All the world's a stage

"All the world's a stage" is the phrase that begins a monologue from William Shakespeare's pastoral comedy As You Like It, spoken by the melancholy Jaques in Act II Scene VII Line 139. The speech compares the world to a stage and life to a play and catalogues the seven stages of a man's life, sometimes referred to as the eight ages of man. Text Origins World as a stage The comparison of the world to a stage and people to actors long predated Shakespeare. Richard Edwards' play Damon and Pythias, written in the year Shakespeare was born, contains the lines, "Pythagoras said that this world was like a stage / Whereon many play their parts; the lookers-on, the sage". When it was founded in 1599 Shakespeare's own theatre, The Globe, may have used the motto (All the world plays the actor), the Latin text of which is derived from a 12th-century treatise. Ultimately the words derive from (because almost the whole world are actors) attributed to Petronius, a phrase which had wide circulation in England at the time.