This world may be compared to a stage and men and to the actors who have to play their parts in drama. Jaques’ speech about the seven stages of a man’ life is too famous to require any mention here. The world to him is a stage nothing more. Men and are merely players with their exits and their entrances mechanically regulated movement in an ephemeral pageant. The life of a man, as he pictures it, reproduces the condition of the imaginary state of nature. The dramatic function of this maxim is that it serves as a cue for Jaques to launch into his great set piece ‘All the World’ a Stage’ exactly as a casual line can be cue for a song in a musical comedy. Ingeniously Jaques lines one great common place-the world as a theatre, life as a play with another notion familiar to historians of ideas, the Seven Ages of Man. Man at each stage is anatomised. So we can divide the drama of a man’ life in seven Acts. The come on and go ** the stage in his life-time every man plays different parts.
