All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players.

The line is spoken by Jaques in William Shakespeare’s pastoral comedy *As You Like It*. In Act II, Scene VII, Jaques delivers a reflective monologue in the Forest of Arden, where the exiled Duke and his followers have taken refuge from court politics. Jaques, a melancholy observer of human behavior, uses the metaphor of theatrical performance to describe human life as a sequence of roles and entrances and exits. The speech—often called the “Seven Ages of Man” monologue—fits the play’s broader contrast between the artificiality of court life and the supposedly more “natural” life in the forest, while still emphasizing that social identity is performed wherever one lives.

Jaques’s metaphor suggests that human identity is not fixed but enacted: people “play” parts shaped by age, circumstance, and social expectation. The image of a stage implies both structure and transience—each person enters, performs, and exits, and the roles change over time. In the larger monologue, Shakespeare traces life from infancy to old age, underscoring the inevitability of aging and the fragility of worldly status. The line can be read as skeptical and even satirical: if life is performance, then ambition, romance, and honor may be costumes rather than essences. Yet it also offers a unifying vision of shared human experience across social ranks.

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.

All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players. (common modernized punctuation/capitalization)
All the world is a stage, and all the men and women merely players. (modernized “world’s” to “world is”)
All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women are merely players. (frequent paraphrase)