In our college class on the “Rise of the British Novel,” I argue occasionally that the British novel originated in the 18th century theaters and thus that novels are, in some literal way, dramas. But this may be wrong.  It is possible that novels are not drama because they imitate the theatre, but because they imitate life, and life itself is a drama.  

This is not an unusual position; in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Jaques famously claims that “All the world’s a stage,/ And all the men and women merely players.” But what if this is not just a metaphor? What if the world is literally a stage? Western cultures from the Beowulfian concept of Middle Earth as a performative battle ground between Heaven and Hell, to the 18th century descriptions of political theatres, to the refined view of the ballroom as a stage where socialites played their parts seem to acknowledge the fundamental reality that the world is literally drama.  

But we rarely consider the audience of the drama. In the political theater, the ballroom and the battlefield, whoever is not currently in the middle of the action is generally considered the audience, but if the whole world is a stage, then that means that actors are only pausing temporarily to watch each other. It does not address who is watching the actors. Who is the audience to the world’s drama?  

Three verses in the epistles give us an intriguing answer. In I Corinthians 11:10, St. Paul says that a woman should wear a head covering “because of the angels.” In I Timothy 5:21, he advises Timothy to rebuke the wayward, “in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus and of the elect angels,” and in Hebrews 13:2, the writer encourages hospitality because strangers might be angels. Though there is much in these verses to wonder at, the assumption running them is surprising and certain; believers should act well because the angels are watching.   

This world is a dramatic stage, and the audience includes the entire unseen world inhabited by God and the angels, by Satan who accuses Job, and by the “great cloud of witnesses” composed of the saints who, in Hebrews 12, died in faith. That world stands toward our time-space continuum just as we stand toward a play or a book in our own, where Elizabeth Bennet is always both accepting and rejecting Mr. Darcy, where Scrooge is constantly both the best keeper of Christmas and also the grinchiest Scrooge. They stand collapsed into a single point of time and space in our world, yet their books may be opened and the story played out in order again. In that world to which our world is a stage, this story is being read aloud, and in our turns we step out and play our parts in the cosmic theater. Those who suffer alone and wish for a witness have a mighty audience. Those who do evil and wish to hide may not.  

This story has not only an audience, but an end – a comic one. And like all good Shakespearian comedies, the wedding dance at the end spills from the stage to the audience and into the street of that eternal city towards which this reality is directed. Wise ones will live in this reality. So may God grant that we may live our lives aware of the stage, suffer our sorrows to the witness of the saints, sin our sins before the face of our graciously suffering Christ, and play our parts well “because of the angels.”