the "All the world's a stage" is not that it characterizes the melancholy Jacques, but that it contains a lot of truth.

The different roles to be played in the world are already written out and predetermined. The individual has no choice but to play his or her part, just like an actor who is assigned to play a particular role. The infant has to act just like an infant, crying and eating and sleeping. The infant boy finds himself playing the role of a schoolboy, and he acts like a schoolboy is supposed to act, including creeping to school very reluctantly. Not all boys go through the soldier stage that Jacques describes, but those who become soldiers will look and act like soldiers. We all find ourselves playing different roles and trying to act the way we think people in those roles are supposed to act. When a man becomes a father, he tries to act like a father; and when a woman becomes a mother, she finds herself trying to act the way she thinks a mother is supposed to act. The world is a stage because there are only certain roles to be played and people try to fit into those roles. Even if they are rebellious, they end up playing the roles of rebels--drinking, swearing, smoking, using drugs, getting into trouble. In some cases they end up in prison, where they try to play the role of tough convicts. It is truly impressive and amusing to see how so many people seem to fit precisely into the roles they are playing. Professors act like professors. Cab drivers act like cab drivers. Waiters and waitresses look, stand, walk and talk like waiters and waitresses. Bus drivers certainly act like bus drivers--and, of course, cops always act like cops. If movies had existed, Jacques might have been made to say that all the world's a big motion-picture set and all the men and women are movie actors--some of them stars and some of them merely extras.

The meaning should start in context: this is a play in which people are playing parts (the actors, playing characters), and in which some characters are pretending to be others (living under false names, as men when they are women, etc.). Therefore, it is a statement that is already true: that's the world they are in.

However, on a deeper level, it is a cynical line: it says we all play roles, and that none of us are honest or sincere. We just pretend.

Going deeper still, it suggests there is an author behind us, a God perhaps, who writes us into being, and it recognizes how brief our lives are.

"Touchstone's comment that "from hour to hour we ripe and ripe,/ And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot" is a comic foreshadowing of Jaques' "Seven Ages of Man" speech at the end of this scene. Jaques' assertion that he laughed for a hour by Touchstone's dial is ironic, for again he did not realize that Touchstone was satirizing his philosophy."

"In his "Seven Ages of Man Speech" (II.vii.139-66), Jaques says, "All the world's a stage, / And all the men and women merely players" (II.vii.139-40). He seems to see nothing of lasting value in life because these players come and go; it would seem that one player is as good as another. About the stages humans pass through as they mature, he has nothing good to say: infants are "mewling" and "puking''; the schoolboy is ''whining''; lovers sigh melodramatically; the soldier fights for as inconsequential a thing as reputation; the judge is corpulent and self-indulgent; the aged man shrinks in his clothes and wheezes; and finally, near death, man becomes a child again with no teeth, failing eyesight, and a loss of appetite."

"All the world's a stage" is the first line of a monologue from William Shakespeare's play, As You Like It.  In this monologue, the character, Jacques, describes life as a stage on which men and woman are "merely players" during their lives.  One man plays "many parts" in his life that is divided into seven acts.

This monologue is an extended metaphor.  The seven acts are the "seven ages" of man with the first being infancy, then the schoolboy, followed by the lover "Sighing like a furnace."  After the lover, man plays the part of the soldier "Jealous in honor...Seeking the bubble reputation," then the

justice, in fair round belly with ...eyes severe and bear of formal cut,/Full of wise saws and modern instances

The sixth age "shifts/Into the lean and slippered pantaloon" as man ages and his manly voice changes again "toward chidish treble..." The "last scene" is the "second childishness and mere oblivion" in which man has lost teeth, eyes, taste--everything.

Understanding the meaning of what you're reciting is a very good idea!  It's hard to get the meaning across to your audience if you don't understand what you're saying.

The original character who speaks the speech, Jacques, is VERY cynical about life, and he is talking about the seven stages of a person's life.  Most often, we only hear the first part of the speech as it is quoted endlessly by theater/acting/drama buffs (like myself - I have a t-shirt with those first 4 lines on it!).  But the rest of the speech is what really tells us what Jacques is feeling about life.

We start out as puking babies, go through all the necessary stages of life, then end up just like babies again as old people - "Sans (without) teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything." (Act II, scene 7)

So re-think what you're saying in terms of explaining the stages of life to your audience.  It's not a sugary sweet speech - rather, it indicates a great deal of cynicism about the seven ages of man!  Good luck!

The soliloquy of Jacques in As You Like It is not symbolic but metaphorical. The extended metaphor has two main parts. In the first part he is saying that everybody in the world is an actor on a gigantic stage all at the same time. It is one vast stage production. Then in the second part Jacques focuses on one individual actor and declares that he has to play seven parts during his lifetime. He describes each of the roles every man must play, if he lives long enough, beginning as an infant, gradually becoming a boy, and so on inexorably until he reaches the last stage of all as a very old man ready to die.

What is intriguing about this soliloquy is that we recognize the truth in it. We remember various "roles" we played in our past and how we somehow seemed to be assigned new roles and learned to play them after feeling a little awkward in them at first. We recognize how we are often "playing a part" when we are at work or at a social gathering, and we realize that other people must be doing the same thing.

These "roles" or "parts" are now called "personas" by psychologists, and the term has become part of the common language. When are we really ourselves? Probably only when we are alone--if then. The rest of the time, to use T. S. Eliot's words, we "put on a face to meet the faces that we meet." Shakespeare, through his character Jacques, is telling an important truth about mankind and human society. What does "All the world's a stage" mean? It means that all the world's a stage.

Shakespeare uses an extended metaphor in his poem commonly referred to as "The Seven Ages of Man" from As You Like It.  Beginning with "All the world's a stage," the speaker compares the world to a stage and people to actors.  Throughout the poem, he uses the theatrical metaphor of "to describe the development of man as he grows from child to adult.  According to Shakespeare, "one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages."

"The Seven Ages of Man" also employs the use of simile.  The "whining schoolboy" is "creeping like a snail unwillingly to school."  A simile is a comparison of two unlike objects using 'like' or 'as.'  This figurative language device effectively depicts the schoolboy's reluctance at going to class through his slow sluglike pace.  Shakespeare uses simile again in the next comparison with the lover "sighing like a furnace;" the comparison suggests multiple meanings.  The sound of the sigh and also the fiery heat of the furnace is similar to the passion felt by the lover. 

Jaques of As You Like It by William Shakespeare employs the theatrical metaphor of "All the world's a stage" for his famous monologue.  This speech is, of course, an extended metaphor as the idea of people playing a role throughout life is carried througout the entire speech.  And, with this metaphor of the life as a stage, there is the underlying suggestion that fate plays a rather strong role in one's life and that one is not quite as independent as one imagines oneself.  In addition, while the individual takes so seriously his/her role, this role is yet merely entertainment for others as the audience in this theatre of life.

Within the metaphors of each stage of life there are other literary devices employed.  For instance, in the lines about the young boy, there are similes:

Then the whining school boy with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail

Likewise, in the description of the boy as he grows older there is also a simile:

And then the lover, sighing like furnace

So, too, is the soldier compared to a pard (an animal from Medieval bestiaries):

.....Then a soldier
Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard

In addition to the similes, Shakespeare employs much parallelism; for instance,

Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrelWith spectacles on nose, and pouch on side

Metaphor is in this line:

Seeking the bubble reputation

Personification follows in the next line:

Even in the cannon's mouth

The poetic devices, such as simile and metaphor and personification, help suggest the underlying meaning by providing vivid comparisons that are commonplace, common to everyone's experience, and humorously true and by creating vivid images that are easy to understand.