<p>^ He did see Duse work and it had an influence, but he compiled his system over time by interviewing a lot of actors whose work he admired about their processes along with a lot of trial and error. Like his move away from affective memory as an emphasis in favor of imagination supposedly began in earnest after Michael Chekhov who was one of his students gave a long, heartwrenching monologue about the death of his father that pretty well left everyone in the class in tears. Stanislavski then kicked him out of class for a couple of weeks when he told everyone he’d just made it up and that his father was fine, but the point about which they’d been arguing for awhile was taken. Another funny thing is that all the Method people hold Duse up as an ideal and go on and on about her while at the same time villifying Sarah Bernhardt who was another acclaimed actress of the period with a markedly presentational style when there really isn’t much information available about Duse’s actual process if she even had such a thing set in stone. But yeah … Shakespeare did pretty well lay it out in Hamlet’s advice to the players although he didn’t prescribe any particular “method.”</p>
<p>Oh, and what I meant by “pure Stanislavski” in reference to Emerson was that I believe they simply teach Stanislavski’s system as they understand it instead of one of the named American Method versions. And yes. There will always be differences in the way any system is taught just by nature of the teacher’s skill, preferences and personality if nothing else. I said “pure Meisner,” too, in reference to Rutgers when in fact it’s taught by Barbara Marchant whose approach may differ somewhat from her teacher, Bill Esper, who is known to have occasionally butted heads with Sandy Meisner over the differences in which he approached teaching the technique. These things all evolve, too. Like the Practical Aesthetics approach as it is now taught apparently differs somewhat from how it was spelled out in A Practical Handbook for the Actor although the overall philosophy remains the same. They’re all like that. Hell, Uta Hagen even wanted her first book, Respect for Acting, discontinued from print and removed from the shelves after she published A Challenge for the Actor due to the evolution in her teachings although I found useful nuggets in both. It’s not like there’s any one true recipe …</p>