Page 280 - Shakespeare - Vol. 3

Enter Hamlet and three of the Players.

HAMLET
Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the
tongue; but if you mouth it as many of your players do, I had as lief the town-
crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus,
but use all gently; for in [5] the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say,

whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that
may give it smoothness. O, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious
periwigpated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to [10] split the

ears of the groundlings, who for the most part are capable of nothing but
inexplicable dumbshows and noise. I would have such a fellow whipped for
o’erdoing Termagant. It out-Herods Herod. Pray you avoid it. [15]

1 ST PLAY.
I warrant your honour.

HAMLET
Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion be your tutor. Suit the
action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that

you o’erstep not the modesty of nature. For anything so o’erdone is from the
purpose of playing, [20] whose end, both at the first and now, was and is to
hold as ’twere the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her feature, scorn her

own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.
Now this overdone or come tardy off, though it makes the [25] unskilful
laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve, the censure of the which one
must in your allowance o’erweigh a whole theatre of others. O, there be
players that I have seen play − and heard others praise, and that highly −

not to speak it profanely, [30] that neither having th’accent of Christians, nor
the gait of Christian, pagan, nor man, have so strutted and bellowed that I
have thought some of Nature’s journeymen had made men, and not made

them well, they imitated humanity so abominably. [35]

1ST PLAY.

I hope we have reformed that indifferently with us.

HAMLET