The whirlwind of passion

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...

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.

---Hamlet.  Act III, Scene 2.

 

Comments

[Nance]

Wow. It's like he had already seen "Scarface."

[Earl Bockenfeld]

Don't know about Scarface, but this sounds like Bush's speech coach to me. Bush knows/does tongue trippingly like a pro.

[Gotham Image]

JFK sawed the air - but just enough - Bush doesn't speak trippingly so much as he trips over the speech.

As far as Cheneymammon goes - Look at his eyes Player - What do you see? Those are not your grandmother's carbuncles.

[Gotham Image]

Factor this:

Groundlings, dumbshows, noise, and cable news - Holding not a mirror up to nature, but mirroring the decay of nature in our minds.

[Elise]

Absolutely one of my favorite bits from that most quotable of plays. Damn, that Dane could talk.