Seven Ages of Man, with exceptions June 17, 2007
I think AS YOU LIKE IT is my favourite book. Not just for the backdrop of the forest, the role playing, the dipping in and out of characters and genders, the wrestling match, the marriages and the return in happiness ‘home’... but in particular for the keynote speech about the ages of man : infant, school-boy, lover, soldier, justice, pantaloon, and finally, second childhood. Shakespeare means that the world is but a theatrical stage where we humans are actors. From our birth we parade this stage and keep on acting true to our age, until old age which becomes our last scene…
“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,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms;
Then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lin’d,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well sav’d, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion;
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”
— Jaques (Act II, Scene VII, lines 139–166)
Shakespeare’s men and women did not live as long as us. With longer lives and all the information at hand (internet etc.) about getting value for money and buying us time, can we better control and shape our destinies and performances on the stage?
Today is father’s Day. I have my first ever card – from Ava. I have “waited” until my forties to have a first child. In William’s day I would more likely have conceived when the ‘lover’ or the ‘soldier’ “seeking the bubble reputation”. Perhaps that is where I am indeed at in the great sequence but back then with life expectancy maybe 50 and not 80 the lover/soldier period was surely when you were in your twenties. I am 45.
p.s. Happy birthday Sally, 35???
