Summary
This poem "All the world's a stage" is a realistic poem that has been composed by a renowned English poet William Shakespeare. The main theme of this poem is that man is the ultimate loser in the game of life. According to Shakespeare, the world is a stage and everyone is a player. He says that every man has seven stages during his lifetime. He performs different seven roles in his lifetime and finally exits from this worldly stage. The first stage of a man is childhood. He plays in the arms of his mother. He often vomits and cries in this stage. In his second stage, the man is an unwilling school going student. He becomes a lover in his third stage. He is very busy composing ballads for his beloved and yearns for her attention. In the fourth stage, he is aggressive and ambitious. He seeks reputation in all that he does. He is ready to guard his country and becomes a soldier. In his fifth stage, he becomes a fair judge with maturity and wisdom. In the sixth stage, he is seen with loose pantaloons and spectacles. His manly voice changes into a childish treble. The last stage of all is his second childhood. Slowly, he loses his faculties of sight, hearing, smell and taste and exits from the roles of his life. Thus, Shakespeare has presented the pictures of the seven stages of a man’s life in the poem ‘All the World’s a Stage.'