When was All the World's a Stage by William Shakespeare written?

Answer 1

meaning of all the world's a stage (a speech from the play As You Like It) (not a poem unless it's found poetry)

We live a preordained, fated life, in which we are actors or players, merely following scripts, much as we like to think that we are living individual, independent, unique existences.

Then there is the listing of our main acts from birth to death.

The monologue pulls the rug out from under us. we need to be humble as we're not particularly important, many others are doing exactly what we are.

In addition, our experiences, pleasures and pains, however real they may be, may just be for the fun of someone behind the "fourth wall" of the stage, behind which is the audience. even the pleasure felt in writing this exegesis is then scripted.

The player is described in isolation. In real life there are many interactions with many predictable results and a few unpredictable ones. Advances in psychology show that most personality traits and types and their interactions are in finite variation, many unforseen by laymen, thus taken to be unique experiences. At a higher level, the vast majority of it all follows scripts describable in a paragraph or two, filling out this monologue even further. There will, of course, be a minority of outliers, people and etiology. Details WILL differ, such as Laurence Olivier's understated, sensitive, introspective Hamlet versus Mel Gibson's raw, troubled portrayal.

finally, there are modern day plays with the same thesis such as the film "The Matrix", in which Neo finds out that his entire life is a computer generated confabulation. there is another scene in the same film about fate:

ORACLE

I'd ask you to sit down, but

you're not going to anyway. And

don't worry about the vase.

NEO

What vase?

He turns to look around and his elbow knocks a VASE from

the table. It BREAKS against the linoleum floor.

ORACLE

That vase.

...

NEO

How did you know...?

She sets the cookie tray on a wooden hot-pad.

ORACLE

What's really going to bake your

noodle later on is, would you

still have broken it if I hadn't

said anything.

I would interpret it to mean that 'nothing is permanent'. Everything is changing and so nothing is really important. We are just playing a role, the role of a boy, man, soldier ....whatever.

A higher level interpretation would be to not take life too seriously as its only a stage & we are mere players. However that is not a possible interpretation for the character Jaques who says the speech. He is chronically depressed and takes everything too seriously. So I think we can throw this interpretation out.

Answer 2

The first thing you have to know about "All the World's a Stage" is this:

It's not a poem.

It never was a poem.

It's actually a speech said by the character Jaques in William Shakespeare's play As You Like It, Act 2, Scene 7. And because it's a line, or set of lines from a play, it cannot be understood exclusively by using the techniques you would use to understand a poem, because although it is poetic, it takes its meaning from its context. If you had to explain the line "It's over there by the window", you would not approach it by looking for alliterations. You would want to know what the person is responding to.

OK. Jaques is a perennially depressed and pessimistic person. He is what people in Shakespeare's day called melancholic. He lives out in the bush with a number of other people who have been exiled from the town, including the former Duke of the town, Duke Senior, who has been usurped by his brother (shades of the Tempest here). The Duke, unlike Jaques, is upbeat about his situation, and he tries to cheer Jaques up by telling him that things could be worse. He uses the exiled Orlando, who has just showed up in their camp, as an example. The Duke says:

"Thou seest we are not all alone unhappy:

This wide and universal theatre

Presents more woeful pageants than the scene

Wherein we play in."

But this doesn't cut much with a man who can suck melancholy out of a love-song like a weasel sucks eggs. He finishes the line (remember, this is blank verse, ten syllables to the line, and "wherein we play in" has only five) with the first line of his response, "All the world's a stage". That means his response is immediate--there's no space for him to think up a fancy answer--and it goes something like this:

"You call the world a wide and universal theatre? Well all the world is a stage all right. We're all actors, we're all playing a part. We come in on cue, and leave on cue. And we all play the same stupid parts: infant, schoolboy, lover, soldier, justice, pantaloon. And in the end, brother, we all end up as nothing, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything, just waiting for death. So don't tell me not to be depressed."

Answer 3

People are only actors on the stage of life none with a purpose more than another, all with a role to play. Birth is our entrance to the stage of life, whilst death our exit. It also implies that nothing is permanent nor lasts forever.

Answer 4

It is not a poem; it is a speech from the play As You Like It by William Shakesepeare. To understand the subtext of the speech it helps to know that it is delivered by Jacques, a notoriously depressed and depressing courtier, in the midst of a conversation with Duke Senior, who has been deposed and is camping out in the forest of Arden. You should read the whole scene to get the context.

Answer 5

"All the world's a stage" is a famous line from Shakespeare's play "As You Like It," which was written around 1599-1600.

Answer 6

...from "As You Like It" written in 1599

Answer 7

William Shakespeare