All the World’s a Stage

By William Shakespeare

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 cannon’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.

This text follows Project Gutenberg’s modern-spelling edition of As You Like It (eBook #1523). The play was first printed in the First Folio of 1623, and spelling and punctuation vary between editions, so some versions print “honor” for “honour” in line 13.

Line numbers on this page count from “All the world’s a stage,” which in the play is a half line that completes the line Duke Senior begins just before it.

“All the World’s a Stage” is the most famous speech in William Shakespeare’s comedy As You Like It, spoken by the melancholy lord Jaques in Act 2, Scene 7. The play was probably written around 1599 and was first printed in the First Folio of 1623. In 28 lines of blank verse, Jaques compares human life to a play in seven acts, from the “mewling and puking” infant to the old man left “sans everything,” and its opening line has become one of the most quoted in English.

Our reading is that the speech is a brilliant performance that the play refuses to give the last word. Jaques ends on an old man reduced to nothing, and at that very moment, Orlando walks in carrying Adam, an old servant who gave up his savings and his home out of loyalty. The speech calls old age “mere oblivion.” The scene that follows answers that old age can still be cherished, fed, and saved.

ON THIS PAGE
Summary · Background · Analysis and Themes · Form and Technique · Notable Lines · Themes · FAQ
Glossary · In Popular Culture · Related Poems

Summary

Jaques begins with a comparison: the world is a stage, and all men and women are actors who make their exits and their entrances. Each person plays many parts in a lifetime, and the play has seven acts, which are the seven ages of man.

First comes the infant, crying and spitting up in a nurse’s arms. Next is the schoolboy, with his satchel and his freshly washed face, dragging himself to school. The lover follows, sighing and writing a sad poem about his mistress’s eyebrow.

The fourth age is the soldier, who swears, wears a fierce beard, picks fights, and chases fame into the mouth of a cannon. The fifth is the justice, a well-fed magistrate with a stern look, a neatly trimmed beard, and a stock of wise sayings.

In the sixth age, the man becomes a thin old “pantaloon” in slippers and spectacles. The stockings he saved from his youth are now far too wide for his shrunken legs, and his deep voice is turning shrill again. The last scene is a second childhood and forgetfulness, “sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”

Background

As You Like It is a pastoral comedy, and most scholars date it to about 1599. On August 4, 1600, it was entered in the Stationers’ Register with a note that it was “to be stayed,” meaning its printing was held back. It did not appear in print until the First Folio of 1623.

Shakespeare took his plot from Thomas Lodge’s prose romance Rosalynde (1590), in which a banished king lives with his followers in the Forest of Arden. The melancholy Jaques has no counterpart in Lodge’s story. He is Shakespeare’s addition, a well-traveled cynic who moralizes about everything he sees.

The speech comes at a tense moment. Orlando, starving, has burst in on the exiled Duke’s outdoor meal with his sword drawn, only to be welcomed kindly, and he has gone to fetch his old servant Adam. While he is away, Duke Senior remarks that “this wide and universal theatre” holds sadder scenes than their own, and Jaques takes up the idea.

By 1599, the image of the world as a stage was already old. Shakespeare had used it in The Merchant of Venice, where Antonio calls the world “a stage where every man must play a part.” Richard Edwards’s play Damon and Pithias, printed in 1571, credits Pythagoras with the same comparison, and Erasmus had described life as a kind of play in The Praise of Folly.

According to a story often repeated, the Globe Theatre, which opened in 1599, carried the Latin motto Totus mundus agit histrionem (“the whole world plays the actor”). The evidence for the motto comes from later sources, and scholars have questioned whether the theater ever used it.

Dividing life into ages was also a familiar idea, with schemes of three, four, seven, and more stages going back to antiquity. The scholar T. W. Baldwin argued that Shakespeare’s version draws mainly on books used in Elizabethan grammar schools, especially the Zodiacus Vitae of Palingenius, a long Latin poem on human life.

A later tradition holds that Shakespeare himself played Adam, the old servant who enters as the speech ends, though there is no firm evidence for it.

