First Age: Infancy
Before the analysis proper of the various ages of a man’s life, Jaques offers a clever play on the word stage by claiming “All the world’s a stage” and continues the theater metaphor, stating, “And all the men and women merely players: / They have their exits and their entrances.”
Then focusing on “one man,” he asserts that this anyman may “play many parts” in the play. Each act of the man’s life is called an age and there are seven of them. Of course, the first age is infancy when the baby accomplishes nothing more than “Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.”
Second Age: School-Boy
The next period of a man’s life finds him a “whining school-boy.” The pessimism of this speaker becomes evident especially as he describes the “school-boy,” who goes to school “unwillingly” with his book bag, his “shining morning face,” no doubt scrubbed clean by his mother; his disdain for school is shown as he goes “creeping like a snail” in the school’s direction.
Third Age: The Lover
The lover’s character is no more pleasant than the “puking” infant and the reluctant school-boy, for his behavior resembles a “sighing” “furnace,” as he sings a “woeful ballad / Made to his mistress’ eyebrow.” His lack of inspiration is denoted by his focusing on such an inconsequential facial part.
Fourth Age: The Soldier
This age finds the man full of himself, seeking a reputation that is so easily burst like a “bubble.” He takes “strange oaths,” wears facial hair “like a pard.” He is “jealous in honour” and “sudden and quick in quarrel.” Jaques finds looking down the “cannon’s mouth” an unlikely place to solidify a reputation.
Fifth Age: The Justice
By the fifth age, the man is succumbing to the body change phenomenon known as “middle-age spread” with his “fair round belly.” His eyes are now “severe” and his beard trimmed and tamed, unlike the soldier’s scruffy beard. He is able to spout aphorisms full of wisdom, but again Jaques cannot take him seriously; he asserts that it is only “his part” in this play where “all the world’s a stage.”
Sixth Age: The Retiree
Chronological age has taken the man into a stage wherein he is hardly capable of maintaining his earlier activities. He has grown thin and can no longer fit into his clothes. He wears “spectacles on nose and pouch on side.” And as his body has “shrunk,” his voice that was “big” and “manly” now is “turning again toward childish treble.”
Seven Age: Second Childhood
The most pathetic of all is the man in his “second childishness,” for in this age, his final act, he is without teeth, eyes, taste, nay, without “everything.” Demonstrating his French, Jaques uses the French term “sans” to state all those things the age seven man is “without”: “Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”
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