The instruction of Hamlet to the players is the most conclusive evidence that William Shakspere was not only the greatest dramatic author, but an actor and orator of matchless mould.
There was no character that his soul conceived in any of his plays, fool or philosopher, that he could not act better than any man in his company.
In the first rehearsal of his plays he usually read the lines to his men and gave them the cue and philosophy of the character to be enacted.
A few days before the play of Hamlet I heard him deliver this speech for the edification of the whole troupe, that they might know how to render their lines in an effective and oratorical manner:
_"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. Now 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 overdoing 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 unskilled laugh, cannot but Make the judicious grieve; the censure of The which one must in your allowance Overweigh 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!"_