Excerpt from The Miser of Raveloe
The play "The Miser of Raveloe" is based upon George Eliot's "Silas Marner," and is an attempt to represent in dramatic form a few of the most striking incidents of that novel.
This play was planned and for the most part written by members of the Second Year Class of the Cairo (Illinois) High School, to supplement their study of the novel. It was staged, costumed, and played by the class for their regular rhetorical exercises. The costumes were home-made, the stage furniture manufactured by the manual training class after school hours. The play requires from one hour and forty-five minutes to two hours for presentation. If the pantomime in Act II is prolonged, or if the songs in Act III are encored, the maximum time is required.
There is an increasing effort in high schools (and in grammar schools also) to make the Friday afternoon literary exercises corellate with and grow out of the actual work of the school. There is also a demand for short plays suitable for such occasions. Children are born actors, and take more readily to the play than to any other form of literary expression.
In this play the atmosphere of the novel has been kept as far as possible, most of the dialogue except that in the third act being taken verbatim from the book. In acting his part, each pupil was obliged to study his "Silas Marner" very carefully, in order to interpret his particular character truthfully. A great many directions concerning stage "business" have been omitted from the play, in order that the actors may be unhampered in presenting the situations. A list of stage properties also has been omitted, as these were of the simplest and most obvious character.
It is hoped that what has been of service to one high school, in its effort to interpret dramatically one of its classics, may be of benefit to others.
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