Shakespeare’s romantic comedies. The speaker is
Jaques, a lord attending the banished Duke of
Burgundy, referred to in the play as Duke Senior.
Duke Senior is Rosalind’s father and the rightful
heir to the dukedom. One of several men living
out their banishment in the Arden Forest, Jaques
is melancholic, sarcastic, and occasionally bitter.
He is also a person who believes that man’s jour-
ney from birth to death is completely without
meaning. Men are born and eventually they die.
Life, then, is without significance. As a character
in a romantic comedy, Jaques would seem out of
place in a play so filled with romance that it ends
with four weddings. Understanding Jaques’s
position in the play, his worldview, and his rela-
tionships with other characters is important to
understanding the underlying messages of
‘‘Seven Ages of Man.’’
Understanding Jaques’s role and function in
As You Like Itallows readers to understand
‘‘Seven Ages of Man’’ more fully. Jaques is solely
a Shakespearean invention. There is no corre-
sponding character in Thomas Lodge’s 1590
prose pastoral romance, Rosalynde, Shake-
speare’s source forAs You Like It. In Jaques,
Shakespeare has devised a solely contemplative
character. Jaques thinks but does not act; he is
content to stand on the sidelines, talking about
other people. He entertains himself in his banish-
ment by making barbs directed at the characters
he encounters. Jaques is a jaded, melancholy
philosopher, one who spouts moral precepts,
just as the justice does in rendering decisions.
Like the justice he satirizes in ‘‘Seven Ages of
Man,’’ with his ‘‘wise saws,’’ Jaques spouts trite
platitudes and empty negative comments. In his
sarcastic exchange with Orlando in act 3, scene 2,
Orlando accuses Jaques of talking in cliche ́s.
Jaques’s so-called knowledge does not come
from experience. The pithy sayings that Jaques
uses are taken from ‘‘right painted cloth,’’ cheap
tapestries used as decoration. In other words,
there is nothing original or penetrating about
what Jaques has to say. He is spouting the famil-
iar sayings of the day, not unlike the framed
truisms displayed in some modern homes.
Jaques is a phony philosopher, whose postur-
ing is not taken seriously by other characters in
the play. In her bookShakespeare After All,Mar-
jorie Garber states that Jaques’s melancholy is an
affectation. Garber labels Jaques ‘‘a faddist, a
self-conscious self-dramatizer,’’ who is mimicked
by the fool Touchstone, and who, in turn, mimics
himself. Just before Jaques utters the ‘‘Seven Ages
of Man,’’ he explains that he has met Touchstone
in the forest. Jaques describes meeting Touch-
stone, who pretends to be as pretentious as
Jaques. Jaques is amused at Touchstone’s mim-
icry. He laughingly tells Duke Senior:
When I did hear
The motley fool thus moral on the time
My lungs began to crow like chanticleer,
That fools should be so deep-contemplative.
Jaques admires Touchstone for being simi-
larly pompous and grandiose. In a sense Jaques
is admiring himself. At the conclusion of this
speech, he expresses a wish to be a ‘‘worthy
fool.’’ Jesters or fools were employed in royal
courts for comic entertainment, and often their
witty remarks provided insight about political
matters. These hired buffoons were generally
very intelligent, and they were respected by peo-
ple at court. At the end of the play, when the
characters pair up and return to the world,
Jaques chooses not to join them. His choice to
enter a monastery seems to suggest he does have
the makings of a fool. In fact, he is not even
suited to live among ordinary people in the
urban world.
Although Jaques thinks himself a philoso-
pher, he is not a deep thinker. The seven ages of
man was an old tradition before Shakespeare
appropriated it forAs You Like It. Seven was
historically a special number, assigned to the
planets and to the number of vices and virtues,
and the number of liberal arts. The idea that the
real world is like a stage was also not original with
Shakespeare. Garber states that the metaphor
was a cliche ́ by the time he used it and that the
interest in the speech comes not from its content
but from the person who delivers it. Garber
observes that ‘‘when Shakespeare put these
words in the mouth of one of the most affected
poseurs he was making a deliberate theatrical‘SEVEN AGES OF MAN’ OFFERSNOTHING NEW AND ORIGINAL TO THE AUDIENCE,
BUT IT DOES REVEAL THE SADNESS THAT IS
JAQUES’S LIFE.’’
Seven Ages of Man