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| It's a chessboard you maggot ... and don't forget it!!! |
I saw this image of a stage in Iceland on the Bing search homepage this morning as my newsfeed appeared on what looked to me as the stage area, and I couldn't help thinking about that old line of Shakespeare's, which I put in the search engine and ended up at Wikipedia to read about -
"All the world's a stage" is the phrase that begins a monologue from William Shakespeare's As You Like It, spoken by the melancholy Jaques in Act II Scene VII.
The speech compares the world to a stage and life to a play, and catalogues the seven stages of a man's life, sometimes referred to as the seven ages of man: infant, schoolboy, lover, soldier, justice, Pantalone and old age, facing imminent death.
It is one of Shakespeare's most frequently quoted passages.
The comparison of the world to a stage and people to actors long predated Shakespeare.
Richard Edwardes's play Damon and Pythias, written in the year Shakespeare was born, contains the lines, "Pythagoras said that this world was like a stage/Whereon many play their parts; the lookers-on, the sage".
When it was founded in 1599 Shakespeare's own theatre, The Globe, may have used the motto Totus mundus agit histrionem (All the world plays the actor), the Latin text of which is derived from a 12th-century treatise.
Ultimately the words derive from quod fere totus mundus exercet histrionem (because almost the whole world are actors) attributed to Petronius, a phrase which had wide circulation in England at the time.
In his own earlier work, The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare also had one of his main characters, Antonio, comparing the world to a stage:
I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano;
A stage where every man must play a part,
And mine a sad one.
— Act I, Scene I
In his work The Praise of Folly, first printed in 1511, Renaissance humanist Erasmus asks, "For what else is the life of man but a kind of play in which men in various costumes perform until the director motions them off the stage."
In his own earlier work, The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare also had one of his main characters, Antonio, comparing the world to a stage:
I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano;
A stage where every man must play a part,
And mine a sad one.
— Act I, Scene I
In his work The Praise of Folly, first printed in 1511, Renaissance humanist Erasmus asks, "For what else is the life of man but a kind of play in which men in various costumes perform until the director motions them off the stage."
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| R. Lee Ermey in the 'X-Files' |
I agree with Shakespeare that "All the world's a stage" in many ways when it comes to life in a metaphorical sense, but seeing the passing of R. Lee Ermey on that Bing stage pictured above and with me being a huge Kubrick fan, I couldn't help think that through the stage of the screen Kubrick was also telling us that yes, the world is a stage, but beware, because to some of those players it is also a deadly chessboard.
Ironically, Kubrick passed away in the month named after the god of war ... March.
And Lincoln was shot while watching a play.
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| DARK HOLLYWOOD T-Shirt from THC |
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| The eagles aren't what they seem either? |
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