Life’s rich pageant/tapestry

Origin of: Life’s rich pageant/tapestry

Life’s rich pageant/tapestry

Usually in the form of ‘all part of life’s rich pageant’ and often used ironically to indicate that something is actually mundane or dull. Sometimes, the word tapestry is substituted for pageant. One would expect that it might have come from Shakespeare or some other great literary mind, but Nigel Rees and others attribute it to the writer, broadcaster and raconteur, Arthur Marshall (1910-1989), who appeared regularly in the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) TV series Call My Bluff. Marshall is said to have coined the expression in 1935. Life’s Rich Pageant was the title of his biography published in 1984. One wonders, however, whether Shakespeare was indeed the inspiration for the expression. Prospero in The Tempest, Act IV, Scene I, muses on the fleeting nature of life as an “insubstantial pageant”.