"7 Ages of Man" from "As You Like It" (Nicholas Pennell)

Shakespeare's "7 Ages of Man" speech by the melancholy Jaques from the play "As You Like It". Jacques' famous lines about the Seven Ages Of Man which begin, "All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players," is performed here by Nicholas Pennell from the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, Ontario (1983 TV), filmed before a live audience. this clip begins with Orlando's line "Then but forbear your food a little while," (Act II, scene 7, line 125 of The Arden Edition) Andrew Gillies ... Orlando Mervyn Blake ... Adam William Needles ... Duke Senior Nicholas Pennell ... Jaques John Novak ... Amiens Commentary By Henry Norman Hudson: Such a division of human life into certain stages or epochs as Jaques makes, II, vii, 142-165, is found in Greek, Latin, and later Hebrew literature. In some Greek verses attributed to Solon, the life of man is divided into ten ages of seven years each. Proclus is said to have made the distribution into seven ages, "over each of which one of the seven planets was supposed to rule. . . . Hippocrates likewise divided the life of man into seven ages, but differs from Proclus in the number of years allotted to each period."-— Malone. Fourteen periods are given in the Mishna, the body of the 'Oral Law' of the Jews redacted in the third century; and in the Midrash, the Hebrew exposition of the Old Testament made between the sixth and twelfth centuries, the division is into seven periods. A poem upon the ten stages of life was written about the year 1150 by the great Hebrew scholar and exegete Abraham ben Meir ibn Ezra, the Rabbi ben Ezra of Browning's poem. In Arnold's Chronicle, a famous fifteenth century miscellany, is a chapter entitled "The vii Ages of Man living in the World." Henley thinks that Shakespeare took his hint for the famous passage from some of the pictorial representations of the theme which were popular in Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. But what Shakespeare found neither in old woodcuts nor in mediaeval lore are the terse expression, supreme artistry in description, and peculiar Jaques cynicism shown in the emphasis put upon the unlovely aspects of human life in each of the seven ages.