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.  Oh, 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 ’t were, 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 theater of others.  Oh, 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.

Oh, 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 meantime 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.  Go make you ready.

EXERCISES

1.  ’Neath our feet broke the brittle bright stubble like chaff.

2.  The first sip of love is pleasant; the second, perilous; the third, pestilent.

3.  Our ardors are ordered by our enthusiasms.

4.  She’s positively sick of seeing her soiled, silk, Sunday dress.

5.  The rough cough and hiccough plowed me through.

6.  She stood at the gate welcoming him in.

7.  Five miles meandering with a mazy motion.

8.  Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers:  if Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, where is the peck of pickled peppers that Peter Piper picked?

9.  Theophilus Thistle, the thistle-sifter, sifted a sieve of unsifted thistles.  If Theophilus Thistle, the thistle-sifter, sifted a sieve of unsifted thistles, where is the sieve of unsifted thistles that Theophilus Thistle, the thistle-sifter, sifted?