1 Corinthians vii. 31.
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—
“They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.”
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
“When we are born, we cry, that we are come
To this great stage of fools.”
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:
“I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano,