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ALL THE WORLDS A STAGE

This piece id from Shakespeares comedy, As You like It. It is the speech of Jacques, who is a cynical philosopher and courtier of a banished Duke. Jacques is consoling the Duke by presenting a cold and objective view of human life. According to him human life is much like a play on a stage. The world like a stage. Human beings are like the actors coming for a while on the stage, playing their roles and making their exits. This life, according to Jacques, is like a play of seven acts. There are seven stages in it. The first stage is infancy, when the child is an infant crying and vomiting milk in the nurses arms. In the second stage he is a playful child, creeping like a snail, unwillingly to school. Then, in the third stage he is a young and passionate lover, writing love poems, praising the beauty of his beloved. As a grown up young man, in the fourth stage, he is like a soldier. He has grown a beard and is always ready for a fight for the sake of honour and reputation. (Although, according to Jacques, reputation is as shout lived as a bubble.) Past middle age, in the fifth stage, he is like a responsible judge. His belly is rounded with good food (like chicken, etc.). His beard is fashionably trimmed. His speech is always full of proverbs and wise saying. Then comes the sixth stage: old age. He has become thin and weak. He looks like a comic fool, with his spectacles and his slippers. His money purse always hangs by his waist. His stocking are now loose on his shrunken legs. His voice, too, has come to have a shrill childish sound. And the final scene of lifes drama is like a second childhood, with no teeth and little cision in the eyes, there is no taste for the tonque. Indeed, all sense organs have lost their strength. In short human life in a strange story ending in sadness and death.

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