What Jaques is in Shakespeare's pages most people know. In the very
first reference made to him he is described as 'melancholy,' and as
'weeping and commenting' upon a stricken deer. He has 'sullen fits,' we
read. He himself tells us he 'can suck melancholy out of a song.' He
protests that the banished Duke is 'too disputable' for him--that he
(Jaques) thinks of as many matters, but makes no boast of them. The
Duke, on his side, speaks of Jaques as 'compact of jars' (made up of
discords), and when Jaques offers to 'cleanse the foul body of the
infected world,' retorts on him that it would be a case of 'most
mischievous foul sin chiding sin,' Jaques having been himself a
notorious evil liver. To Orlando Jaques suggests that they should rail
at the world and their misery, while to Rosalind he confesses that he
loves melancholy better than laughing. ''Tis good to be sad and say
nothing.' He has, he says, a melancholy of his own, the result of his
experience and reflection, which wraps him in a most humorous sadness.
Jaques, in fact, is a rake turned cynical philosopher. He regards man
and nature as only so much material for observation and for moralizing.
Such is the Jaques of 'As You Like It'--a purely original creation,
embodying a familiar type of humanity, but nevertheless not good enough
for certain of Shakespeare's successors in the dramatic art. Jaques has
more than once been revised and edited, in common with other characters
in the sylvan comedy. He did not quite satisfy the fastidious taste of
Mr. Charles Johnson, the ingenious author of 'The Country Lasses' and
other pieces, who, as was said with more point than truth, was 'famous
for writing a play every year and being at Button's coffee-house every
day.' Still less did Shakespeare's Jaques commend himself to the 'J.
C.' who was so kind as not merely to adapt 'As You Like It,' but to
elaborate and paraphrase it. Nor did the 'melancholy' one prove
acceptable even to the judgment of Georges Sand, when that intellectual
lady set to work to 'arrange' the play for the French stage.
Shakespeare, it appeared to all these writers, had perpetrated an
unaccountable mistake. He had failed to make Jaques pair off with Celia.
That charming maiden is handed over to the converted Oliver, while
Jaques goes off to study the humours of the repentant Duke. Happy
thought! Transform Jaques and Celia into a species of minor Benedick and
Beatrice, and marry them in the end!
Mr. Charles Johnson adopted this idea almost literally. His 'Love in a
Forest'--brought out at Drury Lane in 1723--is 'As You Like it' cut down
and altered, with scraps from 'Much Ado About Nothing,' 'Love's Labour's
Lost,' and other Shakespearean pieces, introduced at various points, the
whole welded together by means of wondrous emanations from the
compiler's fancy. To Jaques are assigned a number of lines spoken
elsewhere by Benedick or by Biron. We have the well-known gibing scene
between Jaques and Orlando up to a certain stage, when, commenting on
Jaques' questions about Rosalind, Orlando says: 'But why are you so
curious?--you who are an obstinate heretic in the despight of beauty and
the whole female world?' Then Jaques replies to this speech, which
belongs to Don Pedro in 'Much Ado,' in the familiar words of Benedick in
that play, asserting that he will 'live a bachelor,' and that if ever he
breaks that vow his friends may put round his neck the legend, 'Here you
may see Jaques, the married man.' At this juncture Rosalind and Celia
appear, and, while Rosalind as Ganymede has her first colloquy with
Orlando, 'Jaques talks with Celia--they walk in another glade of the
forest.' When they return it is at once evident that Jaques' celibate
intentions have already been shaken. He calls the lady 'destructively
handsome,' and says his heart 'gallops away in her praise most
dangerously.' She avers he will be in love if he does not take heed, and
he says, 'I doubt so--yet I hope not.' A moment or two after, encouraged
and fired by her words, he asks her plump to marry him, and she promises
so to do, 'two years hence, if my brother Ganymede consents.' Then he
admits, in soliloquy, that he is 'in love, horribly in love,' his
spirits 'caught at last by a pair of bugle eyeballs and a cheek of
cream.' And then come more quotations from Benedick, as well as an
annexation of Touchstone's remark about the honourableness of the
forehead of a married man. Celia by-and-by confesses to Rosalind that
'her heart doth incline a little to the philosopher,' whose love, she
allows, 'does not sit easy upon him,' but whose words are 'full of
sincerity.' Still later Jaques comes to Rosalind for her approval of the
match, speaking this time in language used by Biron. She, however,
refuses, declaring that he cannot be polished into a modern husband; and
he retires disconsolate. But with Orlando he is more successful. He is
promised that Ganymede shall give way, and that his wedding shall take
place to-morrow. And so all ends happily.
