The apostle would have his brethren so to use this world, as not abusing it; and for this reason, that “the fashion of this world passeth away.” In the original the phrase runs: παράγει γὰρ τὸ ΣΧΗΜΑ τοῦ κόσμου τούτου. The expression is said by Grotius and others to be borrowed from the theatre, and to refer to the scene-shifting of the stage. Life here below has verily its histrionic aspects; the fashion of it passeth away much as do the scene-painter’s creations, the stage-carpenter’s framework, the spectacular effects and dissolving views, nay the very actors themselves. For, all the world is in some sense a stage, and all the men and women merely players—
Considering his own profession, the figure is one that must often have crossed and occupied Shakspeare’s mind—at once so keenly observing and so profoundly meditative. Not that he harps much upon it, so much as might, perhaps, have been expected, in his plays. Still he does now and then recur to the histrionic metaphor. And it is in his graver mood, not his lighter, that he does so; in sober sadness, not with gibing glee. As where Lear, in the extremity of his distraction, intent on preaching to Gloster, takes for his text the wail of infancy, crying, the first time that it smells the air: for
Or again, as where Antonio, the care-fraught merchant of Venice, assured by a friend that he is looking far from well, indeed “marvellously changed,” and remonstrated with for not taking life more easily, replies:
Mundus universus exercet histrioniam,—the saw is Petronius Arbiter’s. There is an obverse reading, by some other old Eminent Hand: Totum mundum agit histrio. If all the world’s a play, so again there’s not in all the world a character the player won’t act. Lucretius had the stage simile of life in his mind’s eye, when he said of those who hide certain of their doings, vitæ post-scenia celant,—the post-scenium being what we call “behind the scenes,” where the actors dress and “make up” for their parts. And what says a distich in the Greek Anthology:
Sir Thomas Browne professes, in his large utterance and stately style: “The world to me is but a dream or mock show, and we all therein but pantaloons and anticks, to my severer contemplations.” To the same effect, though not in the same spirit, Wordsworth’s recluse avows himself tired
When both Swift and Bolingbroke had closed the tenth lustre of their years, his cynical lordship wrote from Brussels to the cynical dean, that he thought it high time to determine how they should “play the last act of the farce. Might not my life,” adds accomplished St. John, “be entitled much more properly a what-d’ye-call-it than a farce? Some comedy, a great deal of tragedy, and the whole interspersed with scenes of Harlequin, Scaramouch, and Dr. Baloardo.” Accomplished St. John was always, and to the last an accomplished actor. As for Dr. Swift, he expanded the histrionic similitude of life into some eighteen stanzas on the puppet show—which record how wit, “the life of man to represent, and turn it all to ridicule, did once a puppet show invent, where the chief actor is a fool”—and of which, perhaps, the gravest runs thus:
Don Quixote tells Sancho Panza how like human life is to a play. One takes the part of a ruffian, another of a liar, a third of a merchant, a fourth of a soldier. This man is for the occasion the lover; that man is the judicious friend. At last the play is ended. Each takes off the clothes which belong to his part, and the players remain equal. So it is in the comedy of this world, says Don Quixote. There are emperors and popes, and all the characters that can be introduced into a play; but it is played out, death takes away the outward trappings which made them seem to differ, and they remain equal in the tomb.
Where, is the author of the Complaint’s complaining query, or querulous plaint,
It is a trite topic, indeed, with Dr. Young,—that of “Life’s gay stage, one inch above the grave,” whereon those strut and fret their hour, that shall soon be seen no more for ever. All, merely players.
Dr. Maginn takes note of the frequency with which Lucian compares life to a theatrical procession, in which magnificent parts are assigned to some, who pass before the eyes of the spectators clothed in costly garments, and bedecked with glittering jewels; but, the moment the show is over, are reduced to their original nothingness, no longer kings and heroes, but poor players whose hour has been strutted out.
No wonder that the master Showman of Vanity Fair should pen an envoi after this fashion:
Horace Walpole will be found iterating and reiterating in his letters a favourite apophthegm of his—that the world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.
