Hamlet Once More, Different
a report by Anne Fielding
On a Sunday afternoon in September 1963, at a Time Enough Poetry Class, I heard Eli Siegel read the first act of Hamlet. It was an important experience in theatre. Without smoke and dim lights, supernatural sounds or eerie music, there was the platform at Elsinore, with Bernardo, Marcellus, and Horatio waiting. There was the mystery and wonder with the feeling of cold night; there was the poetry and the life of it.

There Was Stage, 18th Century, Poetry
report of a lecture Eli Siegel gave June 10, 1973
by Carol McCluer
This is thrilling, hopeful, inspiring education about something Aesthetic Realism explains for the first time: that the art of acting is an expression of the deepest desire of every person—to like the world.

On Edmund Kean's Acting
from a lecture Eli Siegel gave titled: "American Poetry Says Something About Poetry" given November 8, 1970
by Carol McCluer
Eli Siegel discussed an essay largely forgotten today by the American novelist and essayist, Richard Henry Dana, about the great 18th century English actor Edmund Kean. He called it “perhaps the most important single theatrical criticism in the 1820s in America,” and “the most valuable description of acting perhaps in the world.”

Mary Garden; or, Can a Woman Love, and Still Be Free?
by Carrie Wilson
The autobiography of an important opera singer, Mary Garden’s Story, Mr. Siegel recommended, because, he said, her life brings up "the matter of what to leave out and what to include. Mary Garden said she didn't want to marry. She felt that something interesting her might take her away from something else." This is a question had by many women, and Aesthetic Realism answers it magnificently.

I Believe This About Acting
by Anne Fielding
from Aesthetic Realism: We Have Been There, Six Artists on the Siegel Theory of Opposites: Definition Press, New York, 1969
Anne Fielding taught acting based on Aesthetic Realism at
HB Studio, and teaches the Acting class at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation in New York City. She says, "In this essay is just some of what I learned about the urgent, needed comprehension of the art of acting and the human self."

On Shakespeare's Ophelia
by Carol McCluer
Eli Siegel is the critic who understood Ophelia truly, and he showed, looking at the text with scrupulous and loving exactitude, that the Danish girl is not a passive victim.

Real Self-Expression: How Can a Man Have It?
by Bennett Cooperman
including a discussion on the great actor Edmund Kean
When a person expresses himself truly, I learned, he puts together inside and outside—what is deep within him comes out and joins with what Mr. Siegel calls a "'friendly outside."

Passion and Control in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night
by Ann Richards and Carol McCluer
“What should I be passionate about, if anything?” “Am I too cold, do I have enough feeling?” and “Why do I feel I’m all over the place, and don’t have control of my emotions?” are questions that torment women and men all over the world.

Rachel; and True Individuality
by Carrie Wilson
The "courageous and just relation of [Rachel's] self" with the classic heroines in the dramas of Corneille and Racine, has given her immortal individuality. Meanwhile, another, false idea of individuality weakened her, as it does women today.