John Stephens, in his Essays and Characters, 1615, thus describes a common player: “Therefore did I prefix an epithet of ‘common’ to distinguish the base and artlesse appendants of our city companies, which oftentimes start away into rusticall wanderers and then, like Proteus, start back again into the citty number.”
HAMLET’S ADVICE TO THE PLAYERS.
III, 2.
HAM.
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. O, it offends me to the wound 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.
HAM.
Be not too tame neither, but let your 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 makes 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.