All the world’s a stage,
and all the men and women merely players;
they have their exits and their entrances,
and one man in his time plays many parts,
his acts being seven stages.
based on this excerpt, what is the main idea of this poem?

the world is small, like a theater stage.
all plays should have seven acts.
life is like a play, and people play the same role throughout their lives.
life is like a play, and people play many different roles during their lives.

The correct answer is: "Life is like a play, and people play many different roles during their lives".

Explanation:

This passage was written by William Shakespeare (1564-1616) for the play As you like it. It is an excerpt from a monologue and compares the world and life to a stage in which players play their different roles going forth and back in their own time. It is highly known and most critics say that it is a picture of the modern world in which Shakespeare painted the idea of a performative world and life, and whose human beings are all just different players.

it was surely an odd creature that one made up by reading the historians first and the poets afterwards a worm winged like an eagle; the spirit of life and elegance and charm,   in a kitchen chopping up suet. but these creatures, monst'r however entertaining to the imagination, hast no existence in fact. what one might doth to bringeth h'r to life wast to bethink poetically and prosaically at one and the same moment,   thus keeping in toucheth with fact—that the lady is mrs martin, ag'd thirty-six, did dress in blue, wearing a black coxcomb and brown shoeth; but not losing sight of fiction eith'r—that the lady is a vessel in which all s'rts of spirits and f'rces art coursing and flashing p'rpetually. the moment, howev'r, yond one tries this method with the elizabethan mistress, one brancheth of illumination fails; one is did hold up by the scarcity of facts.   one knoweth nothing detailed, nothing p'rfectly true and substantial about h'r.   hist'ry scarcely mentions h'r.   and i did turn to professeth'r trevelyan again to seeth what hist'ry meanteth to that gent.   i hath found by looking at his chapt'r headings yond t meanteth.