哈姆雷特 戏中戏.docVIP

SCENE II. A hall in the castle. Enter HAMLET and 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 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 oerdoing 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 oerstep 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 oerweigh 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 natures 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 se