The Seven Ages of Women
by Julia Sneden
An eon or two ago, one of my English teachers required us to memorize Jacques' "All the world’s a stage" speech from As You Like It by William Shakespeare. It begins:
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.
A Scene from As You Like It by Walter Deverell, 1853, oil on canvas. Private collection
It's a brilliant metaphor, from England's greatest dramatist. The Bard goes on to enumerate those acts, beginning with "... the infant, mewling and puking in the nurse's arms." Anyone who has ever held an unhappy, colicky baby knows the image to be true.
Next comes "... the whining schoolboy, with his satchel and shining morning face, creeping like a snail unwillingly to school." In our house, he'd have had to include the missing left sneaker, the forgotten lunch bag, the cardboard Social Studies project that was drooping before it even got out the door, and the missed bus.
The third age, Shakespeare calls "... the lover, sighing like a furnace, with a woeful ballad made to his mistress' eyebrow." These days any mother of a college student worries less about the "woeful ballad" and more about rap music, since its misogynistic lyrics are plenty full of woe for humankind, male or female. The furnace, however, still sighs, which bodes well for the future of the species.
After that we have a soldier, "full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard (leopard), jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel, seeking the bubble reputation even in the canon’s mouth." (Would that our soldiers at My Lai or Abu Ghraib had considered reputation).
"And then the justice, in fair round belly ... eyes severe ... full of wise saws and modern instances ..." as fine a description of middle-aged pomposity as has ever been written down.
"The sixth age shifts into the lean and slippered pantaloon (16th century slang for geezer) with spectacles on nose ... his youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide for his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice, turning again toward childish treble, pipes and whistles in his sound."
And last of all, "... is second childishness and mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything."
Shakespeare was, God knows, a fine describer, but it seems to me that he missed a couple of things: in the first place, the description notes what the world sees, but I’d bet my arthritic knees that his man still, on the inside, felt continuously like himself. Age brings changes of body and points of view, but the self, the essential me-ness, doesn't change, just as it doesn’t when a fine actor takes on a role in a play or movie.
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