ABSTRACT
The word world is built out of two sturdy lexical legs. The first, wer, refers to man; the second, ald, to an age or epoch. Shakespeare’s Jacques famously informs that “All the world is a stage,” and if that is so, it stands to reason that “all the stage can be a world” as well. Heidegger would often take the word world and turn it into a verb; explaining, in a language somewhere between philosophy and poetry, that, “the world worlds,” or, “It worlds.” Perhaps the greatest of world builders is Shakespeare. For Shakespeare, all meaning grows out of the play between basic opposites. The characters of Shakespeare all exist in the same worlds, they may each deal with the demands of that world differently but they are all responding to the same atmosphere, stimuli, and realities that are made manifest by the world at hand.
