What the sixth age shifts?

Answer 1

These words are clipped from the middle of Jaques' speech in Shakespeare's play As You Like It, Act 2 scene 7, sometimes known as the Seven Ages of Man, which begins with the words "All the world's a stage". The passage is as follows:

The sixth age shifts

Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,

With spectacles on nose and pouch on side

So far Jaques has painted the picture of a man consecutively as a baby, a kid going to school, a twenty-something young lover, a man at his physical prime, and a man comfortable in his middle-aged success, or if you like newly-born, then about aged ten, then about aged twenty, then about aged thirty, then about aged forty or fifty. You see where this is heading. Our next portrait, the sixth, is going to be of a man aged sixty or seventy.

"Pantaloon" is a character in the commedia dell'arte who is thin, elderly, rich and the butt of everyone's jokes. Our elderly man, the "sixth age", is like that.

So what does "the sixth age shifts" mean? Think of shifting gears in a car. As the man ages, he stops being the pompous, square-bearded justice of the fifth age and starts being the thin, ridiculous old man of the sixth as if he were changing gears.