udy_ is still the Player's word for _commit to memory_.]

[Footnote 6: Note Hamlet's quick resolve, made clearer towards the end
of the following soliloquy.]

[Footnote 7: Polonius is waiting at the door: this is intended for his
hearing.]

[Footnote 8: _Not in Q_.]

[Footnote 9: Note the varying forms of _God be with you_.]

[Footnote 10: _1st Q_.

Why what a dunghill idiote slaue am I?
Why these Players here draw water from eyes:
For Hecuba, why what is Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba?]

[Footnote 11: Everything rings on the one hard, fixed idea that
possesses him; but this one idea has many sides. Of late he has been
thinking more upon the woman-side of it; but the Player with his speech
has brought his father to his memory, and he feels he has been
forgetting him: the rage of the actor recalls his own 'cue for passion.'
Always more ready to blame than justify himself, he feels as if he ought
to have done more, and so falls to abusing himself.]

[Footnote 12: _imagination_.]

[Footnote 13: 'his whole operative nature providing fit forms for the
embodiment of his imagined idea'--of which forms he has already
mentioned his _warmed visage_, his _tears_, his _distracted look_, his
_broken voice_.

In this passage we have the true idea of the operation of the genuine
_acting faculty_. Actor as well as dramatist, the Poet gives us here his
own notion of his second calling.]

[Page 110]

For _Hecuba_?
What's _Hecuba_ to him, or he to _Hecuba_,[1]
[Sidenote: or he to her,]
That he should weepe for her? What would he doe,
Had he the Motiue and the Cue[2] for passion
[Sidenote: , and that for]
That I haue? He would drowne the Stage with teares,
And cleaue the generall eare with horrid speech:
Make mad the guilty, and apale[3] the free,[4]
Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed,
The very faculty of Eyes and Eares. Yet I, [Sidenote: faculties]
A dull and muddy-metled[5] Rascall, peake
Like Iohn a-dreames, vnpregnant of my cause,[6]
And can say nothing: No, not for a King,
Vpon whose property,[7] and most deere life,
A damn'd defeate[8] was made. Am I a Coward?[9]
Who calles me Villaine? breakes my pate a-crosse?
Pluckes off my Beard, and blowes it in my face?
Tweakes me by'th'Nose?[10] giues me the Lye i'th' Throate,
[Sidenote: by the]
As deep