The story
In Shakespeare’s comedy The Merry Wives of Windsor, the boastful soldier Pistol asks Sir John Falstaff for money. Falstaff refuses. Pistol answers, “Why then the world’s mine oyster, which I with sword will open.”
The picture is a pearl. An oyster is shut tight, but pry one open and there may be a treasure inside. Pistol meant he would pry his fortune out of the world one way or another.
The line then lay mostly quiet for nearly two centuries. In 1809, an English translator of the French novel Gil Blas used the oyster image for the world—though the French original had no oyster in it at all.
From there the phrase took a sunnier turn. Instead of a world to be pried open by force, it came to mean a world full of chances, open to anyone ready to go after them. It is now a classic thing to say to graduates.