One might safely assume beforehand that a people of so histrionic a turn as the French would make good use of the histrionic metaphor of life, in their belles lettres, of whatever date. And in point of fact the figure is a well-worked one in French literature. Now it is a Cardinal de Retz, who, on being named coadjutor to his uncle, the Archbishop of Paris, describes himself as thereupon ceasing to be “in the pit, or at best in the orchestra, playing and funning with the fiddles,” but mounting thence to the stage itself. Indeed, a modern critic has remarked that Retz is perpetually making use of these expressions and images of théâtre and comédie. He was an accomplished actor from first to last—not above the line of low comedy now and then, and quite an adept in the Cloak-and-Sword business. Now again it is his contemporary, Madame de Motteville, who so frequently represents herself as an occupant of one of the best boxes, intent on diverting herself with the belle comédie that was being played under her eyes. “Les cabinets des rois,” says Madame—who ought to know—are theatres in which pieces of universal interest are for ever being played: some simply comic; others decidedly tragical, though so frequently occasioned by the merest trifles. So, again, Madame des Ursins (the Princess Orsino), another habituée behind the scenes, and herself a star of the first magnitude in any working company, describes the world as une comédie où il y avait souvent de bien mauvais acteurs.
Then, too, we have the Abbé Chaulieu, when dancing attendance on the Duke of Vendôme, and assisting at all the fêtes and galas got up in that prince’s honour, writing in a sort of apologetic strain to his sister-in-law, that since all the world’s a stage, one must just be content to don cap and bells with the rest[13]—for if all your men and women are merely players, motley’s your only wear.
Of another spirituel, and very unspiritual, abbé of that period, Choisy, it has been observed, that his life resembled a comedy, rife with all that is most various and most improbable: his career of fourscore years composed a complete masquerade; for
and in each of them he seems to have acted with professional aptitude, facility, and zest.
Such another actor, with a difference, was Voltaire. As Voltaire himself said of the Duchess of Maine, “Elle aimera la comédie jusqu’au dernier moment, et, quand elle sera malade, je vous conseille de lui administrer quelque belle pièce,” etc., etc.,—so of the mocking philosopher of Ferney, playing his many parts, it has been said, that he had a genius for transformations, having always more than one rôle to play in the comedy of life—which diversity of rôles jumped with his humour, and just hit the mobile preferences of a man who so early in his existence turned player. The life of Voltaire is a comedy, says Sainte-Beuve: his correspondence with D’Alembert shows us the coulisses and background—and lets us in to damaging and disenchanting revelations behind the scenes. Elsewhere he may be seen to fret and strut his hour upon the stage, carefully made up, and all in point device costume; but here we have him in undress, and by dusty daylight, and off his guard.
Tous les comédiens ne sont pas du théâtre, is rightly reckoned one of the prettiest provérbes of M. Théodore Leclerc. In the Proverbe which bears that pregnant title, a nephew incidentally tells his uncle, “Vous qui êtes un homme du monde, vous appelez cela l’esprit du monde; moi qui suis un comédien, j’appelle cela de la comédie. C’est toujours la même chose, sous un nom différent.” The salon and the stage are on a level. To be a real man of the world, is to be an actor of the first class.
M. Scribe puts the proverb as a practical epigram into the mouth of old Michonnet, when trying to soothe and inspirit his pet pupil for the stage: “Calme toi et étudie; ... il y a dans le monde de plus grands comédiens que nous!”
Indeed, according to Chamfort, there is no choice in the matter; every man, however wise and unsophisticated and open-hearted, must, sooner or later, turn actor, on this great stage of fools. For, “la fortune et le costume qui l’entourent font de la vie une représentation au milieu de laquelle il faut qu’à la longue l’homme le plus honnête devienne comédien malgré lui.” We are all actors and actresses, says one of Miss Eden’s characters, and “none of us quite up to our parts, though we act all day long.” Not that every one plays just the part he or she would have chosen. The distribution of rôles would seem often to make this a mad world, my masters.
