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Updated: May 19, 2025
Annapolis became a place of fashion and of court, with horse-races, stage-playing, a press, a club, fox-hunting clergymen, a grand state-house, the town residences of planters, the belles of Maryland, and the seat of war against the French, the British crown, and the slaveholders' insurrection.
Grant that any of us understand a dramatist better for seeing him acted, and it follows, first, that all of us will be most indebted to the stage at the point where the higher and more ethereal faculties are liable in reading to failure and exhaustion, that is, stage-playing will be of most use to us where the mind requires help and inspiration to grasp and revel in lofty moral or imaginative conceptions, or where it needs aid and sharpening to appreciate and follow the niceties of repartee, or the delicacies of comic fancy.
It may seem strange that so great a dramatist as Shakespeare, who realised his own perfection as an artist and his humanity as a man on the ideal plane of stage-writing and stage-playing, should have written in these terms about the theatre; but we must remember that in Sonnets CX. and CXI. Shakespeare shows us that he too was wearied of the world of puppets, and full of shame at having made himself 'a motley to the view. The 111th Sonnet is especially bitter:
Until, therefore, the various haunts of intemperance in eating and drinking, and of gambling and stage-playing, can be broken up, it may be considered vain to hope for the disappearance of those sties of pollution which are their almost inevitable results. We might as well think of drying up the channel of a mighty river, while the fountains which feed it continue to flow as usual.
Mistress Attwood came to meet him, running in the garden-path. "Nicholas?" was all that she could say. "Never speak to me of him, again," he said, and passed her by into the house. "He hath gone away with a pack of stage-playing rascals and vagabonds, whither no man knoweth."
All their preaching is mere stage-playing, and their delivery the very transports of ridicule and drollery. Good Lord! how mimical are their gestures? What heights and falls in their voice?
With half your strength I could bear to wait and labour with myself to conquer fretting. The greatest power in the world is shown in conquest over self. More life will be worked out of you by fretting than all the stage-playing in the world. God bless you, my poor child.
Else let me tell you that you will be behaving like a pack of children playing now at wrestlers, now at gladiators; presently falling to trumpeting and anon to stage-playing, when the fancy takes them for what they have seen. And you are even the same: wrestler, gladiator, philosopher, orator all by turns and none of them with your whole soul.
"Do na ye 'father' me no more," said Simon Attwood, bitterly; "I be na father to stage-playing, vagabond rogues. And be gone, I say. Dost hear? Must I e'en thrust thee forth?" He raised his hand as if to strike. Nick fell away from the latchet-gate, dumb-stricken with amazement, shame, and grief. "Oh, Nick," cried Cicely, "come away the wicked, wicked man!" "It is my father, Cicely."
You seem to me quite frantic for immediate work; but teach yourself quiet and repose in the time you are waiting. With half your strength I could bear to wait and labor with myself to conquer fretting. The greatest power in the world is shown in conquest over self. More life will be worked out of you by fretting than all the stage-playing in the world. God bless you, my poor child.
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