Speak the speech
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"Speak the speech" is a famous speech from Shakespeare's Hamlet (1601).[1] In it, Hamlet offers directions and advice to a group of actors whom he has enlisted to play for the court of Denmark.
The speech itself has played two important roles independent of the play. It has been analyzed as an historical document for clues about the nature of early modern acting practices and it has also been used as a contemporary guide to the performance of Shakespearean drama.[2]
While there is some justification for each of these approaches, they should be distinguished from other, far less valid assertions: on the one hand, that Hamlet ventriloquizes the opinions of Shakespeare on the art of acting in a straight-forward and unproblematic way; on the other, that the speech offers a proto-Stanislavskian view of the art of acting.[3] The first elides the difference between author and character, while the second ignores the historical specificity of the discourses and meanings attached to theatrical performance.[4]
[edit] The speech
| “ | 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, 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. 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 anything so o'erdone 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. 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. First Player: I hope we have reformed that indifferently with us, sir. Hamlet: 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. |
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—Hamlet, (3.2.1-36) |
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[edit] Notes
- ^ Philip Edwards, editor of the New Cambridge Shakespeare edition, argues for mid-1601 as the likely date for the completion of the play (1985, 4-8).
- ^ Rodenberg (2002, 63-65) and Hall (2004, 58-61).
- ^ See, for example, Merlin (2007, 5).
- ^ "[A]ll theatre is 'mimetic' to some degree--but what Shakespeare understood by the requirement (voiced through Hamlet) that the stage "Hold a mirror up to Nature" is very different from the aims of nineteenth-century naturalistic playwrights" (Innes 2000, 5). Joseph Roach offers a detailed critique of this ahistorical approach to acting theory in The Player's Passion (1985), especially, with reference to the early modern period, the first chapter.
[edit] Works cited
- Berry, Cicely. 2000. The Actor and the Text. Rev. ed. London: Virgin Books. ISBN 0863697054.
- Carlson, Marvin. 1993. Theories of the Theatre: A Historical and Critical Survey from the Greeks to the Present. Expanded ed. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. ISBN 0801481546.
- Edwards, Philip, ed. 1985. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark by William Shakespeare. The New Cambridge Shakespeare Ser. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521293669.
- Hagen, Uta. 1973. Respect for Acting. New York: Macmillan. ISBN 0025473905.
- Hall, Peter. 2004. Shakespeare's Advice to the Players. London: Oberon. ISBN 1840024119.
- Merlin, Bella. 2007. The Complete Stanislavsky Toolkit. London: Nick Hern. ISBN 9781854597939.
- Rayner, Alice. 1994. To Act, To Do, To Perform: Drama and the Phenomenology of Action. Theater: Theory/Text/Performance Ser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ISBN 047210537X.
- Roach, Joseph R. 1985. The Player's Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting. Theater:Theory/Text/Performance Ser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ISBN 0472082442.
- Rodenberg, Patsy. 2002. Speaking Shakespeare. London: Methuen. ISBN 0413700402.
- Weimann, Robert. 1978. Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function. Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press. ISBN 0801835062.
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