This, one might almost paraphrase in the words of John Webster’s wobegone Duchess Mariana:
By way of introducing his elaborate narrative of Darnley’s fate, Mr. Froude tells us of Mary Stuart, that on the political stage she was “a great actress. The ‘woman’ had a drama of her own going on behind the scenes; the theatre caught fire; the mock heroics of the Catholic crusade burnt into ashes; and a tremendous domestic tragedy was revealed before the astonished eyes of Europe.” And later again, describing Mary’s caressing wiles to beguile and tranquilise her doomed husband, on the eve of the catastrophe, the same historian employs the same histrionic figure: “Mary Stuart was an admirable actress; rarely, perhaps, on the world’s stage has there been a more skilful player.” But the part, he adds, was a difficult one; she had still some natural compunction; and the performance was not quite perfect.
Most of our business is farce, writes old Montaigne: Mundus universus exercet histrioniam (which the old French essayist’s old English translator renders, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players”). We must play our part well, he adds, but withal as the part of a borrowed personage; we must not make a real essence of a mask and outward appearance, etc. So it is one of Ben Jonson’s “Discoveries,” “de vitâ humanâ,” that our whole life is like a play—wherein every man, forgetful of himself, is in travail with expression of another. In one of his comedies, rare Ben makes a sham inn-keeper, taking his ease in his own inn, and following his own fancies there, “imagine all the world’s a play:—
For every man, in the play of this world, says pious Master Feltham, is not only an actor, but is a spectator, too: “At the beginning (that is, in his youth) it promises so much that he is loth to leave it; when it grows towards the middle (the act of virility), then he sees the scenes grow thick, and fill, and would gladly understand the end: but, when that draws near, and he finds what it will be, he is then content to depart and leave his room to others.”
Fielding’s philosopher asks if the actor is esteemed happier to whose lot it falls to play the principal part, than he who plays the lowest? and yet the drama may run twenty nights together, and so outlast our lives; but at the best, says he, “life is only a little longer drama; and the business of the great stage is consequently a little more serious than that which is performed at the theatre-royal.”
An old Greek writer, speaking of Alexander of Pheræ, who reigned in Thessaly only ten months, and then was slain, calls him, in derision of his brief lease of power, a theatrical tyrant, a mere stage king, who, as it were, walked on only to walk off again. But the palace of the Cæsars, Plutarch remarks, received four emperors in a less space of time, one entering, and another making his exit, as if to fret and strut each his little hour upon the stage. How soon the stage directions, Enter Galba, enter and exit Otho, enter and exit Vitellius, lapse in Exeunt omnes!
In Charles the Sixth’s ordinance, authorising the players of the “Mysteries of the Passion” (towards the close of the fourteenth century), that poor crazed monarch’ styles them his “loved and dear co-mates.” And what could be juster? Michelet asks. “A hapless actor himself, a poor player in the grand historic mystery, he went to see his co-mates’—saints, angels, and devils, perform their miserable travestie of the Passion. He was not only spectator; he was spectacle as well. His people went to see in him the Passion of royalty.”
Players, the abstract and brief chronicles of the time, Hazlitt calls the motley representatives of human nature. They are the only honest hypocrites, he says (and hypocrite, by the way, is classically a correct name for them, though Hazlitt may not have remembered or meant it): their life is a voluntary dream, a studied madness—it being the height of their ambition to be “beside themselves:”—to-day kings, to-morrow beggars, it is only when they are themselves that they are nothing: made up of mimic laughter and tears, they wear the livery of other men’s fortunes, till their very thoughts are not their own. “They are, as it were, train-bearers in the pageant of life, and hold a glass up to humanity, frailer than itself. We see ourselves at second-hand in them.... The stage is an epitome, a bettered likeness of the world, with the dull part left out: and indeed, with this omission, it is nearly big enough to hold all the rest.”
Sir Thomas Overbury had, two centuries before, written characteristically to the same purport. “All men have beene of his occupation,” writes the ill-starred knight of a good actor; “and indeed, what hee doth fainedly, that doe others essentially: this day one plays a monarch, the next a private person. Here one acts a tyrant, on the morrow an exile: a parasite this man to-night, to-morrow a precisian,” and so of divers others.
