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, whirlwind of your 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. 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. 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.
_Shakespeare._