Analysis and Themes

The speech is often quoted as Shakespeare’s own view of life, but it belongs to a character. It works as a self-contained set piece and also as a move in the larger argument of the play.

The Theater as a Metaphor for Life

The opening metaphor turns every person into an actor and every life into a script. Jaques even lists the exits before the entrances, as if leaving the stage were the more natural thing. People arrive on a stage that existed before them, and it will go on after they are gone.

The metaphor also suggests that the parts are fixed. Each age has its costume and props: the satchel, the ballad, the beard, the capon, and the spectacles. A man does not choose his role so much as grow into the next one.

Seven Ages, Seven Caricatures

Each age is drawn as a type rather than a person, and most are mocked. The schoolboy creeps “like snail,” the lover writes verses to an eyebrow, the soldier risks his life for a “bubble,” and the justice speaks in stock phrases.

The comedy depends on exact detail. The justice’s belly is “lined” with capon like a well-stuffed purse, and the old man’s carefully saved hose hang loose on legs that have shrunk inside them.

The Melancholy of Jaques

Jaques is a professional cynic. Earlier in the play, a lord describes him weeping over a wounded deer, and Jaques boasts that he can “suck melancholy out of a song.” The seven ages speech is his showpiece, polished and witty, and its gloom is partly a performance.

The speech also leaves a great deal out. There is no lasting love, no friendship, and no work beyond fighting and judging. Only two women appear, both glimpsed from the outside: a nurse and a mistress who is reduced to an eyebrow.

The Answer in the Scene

The moment Jaques reaches “sans everything,” Orlando enters carrying Adam. Adam is nearly eighty, and in Act 2, Scene 3, he gave Orlando his life savings and followed him into exile. He is old, but he is far from oblivion.

The Duke welcomes them both, calls Adam a “venerable burden,” and turns the scene to food and music. Shakespeare gives Jaques the most memorable speech in the play, and then he quietly corrects it.

Form and Technique

The speech is written in blank verse, which is unrhymed iambic pentameter, the meter Shakespeare used for most serious speech in his plays. The rhythm is loose and conversational, with many lines running on into the next.

Those run-on lines carry the structure. Six of the seven ages begin in the middle of a line: “At first the infant,” “And then the lover,” “Then a soldier,” “And then the justice,” “The sixth age shifts,” and “Last scene of all.” The effect is of one stage of life rolling into the next without a pause.

The images are packed and concrete, with alliteration in phrases such as “shrunk shank” and “quick in quarrel.” The similes are clipped to their essentials, as in “creeping like snail” and “sighing like furnace,” which both drop the article.

The final line has no verb at all. After “Is second childishness and mere oblivion,” Jaques repeats “sans” four times, and he ends on “everything,” the most sweeping word in the speech, used to name a total loss.

Notable Lines

Three passages are quoted far more often than the rest of the speech.

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,

Lines 1 to 4

The opening is one of the most quoted passages in English. Its power lies in its simplicity: one bold comparison, a calm extension of it, and the idea that one person plays many roles over a lifetime.

Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,

Lines 12 to 15

The soldier is the most vivid of the seven. “The bubble reputation” is a lasting phrase for fame that bursts as easily as it forms, and the soldier chases it into the one place most likely to destroy him.

Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

Lines 25 to 28

The ending is famous for its bleakness. The old man loses his senses one by one until nothing is left, and the theatrical frame returns with “last scene” and “history,” a word that in Shakespeare’s time could also mean a story or a play.

Themes

Four ideas run through the speech and the scene around it.

Life as Performance

People play parts, change costumes, and leave the stage when their scene is over. The metaphor makes identity seem less like a fixed self and more like a series of roles that each person takes on in turn.

Aging and Time

The speech follows one man from the cradle to the edge of the grave in 28 lines. Time moves quickly and in one direction, and each age seems to arrive before the last one has finished.

Vanity

The lover’s ballad, the soldier’s reputation, and the justice’s proverbs are all treated as poses. Jaques suggests that what people take most seriously at each age is exactly what later ages will find absurd.

