Excerpt from The Dramatic Imagination by Robert Edmond Jones

It happens to each one of us at times to feel separated from ourselves, going through the business of living as if we were at once a character in a play and the actor who impersonates that character. Two people dwell in us, an outer self, a being who answers to the name of John Doe or Richard Row, a kind of character-part, so to speak, and an inner self, a mysterious essence, a hidden flame, a shy wild Harlequin who plays this part before the world. We feel the presence of this other self when some moment of stark reality strikes through the conventions of our everyday lives. There is no one who has not experienced at some time or other the sense of inward withdrawal. All life in indeed a play in which we act out our roles until the final curtain falls. This idea of the theatre goes deep. We recognize its truth in our inmost hearts. We know that it is true as we know that our souls are immortal. I am persuaded that the consciousness of a dual personality- the sense of otherness, of apartness, the sense that we are possessed, that another’s voice ever and again speaks through us- is a thing that is very common in human experience and that it is the only thing that separates us from the brutes. Perhaps it was the sense of theatre that made us human, ages ago.

If it is true- as Shakespeare makes that melancholy Jaques say- that all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players, playing our many parts on “a vaster place than any stage,” it follows that we must be playing these parts before an audience. Who and what is that audience? Shall we ever know? Perhaps it is an unseen audience, a hierarchy of invisible powers, the Great Republic of “ethereal dominations” that Blake and Shelley saw. I think of the unseen audience of Toscanini, made free of his art by the miracle of the radio transmission… Or is the earth itself a living, sentient being, as the poets have told us, and is it her approval for which we strive, all unknowing, in our performance? And when the curtain has fallen on the last act of our lives, if we have played our parts to the best of our ability, may we hope to hear from beyond the curtain some vibration of divine reassurance, some echo as of ghostly applause?