Set on going after the king’s conscience, Hamlet is instructing the players. On the surface level, this seems to be a general tutorial by a theater enthusiast on the art of acting. But this is not just theory. He wants the player to do his inserted lines as perfectly as he can, for everything is riding on it. This is not the time to have a clown laughing over his lines. And more than any other role, and any other lines, this has to be acted as realistically and forcefully as possible, for murder must have its tongue. Claudius must be able to see himself in this mirror.
HAMLET
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,
the whirlwind of 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 dumbshows and noise: I would have such
a fellow whipped for o'erdoing Termagant; it
out-herods Herod: pray you, avoid it.
First Player
I warrant your honour.
HAMLET
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 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.
First Player
I hope we have reformed that indifferently with us,
sir.
HAMLET
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 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.
Polonius enters with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and Hamlet asks if the King is coming to the play. It is a critical question. As Marvin Rosenberg puts it, “Hamlet - and the naive spectator - wait in suspense. If the King will not come, there will be no mouse for the trap.”
How now, my lord! I will the king hear this piece of work?
LORD POLONIUS
And the queen too, and that presently.
HAMLET
Bid the players make haste.
[Exit POLONIUS]
Will you two help to hasten them?
ROSENCRANTZ GUILDENSTERN
We will, my lord.
Exeunt ROSENCRANTZ and GUILDENSTERN
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