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Jaques

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What separates an infant from an adult? Both are human and both require the same basic needs: food, water, and shelter. Shakespeare’s character Jaques attempts to define the different stages of humankind in his speech mainly by focusing on observable facts. While an infant is, in theory, the same as an adult, Jaques notes that an infant is “mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms,” while an adult is described as having a “fair round belly. . . eyes severe, and beard of formal cut full of wise saws.” In this speech describing the “Seven Ages of Man”, while no clear age group is given for each characterization in his descriptions an age range can be placed to each physical description and actions. The audience can assign an age to each description with relative ease; be that as it may, each individual may pass through stages at different times or not at all. Because all the stages are mainly established based on physical attributes, it makes it easy to see how much we as humans value outward appearance. While physical …show more content…

The main difference between my stages and Jaques’s is that someone who lives a long life may still never reach my final stage. As opposed to Jaques’s stages, while someone may skip some stages in between, if a person lives a long life they will always play the part of “second childishness and mere oblivion.” In my stages, it is possible to move forward and backward between the stages and even be stuck in one forever. While this may discredit my system to some, the cogency of my stages relies more on unobservable, metaphysical characteristics as opposed to Jaques. What makes humans unique compared to our fellow animals is our ability to think and reason. It is that uniqueness that forms the core of my stages, differing from Jaques stages that are also observable in even the most basic of

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