All The World's A Stage

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players...

-- Jacques, in William Shakespeare's As You Like It (c. 1599), Act II, Scene VII, lines 139-140

Or as a Huguenot poet, Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas (1544-1590), put it earlier:

The World's a Stage, where God's Omnipotence,
His Justice, Knowledge, Love, and Providence
Do act their Parts; contending (in their kindes)
Above the Heav'ns, to ravish dullest minds.
The World's a Book in Folio, printed all
With God's great Works in letters Capitall:
Each Creature is a Page: and each Effect
A fair Character, void of all defect.

-- La Sepmaine; ou, Creation du monde (1578), trans. by Joshua Sylvester as Divine Weekes and Workes, First Week, First Day

Not only did Du Bartas influence Shakespeare, his epic poem about creation is thought to have been a major influence upon John Milton's Paradise Lost. In the tradition of hexameral literature, Du Bartas' poetry represents a major achievement. He was not the first to see the world as a stage, although his picture of God's attributes manifested in theatrical glory is, to my way of thinking, more spiritually eloquent than Shakespeare's, nor was he the first to be inspired by contemplation of God's work of creation in the first week of the world. But his influence was such that he is considered to be only French poet of the 16th century who could rival Clement Marot as "the poet of princes, and the prince of poets," and as Joseph Hall wrote in poetic praise of Du Bartas and his English translator, he was certainly a chief poet in two languages:

Bartas was some French angel, girt with bays;
And thou a Bartas art, in English lays.
Whether is more? Mee seems (the sooth to sayn)
One Bartas speaks in tongues; in nations, twain.

Although little-known today, his legacy is behind some of the greatest works of English literature, and when one reads the original French or the English translation, though in eloquence he has been superseded, the Huguenot's combination of spiritual grace and poetic expression tunes the believing heart more sweetly, in my opinion, than England's chief muses.