Your Life According to Shakespeare
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In Act II, scene VII, of the play As You Like It, a disheartened Jacques takes a long look at life:
All the worlds 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(1-4)
It is a line that is as simplistic as it is complicated, comparing the cycle of life to that of a play. This quote, pulled from the play As You Like it, a pastoral comedy by William Shakespeare, has been repeated and analyzed thoroughly throughout the years by poets and philosophers alike. This set speech, spoken by Jacques, takes a seven step look at the aging process of man: infant, schoolboy, lover, soldier, justice, pantaloon, and second childishness. With such visual dialect Shakespeare metaphorically compares the seven stages of aging, to the multiple acts of a play and the plots ascending and descending order much like that of lifes from infant to second childishness.
The language that Shakespeare uses for this set speech is remarkably modern. Shakespeare uses a language that is so modern for his time yet so simple for present day dialect that the set speech is often taken out of the plays context and has achieved a reputation as a poem and has been able to remain such a popular work for so long as well as still carry meaning. For instance, Shakespeare refers to the infant as “mewling and puking in the nurses arms.”(6). When Shakespeare wrote this, it was the first recorded use of “puke” meaning “to vomit”, before then the word had been used to mean a dignified dark brown color, according to the Oxford Dictionary(Shakespeare 2). Anyone in any time period could picture an infant curled up and spitting up on a nurses shoulder, which is what makes the language he uses so interesting. Shakespeare is able to use such vivid words that are able to reach so many different walks of life and still convey a deeper meaning. He also uses a few that are a little out dated in todays society: Bearded like the pard; Capon; Wise saws; and Pantaloon. Each having its own meaning and making perfect sense in the context of the poem, if used today you would be laughed at.
Of the seven stages Shakespeare refers to, infancy is the first then he develops into the whining schoolboy. Every child in the world can relate to the first to stages, especially the latter. No one wanted to start school let alone rush to get there. The way Shakespeare uses such vivid imagery, the reader tends to develop a mental image of a small boy with rosy red cheeks dragging along to school, and it is easy for the reader to just read along as their imaginary little boy grows up into Ðthe lover. Which is what we remember in our own lives as well see in young children today. “Sighing like a furnace, with a woeful ballad/ made to his mistress eyebrow”(Lines 10-11). The boy has discovered love and all of a sudden this imaginary boy has emotion and little character.
The fourth stage in this poem is the roll of soldier. In the time of the poem, to join the national army is like a rite of passage into manhood. Shakespeare describes the, now, man as hairy as a leopard and Ðfull of strange oaths. Shakespeares choices of words in line twelve caught my eye. The reference to the strange oaths implies heavily that maybe it shouldnt