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 dumb-show 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 '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.

When we try to picture what the theatre in Shakespeare's time was