from Hamlet’s Advice to the Players (Hamlet,
Act III scene ii )
| 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 your passion,
you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it
smoothness....
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 any thing 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 feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the
time
his form and pressure…. |
Full Passage:
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 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 dumbshows 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 o'erstep not the modesty of nature: for any thing 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.
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. |
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