ABSTRACT
By all rights the acting of Shakespeare is very simple: you learn the lines and you get up on your feet and you do it. Arguably this is all he is asking of you. He has provided no long essays explaining the meaning of his great plays, he has not inserted voluminous stage directions or prologues such as you might find with George Bernard Shaw and Eugene O'Neill, and the only possible clues in acting his work that he himself has given you are those spoken by Hamlet in his advice to the players:
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, the whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness. O, it offends me to the soul 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 2whipped for o'erdoing Termagant; it out-herods Herod: 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 'twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own image, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.
(Hamlet, Act III, Scene 2)