Or, to top (Pope) Alexander the Great with Glorious John (Dryden):
As we cannot be monarchs, says the Porpora of fiction, we are artists, and have a kingdom of our own: we dress ourselves as kings and great men, we ascend the stage, we seat ourselves upon a fictitious throne, we play a farce, we are actors. The world, he continues, sees us, but understands us not. “It is only when I am at the theatre that I see clearly our true relations to society. The spirit of music unseals my eyes, and I see behind the footlights a true court, real heroes, lofty inspirations; while the wretched dolts who flaunt in the boxes upon velvet couches are the real actors. In truth, the world is a comedy; and we must play our parts in it with gravity and decorum, though conscious of the hollow pageant which compasses us on every side.” And Godolphin pronounces life to differ from the play only in this—that it has no plot, all being vague, desultory, unconnected, till the curtain drops with the mystery unsolved.
All this is in Mr. Carlyle’s vein—of the Sartor Resartus date at least; or as when he depicted the family vagaries of Mirabeaudom, which produced “such astonishing comico-tragical French farces”—with the eight chaotic volumes of family correspondence, wherein the various personages speak their dialogue, unfold their farce-tragedy: “Seen or half seen, it is a stage; as the whole world is. What with personages, what with destinies, no stranger house-drama [than that of the Mirabeau family] was enacting on the earth at that time.” The same figure Mr. Carlyle elsewhere applies to our own revolution times, in the century before: “Such is the drama of life, seen in Baillie of Kilwinning; a thing of multifarious tragic and epic meanings, then as now. A many-voiced tragedy and epos, yet with broad-based comic and grotesque accompaniments, done by actors not in buskins;—ever replete with elements of guilt and remorse, of pity, instruction, and fear.”
Act well your part:—there all the moral lies. Though the world be histrionical, and most men live ironically, says Sir Thomas Browne, “yet be thou what thou singly art, and personate only thyself.”
It has been sadly and severely said of the Emperor Augustus, who was loved by no one, that if, at the moment of his death, he desired his friends to dismiss him from this world by the common expression of scenical applause (vos plaudite!), in that valedictory injunction he expressed inadvertently the true value of his own long life, which, in strict candour, may be pronounced one continued series of histrionic efforts, and of excellent acting, adapted to selfish ends.
L’honnête homme, writes an epigrammatic thinker, joue son rôle le mieux qu’il peut sans songer à la galerie.
Remember, says Epictetus, so to act your part upon this stage as to be approved by the master, whether it be a short or a long one that he has given you to perform. If he will have you to represent a beggar, endeavour to act the beggar’s part well; and so, a cripple, a prince, or a plebeian. It is your part to perform well what you represent: it is his to choose what that shall be.
Thus spake the stoic philosopher. And how speaks the Christian divine? As the merit of an actor, says Robert Hall, is not estimated by the part which he performs, but solely by the truth and propriety of his representation, and the peasant is often applauded where the monarch is hissed; so when the great drama of life is concluded, He who allots its scenes and determines its period will take an account of His servants, and assign to each his due, in his own proper character.
Since the life of man is likened to a scene, “I had rather,” writes John Milton, “that all my entrances and exits might mix with such persons only whose worth erects them and their actions to a grave and tragic deportment, and not to have to do with clowns and vices.”
And this, lest such a player have to echo, in spirit, if not to the letter, the bitter conviction of blinded, blundering Leontes—Io anche—
The measure of a happy life, writes Lord Shaftesbury—he of the “Characteristics”—is not from the fewer or more suns we behold, the fewer or more breaths we draw, or meals we repeat; but from the having once lived well, acted our part handsomely, and made our exit cheerfully—or, to print it as he wrote it, for the lovers of old books’ sake—“and made our Exit cheerfully, and as became us.”
It is well remarked by Archbishop Trench that we have forfeited the full force of the statement, “God is no respecter of persons,” from the fact that “person” does not mean for us now all that it once meant. “Person,” from “persona,” the mask constantly worn by the actor of antiquity, is by natural transfer the part or rôle in the play which each sustains, as πρόσωπον is in Greek. “In the great tragi-comedy of life each sustains a ‘person;’ one that of a king, another that of a hind; one must play Dives, another Lazarus. This ‘person’ God, for whom the question is not what ‘person’ each sustains, but how he sustains it, does not regard.”