mlet._ 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 the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say,
the whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget a
temperance that may give it smoothness. O, it offends me to the
soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion
to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings,
who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable
dumb-shows and noise: I would have such a fellow whipped for
o'erdoing Termagant; it out-herods Herod: pray you, avoid it.

_First Player._ 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 overdone is from the purpose
of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to
hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own
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 make the unskillful 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, that, neither having the
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.

_First Player._ I hope we have reformed that indifferently with
us, sir.

_Hamlet._ O, reform it altogether. And let those that play your
clowns speak no more than is set down for them; for there be of
them that will themselves laugh, to set on some quantity of
barren spectators to laugh too; though, in the mean time, some
necessary question of the play be then to be considered: that's
villainous, and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that
uses it. Go, make you ready.
WILL