HAMLET         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 whipped for o’erdoing Termagant – it out-Herods Herod. Pray you avoid it.

PLAYER          I warrant your honour.         (3.2.8-15)

Hamlet continues to have very strong views about acting styles: O, it offends me to the soul (steady on) to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow—boisterous, perhaps suggesting very loud, in particular, and wearing a wig! (the horror! implicitly perhaps an obvious, extreme wig; men at this date did not usually wear wigs outside the theatre; the boys wore wigs to play women’s parts)—and to hear him tear a passion to tatters, to very rags. Hamlet seems not to like ACTORS, THESPIANS, going over the top in their artifice and their bombast, PERFORMING, full of extreme emotion, shouting away without subtlety or nuance or any attempt at truth, let alone realism. (The tearing of a passion to tatters or ragssuggests a particular repertoire of gestures, too, violent, extravagant.) Hamlet doesn’t like ACTORS who split the ears of the groundlings, play to the gallery at high volume (in the still-familiar idiom, the cheap seats having been at the top of the theatre rather than the bottom for centuries now)—but in any case the groundlings, standing in the yard, are for the most part capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb-shows and noise. The people in the cheap seats have no taste; they like dumb-shows, mimes, old-fashioned (but still popular) at this date; they like pure spectacle rather than rhetoric, they can’t follow or appreciate a proper speech, unless (clearly) it’s being shouted at them. They like sound and fury; they don’t know any better. (Hamlet is being a terrific snob here.)

I would have such a fellow—that kind of actor—whipped for o’er-doing Termagant—it out-Herods Herod. Again the specifics here are old-fashioned: Termagant was the invented name given to a monstrous, angry, ranting pagan deity, sometimes mistakenly imagined as being worshipped by Muslims, and Herod in medieval religious drama became a by-word for ranting and raving, passion and noise as he railed against the news of the birth of Christ and ordered the Massacre of the Innocents. There’s a kind of nostalgia to Hamlet’s theatrical bugbears, but they would presumably still be familiar, perhaps second-hand, to Shakespeare’s audience, as a terrible contrast to the more sophisticated, subtle acting current in the early seventeenth-century (which would still seem terribly artificial and old-fashioned to a modern audience).

I warrant your honour, says the Player, oh, absolutely, sir, we promise not to do that sort of thing, most distasteful. (There could be an eye-roll at the other players; who does he think we are? who does he think he is?) The function of this little episode is interesting: does this Hamlet have anything at all in common with the furious, ranting, cruel man of the previous scene? Is there a kind of irony in it, joke’s on him? Or does this fussiness, in prose, redeem him a bit, the stakes being so low, the context so apparently trivial?