Susanna Shakespeare

Excerpt

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 your 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 dumbshows and noise: I would have such a fellow whipped for o'erdoing Termagant; it out-Herods Herod. Pray you, avoid it.

"My father wrote that. William Shakespeare. It's from one of his plays. He wrote 38 plays, 154 sonnets, a complaint of a woman who went wrong, 2 pornographic narrative poems on classical themes and a threnody lamenting the death of a pair of chaste birds, and I have read every word. And that is, I presume, why you are all here. To learn about his writing. Why, where, how and so forth. And I suppose I am the best person to tell you. A poor substitute for the real thing but the best thing left. That bit, from Hamlet, I actually heard my father speak. He stood in front of a whole stage full of actors. Someone had done something he didn’t like, and this was his version of an acting lesson."