“All the world’s a stage” says Jacques, famously, in As You Like It, “And all the men and women merely players”

 “I hold the world but as the world” says Antonio, echoing him in The Merchant of Venice, “a stage where every man must play a part/ and mine a sad one”.

The Duchess herself says almost the same in Malfi IV i: “I account this world a tedious theatre, / For I do play a part in't 'gainst my will.”

The rhetorical commonplace of comparing the world of a play to the ‘real’ world is by no means uncommon in renaissance drama, but in Malfi, the acting imagery goes far beyond a fashionable reference. From the start of the play, where jokes are made about the passing of time between acts, to the end, where Bosola compares Antonio’s death to something that he has seen on stage, the idea of artificiality and of acting runs through the drama as a strong theme. What is the point of reminding us that the tragedy is a play?

The idea of the world as a stage—and conversely, of the stage as a world—is a powerful image. It both embraces the audience’s complicity in the suspension of disbelief—yes, look, we know we’re only actors, this is an artificial world—and raises important questions about the nature of the world outside the theatre. Put simply, when the actors discuss the idea of pretence, disclose the artificiality of the stage, they reach out to the audience in a way that forbids the audience to regard them only as two-dimensional characters.  In effect, they say that the stage is an effective model for the world, that what happens during the play is something that can have repercussions in the outslde world. If the audience of the play is detached from the action and can see it objectively, so too can the players. They are able to analyse their world—but can we analyse ours?

In As You Like It Jacques responds to the duke’s doubts about his fitness to engage in a mission to chastise the world with a virtuoso speech about the licence for political comment, the essential message of which is ‘if the cap fits, wear it’. His criticisms, he claims, will only gall those who recognise that the accusations are just. At this point the satire moves outwards to embrace the audience:

What woman in the city do I name

When that I say the city-woman bears

The cost of princes on unworthy shoulders?

Who can come in and say that I mean her

When such a one as she, such is her neighbour?

 One can almost imagine him walking to the front of the stage and gesturing at the richly-dressed playgoers.

The duke’s remarks on the plight of Orlando are what provoke Jaques to his wider argument. The duke challenges his characteristic melancholy by an appeal to the wider world. The stage they play on, he suggests, is not the only one. This is a vivid reproach to self-interest, and Jaques responds by embracing the theme with enthusiasm:

DUKE S. Thou seest we are not all alone unhappy:

This wide and universal theatre

 Presents more woful pageants than the scene

Wherein we play in.

 JAQUES                All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the canon's mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
        (As You Like It, 2. 7. 139-167)

All the parts of life that Jaques names, are seen as only so many roles. The lover, the soldier, the justice, all are implicitly judged as insincere: ‘and so he plays his part’, seeking love or reputation not because they are good things, or because the man as individual wishes them, but because they are an expected role, something that is part and parcel of being a man in this time. Jaques is explicitly stripping away the barriers of pretence, the ways in which the audience may think of themselves as being somehow above the characters in the play; instead of comfortably watching the drama, reassuring themselves with their own virtue, he demands that the audience look into their own hearts and analyse how much what they do is their own choice, and how much the choice of fashion or custom or egotism.

In this passage, Jaques is almost quoting a contemporary text, where a similar comparison is made about the planets. Timothy Bright, in A Treatise of Melancholie (see http://web.uvic.ca/shakespeare/Library/SLTnoframes/ideas/spheres.html)  (1586) writes:

The seven ages of man [resemble] the seven planets, whereof our infancy is compared to the Moon, in which we seem only to live and grow, as plants; the second age to Mercury, wherein we are taught and instructed; our third age to Venus, the days of love, desire and vanity; the fourth to the Sun, the strong, flourishing and beautiful age of man's life; the fifth to Mars, in which we seek honour and victory, and in which our thoughts travel to ambitious ends; the sixth age is ascribed to Jupiter, in which we begin to take account of our times, judge of ourselves and grow to the perfection of our understanding; the last, and seventh, to Saturn, wherein our days are sad and overcast, and in which we find, by dear and lamentable experience and by the loss which can never be repaired, that of all our vain passions and affections past the sorrow only abides.

The borrowing is significant, because it suggests that the image can be seen in a wider context.  The planets were thought to affect the fate of mankind, and horoscopes were taken much more seriously—witness the horoscope of the unfortunate baby in Malfi, which Antonio risks so much to cast. If Jaques is suggesting that the acting out of the ages of life can be seen as akin to the way in which the planets influence us, he is making a connection between free will and fate that is profoundly significant.

Within As You Like It, Jaques is often seen as a self-indulgent character, laughed at by the duke and his fellows for his glum outlook on life. At this point he reaches out of the play, and his comments strike an uneasy balance between direct satire and generalised morality. The laughter becomes a little uneasy.

Such self-referential passages are not uncommon in renaissance drama; as in modern texts, the process whereby characters observe that they are within a work of fiction adds point and poignancy to that fiction. It may also add humour. Between Act II and act III of Malfi, several years are supposed to pass: Antonio greets Delio by saying “O, you have been a stranger long at court”, and on his enquiry after the the Duchess, replies “since you last saw her, / She hath had two children more, a son and daughter.” Delio’s response is a familiar gesture to the artificiality of the scene:

Methinks 'twas yesterday; let me but wink,
And not behold your face, which to mine eye
Is somewhat leaner: verily I should dream
It were within this half hour.

It’s a signal for a laugh, but the reference to the willing suspension of disbelief that the audience must indulge in grows sharper as the play proceeds.

When the duchess speaks of herself in IV i as not wanting to play the part assigned to her, we think not only of the play itself, but also of the cruel masque within the play that involves convincing her that her husband and children are already dead. The words remind us that Bosola and Ferdinand also are ‘playing God’, trying to stage-manage what happens. If we are deceived by the duchess’s acting, then so is she deceived. By admitting that the whole world of the play is artificial, by reminding us of it, Webster paradoxically convinces us of its reality.

Similarly, Ferdinand’s remark to Bosola in Act IV ii:

For thee, as we observe in tragedies
That a good actor many times is curs'd
For playing a villain's part, I hate thee for't,

Reaches out to the audience in a familiar way, the good actor playing Bosola ironically complimented, but also reminds us that Bosola the character is himself an actor, someone who has been ironically enjoined to ‘be yourself’ by pretending to be honest when he is not.

Bosola’s much-quoted words about how Antonio came by his death illustrate how much the mood has changed by the last scene:

MALATESTE: Thou wretched thing of blood,
How came Antonio by his death?

BOSOLA: In a mist: I know not how:
Such a mistake as I have often seen
In a play.

Bosola’s words here, though they have a dark humour, are more poignant than witty. If the audience laughs, it is an uneasy laughter. The characters enmeshed within the demands of the scripted play, seem akin to people who rage at an immutable fate: Like the playwright, the audience sits outside the scene, like Gods, observing the struggles of the characters, but powerless—or disinclined—to aid them. Twice in the last scenes Bosola speaks of himself and the cardinals as ‘actors’; not just people who act, who do things, but also perhaps people who pretend.

Bosola’s near-final words:

O, this gloomy world!
In what a shadow, or deep pit of darkness,
Doth womanish and fearful mankind live!

reach out to the audience. The world of the play suddenly seems almost to be the more real world. Mankind in the ‘pit’, the audience watching the play, are different from the actors on the stage, and the actors, who after all can die and rise again, pity them for their fear of death.