As You Like It, all the world’s a stage

William Shakespeare published 1599 447 characters medium

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 schoolboy, 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.

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About this text

This speech belongs to Jaques in As You Like It, a comedy written about 1599. The play was first printed in the collected Folio of 1623. The image of the world as a stage was already a common saying, and Shakespeare turned it into seven scenes. Project Gutenberg carries the complete plays.

Where this text comes fromThis is a set piece, delivered by a character who enjoys the sound of his own melancholy, and every listener on stage knows it. The image of life as a play was a commonplace long before 1599; what Shakespeare adds is the arithmetic, dividing it into seven and then walking through them in order. The version you copy comes from the collected Folio printed seven years after his death, which is the only source for this play and sets the speech as continuous lines.

What you might not noticeThree apostrophes appear in this short passage, and all three mark a possessive rather than an elision: world’s, nurse’s and the bare one after mistress. Source

What it trainsEight commas, two semicolons and three apostrophes in 447 characters, with three sentences averaging twenty-six words. The apostrophes are the awkward part because two of them sit inside a word, in world’s and nurse’s, while the third closes mistress with nothing after it. Thirteen capitals, ten of them opening a verse line rather than a sentence, so the little finger fires on the line break and not on the full stop. The longest word, Unwillingly, is eleven letters and carries a capital as well, so it needs the Shift and then ten letters typed without a pattern to lean on.

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Read the full text at the publisher: Project Gutenberg