have such a fellow whipped for o'erdoing Termagant; it outherods Herod. Pray you avoid it.

First Player. I warrant, your honor.

Hamlet. 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 't 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 unskillful laugh, can not but make the judicious grieve; the censure of which one must, in your allowance, o'erweigh a whole theater 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 Turk, 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.

First Player. I hope we have reformed that in-. differently with us.

Hamlet. Oh, 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 them

A. A. 3.

selves laugh, to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too; though, in the meantime, 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.

OTHER FAIRIES, in attendance upon Oberon and Titania.

(27)

SCENE I-A wood near Athens. Enter Oвeron, R., at one door, with his Train; and TITANIA, L., at another, with hers.

Ober. Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania Tit. What, jealous Oberon! Fairies, skip hence. Ober. Tarry, rash wanton; am not I thy lord? Tit. Then, I must be thy lady; but I know When thou hast stol'n away from Fairy-land, And in the shape of Corin sat all day, Playing on pipes of corn, and versing love To amorous Phillida. Why art thou here, Come from the farthest steep of India, But that, forsooth, the bouncing Amazon, Your buskin'd mistress, and your warrior love, To Theseus must be wedded?

Ober. How canst thou thus, for shame, Titania, Glance at my credit with Hippolyta,

Knowing I know thy love to Theseus?

Didst thou not lead him through the glimmering night,

And make him with fair Ægle break his faith,
With Ariadne, and Antiopa?

Tit. These are the forgeries of jealousy:

And never, since the middle Summer's spring,
Met we on hill, in dale, forest, or mead,
By paved fountain, or by rushy brook,
Or on the beached margent of the sea,

To dance our ringlets to the whistling wind,
But with thy brawls thou hast disturbed our sport.

Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain,
As in revenge, have suck'd up from the sea
Contagious fogs; which, falling in the land,
Have every petty river made so proud,
That they have overborne their continents:
The ox hath therefore stretched his yoke in vain,
The plowman lost his sweat; and the green corn
Hath rotted, ere his youth attain'd a beard:
The fold stands empty in the drowned field;
And crows are fatted with the murrain flock:
And Nine Men's Morris is fill'd up with mud;
And the quaint mazes in the wanton green,
For lack of tread are undistinguishable:
The human mortals want their Winter here,
No night is now with hymn or carol blest:
Therefore the moon, the governess of floods,
Pale in her anger, washes all the air,
That rheumatic diseases do abound:
And thorough this distemperature, we see
The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts
Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose;
And on old Hyems' thin, and icy crown,
An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds
Is, as in mockery, set. The Spring, the Summer,
The childing Autumn, angry Winter, change
Their wonted liveries; and the 'mazed world,

By their increase, now knows not which is which.
And this same progeny of evils comes

From our debate, from our dissension :

We are their parents and original.

[Crosses to R.