All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players” is a quote from William Shakespeare’s play As You Like It. The quote summarizes how people interact with each other in their daily lives.
The full quote is:
All the world’s 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
The quote suggests that people are like actors on a stage, with different entrances and exits. People enter the stage at birth and leave at death
What does Shakespeare mean in his quote “All the world’s 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”?
Those lines from As You Like It are an extended metaphor, but as with many things in Shakespeare, it works on multiple levels.
First, on a practical level, he’s letting Jacques wax poetic for a moment, which gives Orlando time to fetch Adam. It’s really just a narrative gimmick to avoid having the remaining characters stare at each other.
On a thematic level, he’s riffing on the duke’s comment about “more woeful pageants than the scene wherein we play,” which comes immediately before Jacques’s speech.
On a poetic level, the speech compares real life to a play, real people to actors, and real maturity to the development of a character. That’s the obvious interpretation of the metaphor.
Then it gets meta. Shakespeare, as he often does, reminds you from inside the play that you’re watching a play. The duke explicitly says he’s in a scene, which is true for the duke and for the actor playing him. As an audience member, you can look around you and nod and wink at your neighbors, because you’re all in on the joke. Breaking the fourth wall is always risky, but Shakespeare pulls it off. He’s just that good.
So you’re walking home from the theater, you remember this bit, and you start thinking, “Gee, you know, sometimes I feel like I’m in a play. As if I’m just faking it for the benefit of the people around me. Maybe I should stop pretending to be something I’m not… just like those people in the play!! Wow, I learned something today!”
And somewhere Shakespeare says, “You’re welcome.”
The meaning is pretty clear: it shows how Shakespeare saw the theater as a metaphor for life. And he’s right. He saw clearly that a person at 5 years old bears little resemblance to the middle aged man, and the middle aged man bears little resemblance to the man in decline, past the point of retirement. Each of these phases in life is so dramatically differently that it can be perceived as “playing a different part.”
This is not a surprising outlook from the man (Shakespeare) who wrote so profoundly about youth, middle age, and being elderly… as represented (for example) by Hamlet, Antony and Cleopatra, and King Lear, respectively.
The great monologue is interesting in another way. There is of course the great “Authorship” question, in which some have questioned whether he really wrote the plays attached to his name… or was he just a shill or “front” for the real writer, who wanted to remain anonymous.
But the points on the other side are amazing. One of them is that of all great writers who ever lived, Shakespeare alone seems to reserve his greatest respect for actors and the art of theater — not just USING actors effectively (all great playwrights do that) but writing ABOUT the profession of acting, which most writers have completely ignored.
Is it surprising, then, that this greatest of all writers was himself an actor and theater manager???
For example, in “Hamlet,” the company of players seem to be the only people around whom the title character respects.
In the monologue above from “As You Like It,” Shakespeare the writer shows that his respect for the art of acting is so great that he can easily see it as a metaphor for life.