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—
“And I
Play too; but so disgraced a part, whose issue
Will hiss me to my grave.”