Thursday, June 06, 2019

What about the seven ages of women?

When driving to work in the morning, I spotted a mother and child walking to the neighborhood school.  The tot who looked like a first-grader had a pink backpack on her, and was holding on to her mother's hand.

I wondered though if she was indeed holding her mother's hand, or if the mother was dragging her to school.

I was then reminded of Shakespeare's "All the world's a stage" soliloquy, in which the bard describes the whining schoolboy and his satchel.

But that got me thinking that the entire soliloquy is only about the boy/man.  Even though Shakespeare sets up the world as a stage where "all the men and women" are merely players.  After that set up, all he describes is the seven ages of man. Not of a woman.

When this revelation hit me, I could not understand how I had missed it all these years of talking and blogging about the world being a stage with all of us having our entrances and exits.  I wondered then whether girls and women have always sniggered at this soliloquy as nothing but a male's perspective.  And, even more, I wondered what the female equivalent might be.

I am confident that there exists in this world at least one such feminist take on this, with a soliloquy that describes the world as a stage in which a girl grows up into womanhood and then on to old age "Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything."

Here is Shakespeare describing the seven ages of "man":

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. At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
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. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything

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