discusses a certain courtier’s beard, which he
claims is the cause for a quarrel seven times
removed. The seven instances are the ‘‘Retort
Courteous,’’ the ‘‘Quip Modest,’’ the ‘‘Reply
Churlish,’’ the ‘‘Reproof Valiant,’’ the ‘‘Counter-
check Quarrelsome,’’ the ‘‘Lie Circumstantial,’’
and finally the ‘‘Lie Direct.’’ Entertained by this
story, Jaques does not realize its application to his
own speech. Touchstone provides seven
responses, but Jaques fails to see the connection.
Garber notes that Jaques ‘‘is not instructed’’ by
Touchstone’s speech. He does not see his own
failings, largely because he is so focused on the
failings of others. Nor does Jaques see that even
the fool Touchstone does not respect him. In the
final lines of ‘‘Seven Ages of Man,’’ Jaques says
that at the end of life man is ‘‘Sans teeth, sans eyes,
sans taste, sans everything.’’ But he is wrong. As
Jaques finishes this speech, Orlando enters, carry-
ing Adam, an elderly servant. In contrast to
Jaques’s speech, Adam is not without everything.
He may not have his teeth or his hearing, but he is
respected and venerated as a wise elder and cared
forlovinglyinhisoldage.
All that Jaques says in ‘‘Seven Ages of Man’’
is refuted by either the characters in the play or
by his own melancholic musings. As Rosalind
makes clear, Jaques has learned nothing. His
many experiences have not left him any the
wiser. Jaques asserts stock phrases and common-
place platitudes. ‘‘Seven Ages of Man’’ offers
nothing new and original to the audience, but it
does reveal the sadness that is Jaques’s life.
Source:Sheri Metzger Karmiol, Critical Essay on ‘‘Seven
Ages of Man,’’ inPoetry for Students, Gale, Cengage
Learning, 2010.
Danijela Kambaskovic-Sawers
In the following essay, Kambaskovic-Sawers
examines several of Shakespeare’s sonnets and
discusses the use of voice and the possibility of an
overarching story arc throughout the whole of all
the sonnets.
The nature of a sonnet sequence as a poetic
art form is essentially twofold: it contains self-
sufficient, prosodically complex poems, each
seeking to develop an idea to its conclusion;
but it also typically functions as a sequence, an
integrated work in which poems have been
ordered, and characters fashioned, to make
sense when the work is read from beginning to
end. It seems hardly necessary to point this out;
yet, while the sonnets of the Petrarchan dis-
course receive what appears to be continuous
critical attention, acknowledgment of their
‘‘sequentiality’’ is rare and at best tacit. There is
a need to turn critical attention to mechanisms
that sonneteers employ to foster a perception of
cohesion, as well as to acknowledge that such
preoccupations betray the presence of novelistic
thinking.
The sonnet sequence genre constructs a dou-
ble sense of immediacy: drawing on the lyricism
of its constituent sonnets, it also often generates
a perception of a personal narrative when the
sequence is read from beginning to end. Sonnet-
eers use many speaker figures or voices in the
sonnets that constitute a sequence; one of the
more striking examples is certainly Petrarch’s
giving of the first-person-plural voice to ‘‘little
animals’’ in his Sonnet 8. Yet varied uses of voice
in individual sonnets detract little, if at all, from
the impression created in the mind of the reader
that they are reading a love story told in the first
person. The disjointed nature of the sonnet
sequence ‘‘voice’’ is an important part of its
effect. Thus, talking about the birth of the
sonnet sequence vogue, Jacques Barzun writes:
‘‘[Petrarch] fashioned into a shapely quasi narra-
tive work, a kind of allusive autobiography...
Sonnet sequences like Petrarch’s or Shake-
speare’s make possible a narrative-by-episode;
the poet need not versify any connective matter
as he must in an epic. Rather, he anticipates by
five or six hundred years the technique of film
and television’’; and Roland Greene considers
the history of Petrarchism from the fourteenth
to the twentieth century representative of the
staged development of the sequences ‘‘fictional’’
mode. As such, it is a rare literary genre to offer
first-person fictions to the medieval and early
modern reader, and for a long time the onlySHAKESPEARE’S FOCUS ON THE IMPACT OF
REAL RELATIONSHIPS, SUPERIMPOSED ON THE
PETRARCHAN POETICS OF UNSATISFIED DESIRE,
REPRESENTS A GENUINE DEVELOPMENT IN THE
HISTORY OF FIRST-PERSON SPEECH IN THE SONNET
SEQUENCE GENRE.’’Seven Ages of Man