_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 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, tho it make the unskilful laugh, can not but make the judicious grieve; the censure of the which one must, in your allowance, o'erweigh a whole theater 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 reform'd 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 tho in the mean time 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. [_Exeunt Players._ FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 54: From "Julius Caesar," Act III, Sc. ii.] [Footnote 55: From "The Merchant of Venice." Act III, Sc. ii.] [Footnote 56: From "Hamlet, Prince of Denmark," Act III, Sc. ii.] BEN JONSON Born in 1573; died in 1637; became a player in 1597; his first play, "Everyman in His Humor," performed at the Globe Theater in 1598, Shakespeare taking one of the parts; went to France in 1613 as tutor to a son of Raleigh; visited Drummond of Hawthornden in 1618; his library, one of the finest in England, burned about 1621; his works first collected in 1616; buried in Poet's Corner, Westminster, Abbey. OF SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER WITS[57]