None? Then none have I offended. I have done no more to Cæsar than you shall do to Brutus. The question of his death is enrolled in the Capitol; his glory not extenuated, wherein he was worthy; nor his offences enforced, for which he suffered death.
Here comes his body, mourned by Mark Antony, who, though he had no hand in his death, shall receive the benefit of his dying, a place in the commonwealth; as which of you shall not? With this I depart;—that, as I slew my best lover for the good of Rome, I have the same dagger for myself, when it shall please my country to need my death. Shakespeare.
CXXXIII.
HAMLET'S ADDRESS TO THE PLAYERS.
Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, grippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of our players do, I had as life 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. O, it offends me to the soul, to hear a robtustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, we 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. I 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 it were, 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 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. Shakespeare.
CXXXIV.
FALSTAFF'S DESCRIPTION OF HIS SOLDIERS.
If I be not ashamed of my soldiers, I am a soused gurnet. I have misused the king's press outrageously. I have got, in exchange of an hundred and fifty soldiers, three hundred and odd pounds. I press me none but good householders, yeoman's sons; inquire me out contracted bachelors, such as have been asked twice on the banns; such a commodity of warm slaves, as had as life hear the devil as a drum; such as fear the report of a culverin worse than a struck deer or a hurt wild duck. I pressed me none but such toasts in butter, with hearts in their breasts no bigger than pins' heads; and they bought out their services; and now my whole charge consists of slaves as ragged as Lazarus in the painted cloth, where the glutton's dogs licked his sores; discarded, unjust serving-men, younger sons to younger brothers, revolted tapsters, and hostlers trade-fallen, the cankers of a calm world and a long peace; and such have I to fill up the rooms of them that have bought out their services, that you would think, that I had an hundred and fifty tattered prodigals, lately come from swine-keeping, from eating draff and husks. A mad fellow met me on the way, and told me I had unloaded all the gibbets, and pressed the dead bodies. No eye hath seen such scarecrows. I'll not march through Coventry with them, that's flat. Nay, and the villains march wide betwixt the legs, as if—they had gyves on; for, indeed I had the most of them out of prison. There's but a shirt and a half in all my company; and the half-shirt it is two napkins tacked together, and thrown over the shoulders like a herald's coat without sleeves; and the shirt, to say the truth, stolen from my host of St. Albans, or the red-nosed innkeeper of Daintry. But that's all one; they'll find linen enough on every hedge. Shakespeare.