Scarcely by possibility could a dramatist, who was also an actor, avoid the imagery of poetic ideas with which his own profession made him familiar. I am not sure if Sheridan Knowles did not escape the temptation; but if Shakespeare had done so, it would have deprived the world of some of the most forcible passages in our language. The theatre for which he wrote, and the stage on which he acted, supplied materials for his imagination to work into lines of surpassing beauty.
Boissard’s “Theatrvm Vitæ Humanæ” (edition Metz, 4to, 1596) presents its first Emblem with the title,—Human life is as a Theatre of all Miseries. (See Plate [XIV].)
“The life of man a circus is, or theatre so grand:
Which every thing shows forth filled full of tragic fear;
Here wanton sense, and sin, and death, and Satan’s hand
Molest mankind and persecute with penalties severe.”
The picture of human life which Boissard draws in his “Address to the Reader” is gloomy and dispiriting; there are in it, he declares, the various miseries and calamities to which man is subject while he lives,—and the conflicts to which he is exposed from the sharpest and cruellest enemies, the devil, the flesh, and the world; and from their violence and oppression there is no possibility of escape, except by the favour and help of God’s mercy.
Very similar ideas prevail in some of Shakespeare’s lines; as “the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to” (Hamlet, act iii. sc. 1, l. 62, vol. viii. p. 79); “my heart all mad with misery beats in this hollow prison of my flesh” (Titus Andronicus, act iii. sc. 2, l. 9, vol. vi. p. 483); and, “shake the yoke of inauspicious stars from this world-wearied flesh” (Romeo and Juliet, act v. sc. 3, l. 111, vol. vii. p. 126).
But more particularly in As You Like It (act ii. sc. 7, l. 136, vol. ii. p. 409),—
“Thou seest we are not all alone unhappy: