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The line "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players." is not from a poem and is not said by a poet. It is from the play As You Like It by William Shakespeare, and is said by a chronically depressed aristocrat called Jaques. Jaques, along with the exiled Duke are camping out in the forest and biding their time. The Duke, in a vain effort to cheer Jaques up, points to some desperate folks who have just arrived at their camp and says that there are people on the stage of life who are worse off than he is. Rather than try to dispute this indisputable fact, Jaques riffs on the "stage of life" theme already introduced by the Duke, saying that people are just playing the parts laid out for them, which are mostly pretty depressing. But then, just about everything Jaques says is depressing.

Shakespeare liked having the people in his plays watch other people performing plays or talking about themselves as if they were actors all the time because he liked to mess with the minds of his audiences. On the one hand, in order to enjoy the play, we have to suspend our disbelief to imagine that the actors on stage are really in some forest, while on the other hand we know darn well they are really actors. Then he has the actors say "We're really actors, you know." while you are trying to believe that they are not, even though you know they are. Shakespeare does this all the time: he has Antonio in the Merchant of Venice say, "I hold the world but as a the world, Gratiano, a stage where every man must play a part, and mine a sad one." and Macbeth calls himself "a poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage" and King Lear calls the world "this stage of fools".

It's sort of like the way Shakespeare messes with us by having Rosalind, in the same play, pretend to be a boy, then as a boy pretend to be a girl to someone who thinks she's a boy. In Shakespeare's day, this scene would be even more mind-messing because the part of Rosalind would actually be played by a boy playing the part of a girl, disguised as a boy, pretending to be a girl.

But the real reason for this "All the world's a stage" speech is that Orlando has just left the camp to fetch his aged and exhausted retainer Adam. It would look silly for him to return immediately with Adam, so Shakespeare puts some distance between the events with this long speech. It's filler.

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Q: Why does the poet say the world is a stage in the poem all stages of a men?
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