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A Hall in the Castle
(Enter Hamlet and 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 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 […]
fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags,
to split the ear of the groundlings. […]
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 […] though it make
the unskillful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve […]
O! there are players I have seen play, and heard
others praise […] that have so strutted and bellowed
that I have thought some of Nature’s journeyman
had made men and not made them well,
they imitated humanity so abominably. […]
That’s villainous, and shows a most pitiful
ambition in the fool that uses it. Go, make you ready.
(The Players Exit the Stage.)