Hamlet. O, 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 tho in the mean time 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.
[Exeunt Players.
FOOTNOTES:
[54] From "Julius Cæsar," Act III, Sc. ii.
[55] From "The Merchant of Venice." Act III, Sc. ii.
[56] From "Hamlet, Prince of Denmark," Act III, Sc. ii.
BEN JONSON
Born in 1573; died in 1637; became a player in 1597; his first play, "Everyman in His Humor," performed at the Globe Theater in 1598, Shakespeare taking one of the parts; went to France in 1613 as tutor to a son of Raleigh; visited Drummond of Hawthornden in 1618; his library, one of the finest in England, burned about 1621; his works first collected in 1616; buried in Poet's Corner, Westminster, Abbey.