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Theatrum vita humana,

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• THEATR VM VI

TE HVMANE.

CAPVT I.

VITA HVMANA EST TANQUAM Theatrum omnium miferiarum.

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Vita hominis tanquam circus, vel grande theatrum est:
Quod tragici ostentat cuncta referta metus.
Hoc lafciva caro,peccatum,morfque,Satanque
Trifti hominem vexant, exagitantque modo.

Life as a Theatre, from Boussards "Theatrum 1596.

Cupid all arm'd a certain aim he took

At a fair vestal throned by the west,

And loosed his love-shaft smartly from his bow,
As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts:
But I might see young Cupid's fiery shaft
Quench'd in the chaste beams of the watery moon,

And the imperial votaress passed on,

In maiden meditation, fancy free.

Yet mark'd I where the bolt of Cupid fell:

It fell upon a little western flower,

Before milk-white, now purple with love's wound,

And maidens call it love-in-idleness."

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 VITAE HUMANA" (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, 1. 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, 1. 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),—

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Also in Macbeth (act v. sc. 5, 1. 22, vol. vii. p. 512),

"And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing."

And when the citizens of Angiers haughtily closed their gates against both King Philip and King John, the taunt is raised (King John, act ii. sc. 1, 1. 373, vol. iv. p. 26),—

"By heaven, these scroyles of Angiers flout you, kings,

And stand securely on their battlements,

As in a theatre, whence they gape and point

At your industrious scenes and acts of death."

The stages or ages of man have been variously divided. In the Arundel MS., and in a Dutch work printed at Antwerp in 1820, there are ten of these divisions of Man's Life.* The celebrated physician Hippocrates (B.C. 460-357), and Proclus,

See "ARCHEOLOGIA," vol. xxxv. 1853, pp. 167-189; "Observations on the Origin of the Division of Man's Life into Stages. By John Winter Jones, Esq."

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Seven Ages of Life, from an early Block Print in the British Museum

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