Mortality

The speech ends not in death but in “mere oblivion,” a loss of self that comes before the final exit. That makes it one of the starkest pictures of old age in Shakespeare, and only the arrival of Adam softens it.

Frequently Asked Questions

These are the questions readers most often ask about “All the World’s a Stage.”

Who Says “All the World’s a Stage” in As You Like It?

Jaques, a melancholy lord who has followed the banished Duke Senior into the Forest of Arden. He speaks it in Act 2, Scene 7, after the Duke remarks that the world is a “wide and universal theatre” with sadder scenes than their own. Jaques is known for his gloomy wit, and this speech is his most famous moment.

What Are the Seven Ages of Man?

In Jaques’s speech, they are the infant, the schoolboy, the lover, the soldier, the justice, the old man or “pantaloon,” and finally second childhood and oblivion. The idea of dividing life into a set number of ages is much older than Shakespeare, but his version is the one most people know.

What Does “All the World’s a Stage” Mean?

It means that life is like a play and that people are like actors. Each person enters at birth, leaves at death, and plays a series of roles in between, from child to lover to old man. Today, the phrase is often used to suggest that people are always performing for others.

Is “All the World’s a Stage” a Poem?

It is a speech from a play, not a separate poem. Shakespeare wrote it in blank verse as part of As You Like It, but it is so self-contained that anthologies often print it as a poem in its own right, sometimes under the title “The Seven Ages of Man.”

What Does “Sans Teeth, Sans Eyes, Sans Taste, Sans Everything” Mean?

“Sans” is a French word meaning “without,” and it was used in English in Shakespeare’s time. The line pictures extreme old age as a loss of teeth, sight, and taste, and finally of everything else, including memory and awareness. It closes the speech on its bleakest note.

Glossary

A few words in the speech have changed meaning or dropped out of everyday use since Shakespeare’s time.

• mewling (line 6): Crying weakly, like a baby or a kitten.
• puking (line 6): Vomiting or spitting up.
• satchel (line 7): A schoolbag carried on the shoulder.
• sighing like furnace (line 10): Sighing as heavily as a furnace breathes out heat and smoke.
• ballad (line 10): A song or simple poem, here a lovesick one.
• pard (line 12): A leopard; the soldier’s beard is as bristling as a big cat’s whiskers.
• jealous in honour (line 13): Quick to take offense at any slight to his honor.
• bubble reputation (line 14): Fame as fragile and short-lived as a bubble.
• justice (line 15): A justice of the peace, a local magistrate.
• capon (line 16): A rooster fattened for the table, a rich man’s dish.
• saws (line 18): Sayings or proverbs.
• modern instances (line 18): Ordinary, commonplace examples; “modern” could mean trite in Shakespeare’s English.
• pantaloon (line 20): A foolish old man, from Pantalone, the old merchant of Italian commedia dell’arte.
• hose (line 22): Close-fitting breeches or stockings.
• shank (line 23): The lower leg.
• treble (line 24): A high-pitched voice, like a child’s.
• sans (line 28): Without, from French.

In Popular Culture

The speech has echoed through popular music. Elvis Presley’s 1960 recording of “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” includes a spoken bridge that paraphrases its first lines, and that recitation was already printed in the song’s 1927 sheet music.

The Canadian rock band Rush named its 1976 live album All the World’s a Stage. In 1981, the band returned to the speech in “Limelight,” from the album Moving Pictures, which paraphrases its opening lines.

Related Poems

If the seven ages speech speaks to you, these poems share its interest in aging, its theatrical imagery, or its view of life in stages.

• Sonnet 73 by William Shakespeare: Shakespeare’s own meditation on growing old, built from images of autumn, twilight, and a dying fire.
• Ode: Intimations of Immortality by William Wordsworth: A poem that follows life from a radiant childhood into adult forgetting and pictures the child as a “little Actor.”
• Ulysses by Alfred, Lord Tennyson: An aging hero refuses to accept that his last age must be one of rest.
• Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night by Dylan Thomas: A son urges his father to fight old age and death rather than fade away.
• When You Are Old by W. B. Yeats: A love poem that imagines its reader in the final age of life, nodding by the fire.