G THE THEATRE THE PLAYER OOD my lord, will you see the players well bestow'd? Do you hear? Let them be well us'd, for they are the abstract and brief chronicles of the time; after your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you lived. Hamlet. Act II, Sc. 2. FOR my sake do you with Fortune The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds, That did not better for my life provide Than public means which public manners breeds. Thence comes it that my name receives a brand, And almost thence my nature is subdu'd The His To what it works in, like the dyer's hand. Sonnet CXI. Unjustly Censured O, oft it chances in particular men, As, in their birth-wherein they are not Since nature cannot choose his origin— reason, Or by some habit that too much o'er-leavens men, Carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect, Shall in the general censure take corruption Hamlet. Act I, Sc. 4. PLAYS THE HE best in this kind are but shadows; tion amend them. if imagina A Midsummer Night's Dream. Act V, Sc. 1. E shall much disgrace WE With four and five most vile and Right ill-dispos'd in brawl ridiculous, THE play, I rem caviare to the general; HE play, I remember, pleas'd not the but it was as I receiv'd it, and others, whose judgement in such matters cried in the top of mine—an excellent play, well digested in the scenes, set down with as much modesty as cunning. Hamlet. Act II, Sc. 1. An Estimate An Style The Dramatic Unities IMPUTE it not a crime IMPUT To me or my swift passage, that I slide O'er sixteen years and leave the growth untri'd Of that wide gap, since it is in my power A Winter's Tale. Act IV, Sc. I. Its Worst and Best The of Pre- CUSTOM 'HAT monster, custom, who all sense doth THAT eat, Of habits devil, is angel yet in this, Hamlet. Act III, Sc. 4. IMPOSSIBLE be strange attempts to those suppose What hath been cannot be. All's Well That Ends Well. Act I, Sc. 1. WHAT custom wills, in all things should W we do't, The dust on antique time would lie unswept, For truth to overpeer. Coriolanus. Act II, Sc. 3. Free dom for Truth THE PIT N habitation giddy and unsure AN Hath he that buildeth on the vulgar King Henry IV. Part II, Act I, Sc. 3. But do not like to stage me to their eyes. Though it do well, I do not relish well Their loud applause and Aves vehement; Nor do I think the man of safe discretion That does affect it. Measure for Measure. Act I, Sc. I. THE PLAYERS' ART Sound' it to you, trippingly on the |