“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) 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’er-doing 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’er-step 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 which one, must, in your allowance, o’er-weigh 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.”

[Side note:  Avoid extremes]

It will be well to observe that throughout this advice the poet is careful to warn us against extremes—­neither to tear a passion to rags nor to be too tame—­he insists on moderation.  Even in the very tempest of passion one must not lose self-control nor make extravagant use of the hands.  The “overdone” and the “come tardy off” are the two poles to be shunned.

“Speak the speech as I pronounced it.”  By placing the two words “speak” and “pronounce” in contrast, Hamlet leads us to infer that in reading the play over for the actors his principal care was to give perfect articulation.  “Speak the speech as I pronounced it.”

“Trippingly on the tongue.”  Evidently the slow, thick utterance of the mumbling speaker, to the roof of whose mouth the words seem to cling, was not unknown in Shakespere’s day.  As a remedy against this he tells them to “speak it trippingly.”  No word in the English language could so clearly convey the case.  Nimble, airy resonance is suggested by the very sound of the word “trippingly.”

[Side note:  Two errors]