Before Jaques goes into the actual ages of a man’s life, he offers a clever play on the word by claiming “All the world’s a stage” and continues the metaphor with “And all the men and women merely players: / They have their exits and entrances”.
He then focuses on “one man”, and that this anyman may “play many parts” throughout the play. There are seven ages of which a man goes through. The first age starts off with infancy, where the baby can do nothing more than “Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms”/
During the next period of his life, he finds himself a “whining school-boy”. The pessimism in the reader’s tone suggests that the “school-boy” who goes to school “unwillingly” with his book bag his “shining morning face”, no doubt scrubbed by his mother; is clearly his own disdain for school and thus the “creeping like a snail”/
The lover’s stage is no more pleasant than the “puking” infant or relocation school-boy, for his behavior resembled a “sighing” “furnace” while he sings a “woeful ballad / Made to his mistress’ eyebrow”. The focus and detail on such an inconsequential facial part reinforces the author’s lack of inspiration. The next age finds the man full of himself: seeking for a reputation that is burst like a “bubble”. He conforms to doings such as oaths and facial hair “like a pard”. He is jealous in honour” and “sudden and quick in quarrel”. For solidifying a reputation, looking down the cannon’s mouth doesn’t do it for him.
By the fifth age, he is succumbing to a body change phenomenon, the “middle-age spread” with his “fair round belly”/ With his eyes severe” and his beard trimmed and tamed, he is able to spout aphorisms full of wisdom, much in contrast to the soldier’s scruffy beard. Despite the change, Jaques is still unable to view the situation seriously, asserting that it is only “his party” in this play where “all the world’s a stage”. The sixth and chronological age has taken the man into a stage where earlier activities prove to be a task. His body has “shrunk” and thus, he can no longer fit into his clothes. He wears “spectacles on nose and pouch on side” while the voice that was once “big” and “manly” is now “turning again toward childish treble”.
The most pathetic, and there last age, is his “second childishness”/ During this final act, he is but without teeth eyes, taste or rather, without “everything”. Demonstrating his strength, Jaques uses the term “sans” to state all those things the seventh age is “without”: “Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything”.
