Shakespeare: All World's A Stage

So let's see, let's see. To tell this story we need appropriate
actors, plot, prop, script -- Ah! What kind?
I'd pick a musical. Not the tragic, nor the comedy. One too morbid, the other too insouciant.
I'd rather
be stabbed at the back, only to burst out singing about the agony.
The beginning is a little hard.
A moment of silence please -
How about the epic: grand story about royal lineage, the beings before the being
the beings that are background of being, culmination being the being?
No.
It should be in medias res -- in the middle of something --
so that the audience is plunged straight to the middle of something, where the real beginning was over and long gone.
Since, isn't it that way we are plunged into being, cast into the light of existence,
the beginning remains something distant, that should not be pried open, lest the evils leak out and Hope is found never at the bottom all along.
After that, the mundane seven ages of Man; oh, the chorus of sighs!
Let's skip the infant and the school-boy;
Jump to the lover, for love is a source of sorrow, and love is a lot to sing about.
Very simple -- plot is usually about love or the lack of it. Done!
Then comes the soldier and the justice. The ages of paradox.
Look at Justitia and her blindfold.¹
The impartial, yet unaimed swing of a sword; the balanced, but unsighted scales.
It is really no wonder that Man,
torn apart between contradictions of his own making,
shifts to the sixth stage, the pantaloon.
Conflict escalated, climax reached, then running out of steam.
Ready to be catapulted back to the beginning that was not really there?
The seventh stage, the oblivion - wait
(Could we please invoke deus ex machina?)

¹Miller, William. Eye for an Eye, page 1 (Cambridge University Press, 2006)