Module/Film 7 – The Seven Ages of Man and Women
Given by Chris Astill-Smith D.O., Diplomate I.C.A.K. & Gill Farr Dip ASK, BA (Hons), MBA
William Shakespeare’s ‘As You Like It’, spoken by the melancholy Jaques. The speech compares the world to a stage and life to a play, and catalogues the seven stages of a man’s life: infant, schoolboy, lover, soldier, justice, pantaloon, and second childhood, “sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything”. Shakespeare means that the world is nothing but a theatrical stage where we humans are actors. From our birth we enter the stage and keep on acting true to our age, until old age when we act the last scene. It is one of Shakespeare’s most frequently-quoted passages.