Shakespeare’s Macbeth, As You Like It, and all the world’s a stage

If brevity is the soul of wit, Macbeth’s might be the superior statement of the futility of our existence, an entire philosophy contained in a few simple lines, but the overall meaning couldn’t be more different.  It’s as if each speech is itself a prism, and the meaning reflected is based on the direction of the light.

Shakespeare describes the world as a stage and the men and women that inhabit it as mere players in two different monologues in two wildly different plays.  As You Like It, which appeared first in 1599, is a pastoral comedy about love and forgiveness in an almost enchanted forest, where the characters discover themselves free from the constraints of the court and perhaps even time itself.  Macbeth, which followed about seven years later, is a brutal, unrelenting tragedy about a hero who transforms himself into a villain after murdering his rightful king, trapping himself in a web of treachery and deceit.  Both, however, contain a remarkably similar passage, almost as if Shakespeare plagiarized himself.  In As You Like It, Jaques is prompted to the remark in the middle of the play upon learning of Orlando, who has fled from the wrath of his older brother, and who seeks to save the life of his trusted servant after traveling a rough distance in the woods.  Jaques’ lord, Duke Senior, also banished to the forest by his brother, who has usurped his kingdom in his absence, holds a kind of quasi court in exile and offers to help Orlando, noting that “Thou seest we are not all alone unhappy:  This wide and universal theatre Presents more woeful pageants than the scene Wherein we play in.”  Jaques, a melancholy, enigmatic soul responds with one of the most famous phrases in all of literature:

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.
And then the whining school-boy, 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 slipper’d 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.

Macbeth, in contrast, is prompted to a similar analogy by the death of his wife rather than any specific reference to the theater.  He hears the crying of women off screen in Act 5, Scene 5, towards the end of the play, when the walls are closing in around him in the form of a forest of disguised soldiers on the march, and asks his sexton, “Wherefore was that cry?”  The sexton informs him, “The Queen, my lord, is dead.”  Macbeth then unleashes an equally famous and notably similar passage, though one turned to much darker purpose:

She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

The two speeches, taken in isolation, have more in common than simply the analogy of the world as a stage.  Both are about the passage of time, and how we as mortal beings are bound and buffeted by the years, doomed to oblivion no matter who we are or what we do.  On the surface at least, Jaques’ speech isn’t nearly as dark or dire, pithily describing the different stages of life as we age.  There is a gentle humor in the details he trumpets.  The school boy who dreads his classes, heading to school slower than a snail.  The young lover who writes poems about a woman’s eyebrow.  The soldier, willing to throw his life away on a useless cause so someone says something nice about them after they’re gone.  The middle aged man with a belly full of food, contented about his place in life, before the descent into old age, that “second childishness and mere oblivion.”  There is no doubt, however, that the end is equally dark in both cases, “Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”  The absence of everything is nothing, creating an inescapable equivalence between the ultimate conclusions of the two speeches.  Macbeth, meanwhile, remains briefer and far more nihilistic throughout apart from any similarities.  He makes the same claim about how we spend our days on “The way to dusty death,” but finds no joy or meaning in it.  The player in his view is “poor,” and he doesn’t perform anything worthwhile, much less gently humorous.  Instead, he “struts and frets” before being completely silenced, anything he might have said beforehand was useless anyway, being “Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.” If brevity is the soul of wit, we might consider Macbeth’s the superior statement of the futility of our existence, an entire philosophy contained in a few simple lines, but beyond the immediate parallels in content, their overall meaning in the context of each play couldn’t be more different.  It’s as if each speech is itself a prism, and the meaning reflected is based on the direction of the light.

In Macbeth’s universe, there is little light to begin with outside of the opening sequence.  He starts the play as a hero, victorious in battle for his king, but then he encounters three witches who inform him that he will play the role of king himself one day.  Not content to let history take its natural course, Macbeth and his wife plan and execute the murder of the king themselves, seizing the throne after a bloody murder that prompts even more death and destruction.  The tension between the witches’ prophecy and Macbeth’s own choices prompt questions about the nature of freewill, and how some actions, once taken, necessarily lead to an evil we cannot escape, but the play also touches upon our place in the world, how we present ourselves to others versus how we think about ourselves, and the ongoing interplay between our inner and outer selves.  From that vantage, Macbeth might get to play at king for a while, but the events put in motion by the original murder ultimately lead to his undoing.  Throughout it all, however, he doesn’t question his own guilt in the matter, accepting the prophecy about the role he will play at face value without really considering that it was his own bloody work that made the prophecy real in the first place.  He plays the role, but was blind to the implications, either whether it was a role suited – much less destined for him – or what the consequences of donning the crown might be.  Whatever the case, the role that Macbeth was either prophesied or has chosen to play begins a chain of events he cannot escape.  When he claims that life is a “tale told by an idiot,” the statement can directly be applied to the witches’ initial prophecy and his failure to understand the nature of freewill.  He believed the role of king was meaningful and well-suited to him, as well as the role of queen for his wife, but by obtaining it with a heinous crime, he finds no joy in it, only suffering and more death.  Thus, he rejects the idea that anything can have meaning at all, rationalizing his own bloody choices into a statement about the state of the universe itself.  Putting this another way, he is utterly incapable of seeing himself for who he really is – a monster of ambition, and reflexive avarice – whatever role he plays, raging against the world until the very end and self-rationalizing his own flaws. 

