All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players.

This line is authentically Shakespeare's: it opens Jaques's celebrated "Seven Ages of Man" speech in As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII, a play written around 1599 and preserved in the 1623 First Folio compiled by Shakespeare's fellow actors John Heminges and Henry Condell. The exact wording is traceable to the primary dramatic text and is reproduced faithfully in every canonical edition, from the First Folio to the modern Arden, Oxford, and Folger texts. It is worth noting that the metaphor of the world as a stage was a Renaissance commonplace — echoed in the Latin tag totus mundus agit histrionem long associated with the Globe Theatre — so the underlying idea was not Shakespeare's invention; but this specific formulation is his own composition, and no reputable source proposes a competing author or an earlier instance of these particular verses. Because the words are spoken by a character rather than in Shakespeare's personal voice, some readers ask whether the attribution is proper, but for quote purposes the line is securely sourced to his authored work. The attribution is verified.