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.
“And why not players strut in courtiers’ clothes?
For these are actors, too, as well as those.”
Or, to top (Pope) Alexander the Great with Glorious John (Dryden):
“Even kings but play, and when their part is done,
Some other, worse or better, mount the throne.”
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.”