As You Like It, in contrast, is a much more light-hearted affair, filled with far more light than darkness.  Rosalind and Celia both relish their fake identities, the roles they play after leaving the court, free for a while from the cares of nobility and the power struggles of their parents.  The court, in their world, is a complicated place, filled with shifting dynamics and endless constraints.  Though they are best friends, Celia’s father, Duke Frederick, has usurped the role of Rosalind’s father, Duke Senior.  Rosalind herself is essentially a hostage, likely to be married for political reasons.  Celia is treated little better even as the rightful daughter.  The Forest of Arden, however, gives them the freedom to play at something entirely different.  Celia becomes Alieana, a young woman of no means.  Rosalind becomes something even more radical:  A boy, Ganymede.  Orlando doesn’t don a disguise or literally play a different role, but he has fled there as well and discovers kindness he didn’t believe existed in this world, not even in his own family.  All of them discover love, and in one of Shakespeare’s most clever and touching sequences, Rosalind, in disguise, teaches Orlando some of the tricks of the trade, turning him into a more ideal suitor for herself.  Unlike Macbeth, she both perceives the role she is playing and uses it to her advantage.  First, she teases him, telling him that “there is no true lover in the forest; else sighing every minute and groaning every hour would detect the lazy foot of Time as well as a clock.”  (Note the repeated references to the passage of time, the yesterday’s lighting fools the way to dusty death, reimagined as a refuge where time moves at lover’s pace.) She explains that her uncle taught her courtly manners and fell in love, playing her role as a boy throughout.  Her uncle was “one that knew courtship too well, for there he fell in love. I have heard him read many lectures against it, and I thank God I am not a woman, to be touched with so many giddy offences as he hath generally taxed their whole sex withal.”  Orlando asks what these offenses are, “the principal evils that he laid to the charge of women?” and Rosalind insists there are so many, “they were all like one another as half-pence are, every one fault seeming monstrous till his fellow fault came to match it.”  She continues by pretending she has no idea who Orlando is, or that he is the one who has been putting up signs all over the forest about how much he is in love with Rosalind.  “There is a man haunts the forest, that abuses our young plants with carving ‘Rosalind’ on their barks; hangs odes upon hawthorns and elegies on brambles, all, forsooth, deifying the name of Rosalind: if I could meet that fancy-monger I would give him some good counsel.”

Further, she insists that Orlando bears none of the hallmarks of love, not the “lean cheek,” “sunken” eye, “neglected” beard, or disheveled clothes.  Instead, he appears to love only himself.  Orlando protests, asking what he must do to convince her – as a he, in this case – that he’s truly in love.  “Me believe it! you may as soon make her that you love believe it; which, I warrant, she is apter to do than to confess she does: that is one of the points in the which women still give the lie to their consciences.”  She continues, love “is merely a madness, and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do: and the reason why they are not so punished and cured is, that the lunacy is so ordinary that the whippers are in love too. Yet I profess curing it by counsel.”  Orlando says he will not be cured, but what would she (he) do if he could be?  “I would cure you, if you would but call me Rosalind and come every day to my cote and woo me.”  The two set off together in a gender-bending romance that is equal parts oddly progressive in the role swapping, regressive in the sense that this is romantic, courtly love of the purest kind, and ridiculous, like something straight out of a modern sitcom considering Orlando can’t easily recognize Rosalind dressed up as a boy, but such is the magic of the Forest of Arden.  The gender bending of the role, echoes the idea that the world is a stage:  In Shakespeare’s day, Rosalind would be played by a boy, who disguises himself as a woman for the play.  In the play, the woman disguises herself as a man, and in yet another twist, there is a sequence where the boy Rosalind, dresses up as a girl, meaning a man plays a woman pretending to be a man who pretends to be a woman.  These are roles within roles, metaphors for how we present ourselves to the world within metaphors.  Objectively, it is also deceit and deception, but somehow, none of that matters in the service of love, and in that regard, As You Like it has no shortage of love to go around.  Rosalind and Orlando are joined by three other couples in marriage.  Celia finds completely unexpected love in Orlando’s brother, Oliver who has been transformed offscreen and no longer seeks to kill Orlando.  Rosalind helps untangle two relationships gone astray, Silvius and Phebe, and Touchstone and Audrey, who have each been wooing their opposites.  Familial love even prevails between the Duke and his brother when the usurper begs forgiveness and invites everyone back to the court.  It seems that only melancholy Jaques is alone at the end, preferring a life of solitude in the forest.  Ironically, Jaques delivers the famous monologue, but fails to appreciate the implications. Instead, he reads it too much like Macbeth, not realizing that these different roles we play are essentially what makes life worth living in the first place.

Crucially, however, the various roles that Rosalind and others take on throughout As You Like It are in service of what the characters truly want in the first place.  Rosalind teases and courts Orlando as a boy, knowing that she loves him as truly as he loves her, and with the goal of marrying him.  The roles are therefore in service to both a higher purpose and their inner well being.  In other words, Rosalind never loses sight of who she is while Macbeth never has any idea who he is.  (Hamlet similarly struggles with his own identity before finding it in the final act of the play.) He is buffeted by either fate or his own demons, pursuing a throne he might not want in the first place, playing a role that was never his.  Rosalind plays a role that is not her, but remains herself throughout.  The contrast between the two fundamentally changes the meaning of the speeches, transforming light into darkness or darkness into light depending on your perspective.  While it is true that all of us have to play various roles in our life, though rarely as dramatically as changing our sex, the purpose of the role we take on and who we remain underneath matters, not simply the fact that we have taken it on.  The right role can serve a purpose – bringing people together, consoling a friend or loved one, resolving disputes, facilitating forgiveness, providing support or guidance, and more – and if that purpose is just, the deceit involved in the role can also be just and likely forgiven by those that were deceived.  The wrong role, however, played for the wrong reasons threatens to fundamentally alter the player, driving them down a path from which they cannot escape.  The best we can do is to choose our own roles wisely and play them for the right reasons. Shakespeare, of course, does not illuminate which is which, anymore than the explorer tells us how to feel about the distant mountain. As always, it is up for us to decide.