Shakespeare and the Emblem Writers / an exposition of their similarities of throught and expression, preceded by a view of emblem-literature down to A.D. 1616

by Henry Green

cratici-cũ Iohãnis Aeſticãpiani Epiſtola.

Fab. Cebetis, 1507.

Plate 1^a

Tableau of Human Life from Cebes B C 390

Thus, the Tablet of Cebes, a work by one of the disciples of Socrates, about B.C. 390, is an explanation, in the form of a Dialogue, of a picture, said to have been set up in the temple of Kronos at Athens or at Thebes, and which was declared to be emblematical of Human Life.

One of the older Latin versions, printed in 1507, presents the foregoing illustrative frontispiece.

As the book has come down to modern times it is, generally, what has sometimes been named, nudum Emblema, a naked Emblem, because it has neither device nor artistic drawing, but, like Shakespeare’s comparison of all the world to a stage in which man plays many parts, the course of Life, with its discipline, false hopes and false pleasures, is in the Tablet so described,—in fact so delineated,[^[13]] as to have enabled the Dutch designer and engraver, Romyn de Hooghe, in 1670, to have pictured “the whole story of Human Life as narrated to the Grecian sage.”