English · Chapter 19
Study notes aligned to the official NEB syllabus.
William Shakespeare (1564 to 1616), the English dramatist and poet of Stratford upon Avon, wrote this passage not as an independent poem but as a speech in his comedy As You Like It, composed around the end of the sixteenth century. It is spoken by Jaques, the melancholy courtier who has followed the banished Duke into the Forest of Arden, in the second act of the play, just after the exiled company has taken in Orlando and his faint, starving old servant Adam. The sight of that helpless old man prompts Jaques to explain human life as a stage performance in seven acts. Anthologies print the speech separately, and it survives as one of the most quoted passages in English literature.
The speech begins with a bold general claim. The whole world, says Jaques, is a stage, and all men and women are merely players on it who have their exits and their entrances, so that a human being is an actor who enters at birth, performs and then departs. Each person in the course of a life plays many parts, and those parts, he says, number seven, corresponding to seven ages or phases of growth and decay.
The first age is the infant, who does nothing but mewl and vomit in the nurse's arms, a creature of pure appetite and noise with no control over itself.
The second is the schoolboy, who whines, carries a satchel, wears a shining morning face and creeps unwillingly to school as slowly as a snail. Here reluctance replaces helplessness.
The third is the lover, who sighs like a furnace and composes a mournful ballad addressed to his mistress's eyebrow. Feeling has arrived, but it is comically excessive and fastens on an absurdly small detail, so the young man is more in love with his own sighing than with any real person.
The fourth is the soldier, loud with strange oaths, wearing a beard like a leopard's, fiercely protective of his reputation, quick to quarrel and willing to march into the very mouth of the cannon in search of a fame that Jaques dismisses as a bubble. Here energy and courage appear, but they are spent on something empty.
The fifth is the justice, the prosperous magistrate with a round belly well lined with good food, a stern eye, a formally trimmed beard and a stock of wise old sayings and up to date examples for every occasion. This is the summit of worldly success, and it is also, in Jaques's telling, the age of borrowed opinions and self importance.
The sixth age brings the decline. The man becomes a lean, slippered figure like the foolish old man of Italian comedy, with spectacles on his nose and a purse hanging at his side, his legs shrunk thin, and the big manly voice of his prime shifting back towards a childish, piping treble.
The seventh and last age is the most desolate. It is a second childishness and then mere oblivion, a state in which the man has lost teeth, eyes, taste and, as the closing phrase insists, everything. The catalogue that began with an infant unable to speak ends with an old man stripped of every faculty, so the performance closes exactly where it started, and the actor leaves the stage.