SpokenVerse | "How to Give a Performance" from Hamlet by William Shakespeare (speech) @SpokenVerse | Uploaded January 2012 | Updated October 2024, 5 hours ago.
I couldn't find a higher authority.
The guy in the last picture is Bill himself. When we invented the time machine in 2067, we went back and rescued him. He tried to teach himself modern idiomatic English by enrolling in the Open University, majoring in Shakespearean Studies. They flunked him. He kept telling them they were wrong, muttering about how much they managed to squeeze out of a damp sponge.
Now he watches TV and plays with the kids most of the time. He likes Scooby-Doo even more than they do.
Speak the speech, I pray you,
as I pronounced it to you,
trippingly on the tongue:
but if you mouth it,
as many of our 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.
O, it offends me to the soul
to hear a robustious periwigged 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.
Be not too tame either,
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 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.
I couldn't find a higher authority.
The guy in the last picture is Bill himself. When we invented the time machine in 2067, we went back and rescued him. He tried to teach himself modern idiomatic English by enrolling in the Open University, majoring in Shakespearean Studies. They flunked him. He kept telling them they were wrong, muttering about how much they managed to squeeze out of a damp sponge.
Now he watches TV and plays with the kids most of the time. He likes Scooby-Doo even more than they do.
Speak the speech, I pray you,
as I pronounced it to you,
trippingly on the tongue:
but if you mouth it,
as many of our 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.
O, it offends me to the soul
to hear a robustious periwigged 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.
Be not too tame either,
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 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.
