“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.”
With these words from Hamlet, Shakespeare let the world know what he thought about those whose diction was not up to scratch. Good drama required speech to be given “trippingly on the tongue”, he believed – and theatre directors and producers have followed his lead for centuries.