The 'J. C.' who, in 1739, published 'The Modern Receipt, or a Cure for
Love,' as 'altered from Shakespeare,' went much farther than Johnson in
the way of embellishing the unhappy poet. He used his lines
occasionally, but in general either turned them into prose or expanded
them beyond all recognition. Virtually he supplies a comedy based, only,
on 'As You Like It.' Even the names of the characters are changed.
Jaques now figures as Marcellus, 'a sullen, morose lord, a great
woman-hater, but at length in love with Julia'--the Julia being, of
course, Celia. He is described by a shepherd as 'a melancholy sort of
fellow,' who 'reads much, thinks more, eats little, sleeps little, and
speaks least of all. And if he sees a woman he runs away, shuts himself
up in his cave, and prays for an hour or two after.' Julia, hearing
this, cries: 'Oh, the brute! I'm resolved to take a revenge upon him in
behalf of the whole sex.' Jaques, on his part, is struck by Julia's
charms as soon as he beholds them--'What can this mean? I'm wondrous ill
o' the sudden'--and is fain to sit down, lest he should fall. In the
scene which follows there is a great war of words. The lady talks,
purposely, at an agonizing speed, and the gentleman roundly tells her
that he would rather have her room than her company. At last the wrangle
is interrupted, and Julia, as a parting shot, calls Marcellus 'a bear in
breeches.' He himself is inclined, after all, to think her 'something
more than the rest of her detested sex--some being, perhaps, of a
superior order.' He praises her gay innocence and noble simplicity.
Julia, on her side, 'prays Heaven that she is not in love with the
brute,' but is afraid she must be. Then there is a scene in which, by
way of drawing him on, she pretends to love him, but afterwards says
that she was mocking him, and so covers him with confusion.
Nevertheless, he is not cured. He is still her slave, and, as he says,
what is love 'but an epidemic disease, and what all the world has, at
one time or other, been troubled with as well as myself? Why should I
endeavour to curb a passion the greatest heroes have with pride
indulged? No.... He alone is wise who nobly loves.' So he returns to the
charge, makes the lady admit the soft impeachment, and obtains the
Duke's consent to their union. He says, in the end, that he is afraid he
makes but an odd sort of figure--that he has acted a little out of
character, and a great deal below the dignity of a philosopher. But,
having the aforesaid disease, he has sought the remedy, and has found
it; for, in his view, 'Marriage is the surest cure of love.'
Georges Sand, in her 'Comme il Vous Plaira'--a comedy in three acts,
'tiree de Shakespeare, et arrangee'--diverges still further from the
original text. Her work is, even more markedly than 'The Modern
Receipt,' founded, only, on 'As You Like It.' 'In dealing with this
uncurbed genius, which owned no restraint,' she thought herself
justified in 'condensing, abstracting, and modifying' his work. But, as
a matter of fact, her play is indebted to Shakespeare only in idea.
Jaques is introduced early in the piece as sent by the banished Duke
with a message to Rosalind. Of course, he meets Celia, and at first is
_brusquerie_ itself. But in the second act he comes to think there is
something in her name 'qui resonne autrement que dans tout nature.
Est-ce une douceur qui charme l'oreille?' Celia for a long time plays
with him, but in the end they arrive at a mutual declaration of
affection. 'I have always tenderly loved Jaques,' says Georges Sand in
her preface, and 'I have taken the great liberty of bringing him back to
love. Here is my own romance inserted in that of Shakespeare, and,
although romantic, it is not more improbable than the sudden conversion
of Oliver.' That may be; and yet one might have thought that Georges
Sand, of all people, would not have set herself the interesting but
somewhat futile task of improving upon 'As You Like It.'