set like boulders in the pellucid stream of the drama, contributing nothing to its movement, but making its hidden tendencies, its currents and cross-currents, visible and explicit. The contrasts of court and country, of society and nature, which the other persons embody but hardly express, are forced into prominence by the dry jests of the ex-court fool and the biting sarcasms of the disillusioned worldling. Touchstone is a shrewd rustic who has served at court, and armed himself with its accomplishments, without foregoing his native blunt humour. He conveys his buffooneries through the formulas of courtly wit. He makes game of the simplicity of Corin and Audrey, and parodies the strange capers' of the courtly lovers. Jaques's relations with the rustics are of the slightest, but he serves as a most effective foil for the courtiers. His philosophy is a sort of heightened and distorted version of the duke's, and the duke despises his character but loves his company. If the duke sighs over the stricken stag, Jaques moralises its fate into a thousand similes; if the duke makes a passing comparison of the world to a stage, Jaques follows it up with the famous 'seven ages of man.' If Touchstone is allowed a momentary advantage over Orlando and Rosalind, the fresh and robust good-nature of the one and the buoyant wit of the other are far more emphatically opposed (in two nearly adjacent scenes, iii. 1. and iv. 1.) to Jaques's cynical gloom. 'Will you sit down with me? We two will rail against our mistress the world,'-is his invitation to Orlando. 'I will chide no breather in the world but myself, in whom I know most faults.' Jaques has clearly morbid traits; yet he represents a type very characteristic of the early seventeenth century, and one which, as the minute and elaborate drawing shows, greatly interested Shakespeare. The staple of his 'melancholy' was the vague sadness of a sated brain, the despondent waking after the glorious national revelry of Elizabeth's prime. But there are glimpses in it of a profounder and nobler melancholy, which Shakespeare himself, it can hardly be doubted, came to share, melancholy of a profound sensitiveness to wrong and to suffering. Jaques's effusive pathos over the wounded stag, strange and untimely note as it sounds among the blithe horns and carols of the hunters, preludes a deeper, more comprehensive pity, -the stuff of which, in the next years, the great tragedies were to be wrought. AS YOU LIKE IT ACT I. SCENE I. Orchard of OLIVER's house. Enter ORLANDO and ADAM. Orl. As I remember, Adam, it was upon this fashion; bequeathed me by will but poor a thousand crowns, and, as thou sayest, charged my brother, on his blessing, to breed me well: and there begins my sadness. My brother Jaques he keeps at school, and report speaks goldenly of his profit for my part, he keeps me rustically at home, or, to speak more properly, stays me here at home unkept; for call you that keeping for a gentleman of my birth, that differs not from the 10 stalling of an ox? His horses are bred better; for, besides that they are fair with their feeding, they are taught their manage, and to that end riders dearly hired: but I, his brother, gain nothing under him but growth; for the which his animals on his dunghills are as much bound to him as I. Besides this nothing that he so plenti 2. bequeathed; the subject is 'my father' understood. 4. breed, bring up. 6. at school, at the university. fully gives me, the something that nature gave me his countenance seems to take from me: he lets me feed with his hinds, bars me the place of 20 a brother, and, as much as in him lies, mines my gentility with my education. This is it, Adam, that grieves me; and the spirit of my father, which I think is within me, begins to mutiny against this servitude: I will no longer endure it, though yet I know no wise remedy how to avoid it. Adam. Yonder comes my master, your brother. Orl. Go apart, Adam, and thou shalt hear how he will shake me up. Enter OLIVER. Oli. Now, sir! what make you here? Orl. Nothing: I am not taught to make any thing. Oli. What mar you then, sir? Orl. Marry, sir, I am helping you to mar that which God made, a poor unworthy brother of yours, with idleness. Oli. Marry, sir, be better employed, and be naught awhile. Orl. Shall I keep your hogs and eat husks with them? What prodigal portion have I spent, that I should come to such penury? me. Oli. Know you where you are, sir? Orl. O, sir, very well: here in your orchard. Orl. Ay, better than him I am before knows 19. his countenance, his mode of treating me. 21. mines, undermines. 31. make, do. 30 40 38. be naught awhile; explained by Warburton as 'a North Country proverbial curse, equivalent to a mischief on you." |