Grace, dignity, and spontaneity, in short, beauty of expression, was the accepted aim of the age.
In addition to speaking pleasantly, the educated man was expected to speak meaningfully. His vocal delivery should express figures of eloquence effectively.
The consideration of voyce is to be had either in severed words, or in the whole sentence. In the particular applying of the voyce to severall words, wee make tropes that bee most excellent plainly appeare. For without this change of voyce, neither anie Ironia, nor lively Metaphore can well bee discerned.[11]
Nor must this attention to the figures of speech be lavished only upon the formal speech. In his informal Direction for Speech and Style (c. 1590), John Hoskins applies the same consideration to social occasion. Included in his discussion of Agnomination, or repetition of sounds in sentence, such as “Our paradise is a pair of dice, our almes-deeds are turned into all misdeeds,” is a suggestion that “that kind of breaking words into another meaning is pretty to play with among gentlewomen, as, you will have but a bare gain of this bargain.” Sensitivity to the figures of eloquence was widespread; we may expect the actors to have been particularly attentive to their rendition.
Though scanty, indications exist that the speaker was not thought to deliver his speech by rote. As Hamlet compares his behavior with the player’s, he describes the man’s tears, distraction and broken voice,
and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit.
[II, ii, 582-583]
“The conceits of the mind are pictures of things and the tongue is interpreter of those pictures,” wrote John Hoskins to his student.[12] Just as eloquence contained figures of sentence encompassing an extended thought as well as figures of words expressing a turn of a phrase, so did delivery require an understanding of the conceit and passion as a whole as well as the appreciation of the particular literary form.