All the World's a Stage

The purpose of human existence in life is often questioned through poetry. This notion is explored through a soliloquy “All the World’s a stage” deprived from the play As you like It, written by William Shakespeare. It explores the human emotions experienced through the various stages of life. Shakespeare expresses that the human being will go through being an infant, a schoolboy, a lover, a soldier, a justice, a soldier, a pantaloon and an old man. Through the use of metaphoric and figurative language, Shakespeare constructs the different stages of life that humans will experience and consequently, humans must learn to adapt to these changes and continue on with life.
“All the World’s a stage” was written in the Renaissance period, a time where social hierarchy became increasingly accepted, this let Shakespeare explore the humanity of every character regardless of their social position. Even monarch was shown to express human emotions with strengths as well as weaknesses. In this period, there was resurgence in Italian literature and art and the dominating customs and attitudes of Europe disappeared. Society started to question whether there was a God and many people questioned established beliefs about the place of the individual within the universe. Shakespeare explores the concept of the phases of life and existence in order to express that the purpose of life is to learn from past experiences and pass down these teachings to the next generations in order to create a world of tranquillity and harmony; however, this is not evident in the world today. This shows that humans don’t learn from past experiences and are more concerned about what they think