Contents
-BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD
Dramatis Personæ
William Shakespeare (1564–1616). The Tragedy of Hamlet Prince of Denmark.
The Harvard Classics. 1909–14.
Scene II
Act III
[A hall in the castle]
Enter HAMLET and Players
Ham.Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounc’d 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 see 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 could have such a fellow whipp’d for o’erdoing Termagant. It out-herods Herod. Pray you, avoid it.1. Play.I warrant your honour.Ham.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 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, 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.1. Play.I hope we have reform’d that indifferently with us, sir.Ham.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 most pitiful ambition in the Fool that uses it. Go, make you ready.Exeunt Players.Enter POLONIUS, ROSENCRANTZ, and GUILDENSTERN
How now, my lord! Will the King hear this piece of work? And the Queen too, and that presently.