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:—
“The state, and men’s affairs, all passages
Of life, to spring new scenes; come in, go out,
And shift, and vanish.... I have got
A seat to sit at ease here, in mine inn,
To see the comedy; and laugh, and chuck
At the variety and throng of humours
And dispositions, that come justling in
And out still, as they one drove hence another.”