Looking back at his career as a dramatist, Ben Jonson concluded that ‘I have considered, our whole life is like a Play: wherein every man, forgetful of himself, is in travaile with expression of another. ’ Thus Jonson neatly encapsulated a view shared by many of his contemporaries. The metaphor whereby the actions of men and women are seen as theatre, and the world wherein such actions occur as a stage, recurs constantly: Francis Bacon used it in his legal pleadings; the historian, John Hayward, saw the past in terms of the acts of a play; the diplomat, Sir Thomas Lake, described events in France the same way. Sir Walter Ralegh wittily extended the metaphor to the drama of salvation itself, a comedy where

Yet, as Ralegh well knew, God was not the only audience for the human comedy, and many below the eminence of the deity comfortably passed judgement on the way in which the men and women of the Court played their parts.

Rôle-playing indeed was of the essence of being a courtier, and many a reader, then and now, of Castiglione's handbook has wondered whether there was any substance at all beneath the fine display and elegant acting. For the satirist, John Marston, ‘Castilio’ was a fop, a talker, a writer of sugared sonnets not entirely his own, that is, one who projected an image far beyond any hope of realization.