life - it was expressive; its dark red walls
were articulate with memories and relics. These were simple things
- photographs and water-colours, scraps of writing framed and
ghosts of flowers embalmed; but a moment sufficed to show him they
had a common meaning. It was here she had lived and worked, and
she had already told him she would make no change of scene. He
read the reference in the objects about her - the general one to
places and times; but after a minute he distinguished among them a
small portrait of a gentleman. At a distance and without their
glasses his eyes were only so caught by it as to feel a vague
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Dark Lady of the Sonnets by George Bernard Shaw: every day; and this was taken as a disparagement of Shakespear's
"originality." Why was I born with such contemporaries? Why is
Shakespear made ridiculous by such a posterity?
_The Dark Lady of The Sonnets was first performed at the Haymarket
Theatre, on the afternoon of Thursday, the 24th November 1910, by Mona
Limerick as the Dark Lady, Suzanne Sheldon as Queen Elizabeth,
Granville Barker as Shakespear, and Hugh Tabberer as the Warder._
THE DARK LADY OF THE SONNETS
_Fin de siecle 15-1600. Midsummer night on the terrace of the Palace
at Whitehall, overlooking the Thames. The Palace clock chimes four
quarters and strikes eleven._
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