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.”
“If the world be, indeed, as ’twas said, but a stage,
The dress only is changed ’twixt the acts of an age.
From the dark tiring-chamber behind straight reissue
With new masks the old mummers; the very same tissue
Of passionate antics that move through the play,
With new parts to fulfil and new phrases to say.”
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!