“All the world’s a stage” is the phrase that begins a monologue from Shakespeare’s pastoral comedy As You Like It, spoken by the melancholy Jaques in Act II Scene VII. Through Jaques, Shakespeare takes the audience on a journey of the complete lifecycle of a human being, made particularly vivid by its visual images of the different stages of an Elizabethan’s life. The speech compares the world to a stage and life to a play and catalogues the seven stages of a man’s life, sometimes referred to as ‘The Seven Ages of Man.’
The idea of a man’s life being no more than a brief appearance on a stage is something that fascinated Shakespeare. Macbeth sees his life in that way – you strut about and stress on the stage but all those passions and, indeed, everything you do in life, is meaningless, as at the end of that you just disappear. Like an actor anguishing on the stage over the trials of life, with great passion, and then, after the performance, just going home to resume his normal life. It’s a religious idea in a way. An actor playing out the human drama is only an actor. At the end of the show he resumes a different, more permanent, life – an afterlife – and what he has done on the stage, in other words, in his life, is just an act. Real life lies beyond that.
The comparison of the world to a stage and people to actors long predated Shakespeare. Richard Edwards’ play Damon and Pythias, written in the year Shakespeare was born, contains the lines, “Pythagoras said that this world was like a stage / Whereon many play their parts; the lookers-on, the sage”. When it was founded in 1599 Shakespeare’s own theatre, The Globe, may have used the motto Totus mundus agit histrionem (All the world plays the actor), the Latin text of which is derived from a 12th-century treatise. Ultimately the words derive from quod fere totus mundus exercet histrionem (because almost the whole world are actors) attributed to Petronius, a phrase which had wide circulation in England at the time.
Likewise the division of human life into a series of ages was a commonplace of art and literature, which Shakespeare would have expected his audiences to recognize. The number of ages varied: three and four being the most common among ancient writers such as Aristotle. The concept of seven ages derives from medieval philosophy, which constructed groups of seven, as in the seven deadly sins, for theological reasons. The seven ages model dates from the 12th century. King Henry V had a tapestry illustrating the seven ages of man. According to T. W. Baldwin, Shakespeare’s version of the concept of the ages of man is based primarily upon Pier Angelo Manzolli’s book Zodiacus Vitae, a school text he might have studied at the Stratford Grammar School, which also enumerates stages of human life. He also takes elements from Ovid and other sources known to him.