Duke S. And did you leave him in this contemplation? 2 Lord. We did, my lord, weeping and commenting Upon the sobbing deer.

No character in Shakespeare's dramas has suffered more from the patchworking playmongers than that of Jaques in this play. In his case the change resulted from a desire to make the character more interesting to the female part of an audience, and therefore more acceptable to a first comedian. The Jaques of the stage is a melancholy, tenderhearted young man, with sad eyes and a sweet voice, talking morality in most musical modulation. Shakespeare's Jaques is a morose, cynical, querulous old fellow, who has been a bad young one. He does not have sad moments, but "sullen fits," as the Duke says. His melancholy is morbid ; and is but the fruit of that utter loss of mental tone which results from years of riot and debauchery. He has not a tender spot in his heart. There is not a gentle act attributed to him, or a generous sentiment, or a kind word put into his mouth by Shakespeare. He does not even pity the wounded deer which he sees by the brookside: for the touching description of the anguish of the "poor sequestered stag," which Jaques gives upon the stage, is, in the play, spoken by the 1st Lord. Shakespeare's Jaques finds in the sufferings of the animal only an occasion to sneer at his fellow-men. He seeks food for discontent in every thing; and the Duke, when told that "he was merry, hearing of a song," says:

"If he compact of jars, grow musical,

We shortly shall have discord in the spheres."
Act II. Sc. 7.

With regard to the age of Jaques, Shakespeare's text

is no less unmistakable. The tone of his conversation and conduct is entirely that of a man of long experience of the world. The Duke, censuring him for his delight in satire, makes the following remarkable speech, which bears directly upon his age and his character, and which is curtailed upon the stage. He tells him that he would do

"Most mischievous foul sin, in chiding sin.
For thou thyself hast been a libertine,
As sensual as the brutish sting itself;

And all th' embossed sores, and headed evils
That thou with license of free foot hast caught,
Wouldst thou disgorge into the general world."
Act II. Sc. 7.

Jaques, in addition to his life of libertinism, has been a great traveller, which in Shakespeare's day took many years of a man's life. He is, besides, too old to think of coping with a young man like Orlando; for when the latter threatens death to any one who eats until his "affairs are answered," Jaques, who is no coward, replies:

"An you will not be answered with reason,

I must die."

Act II. Sc. 7.

But honest Audrey, speaks decisively upon this point. Shakespeare's Jaques interrupts her and Touchstone as they are to be married in the forest by Sir Oliver Martext, and speaks very slightingly of that divine's clerical qualifications, which the stage Jaques neglects to do. Audrey, referring to this, says:

"Faith, the Priest was good enough, for all the old gentleman's saying." Act V. Sc. 1.

It is evident that Jaques should be played as a cynical,

gray-headed, broken-down debauchee; and that even the exhibition of kindness which conformity to stage custom requires, on the entrance of old Adam, is entirely inconsistent with Shakespeare's conception of the character.

Shakespeare has brought this old, high-bred, worn-out voluptuary into fine relief by juxtaposition with one who has nothing in common with him but age; and in that Jaques has the advantage. The serving man Adam, humbly born and coarsely nurtured, is no insignificant personage in the drama; and we find in the healthy tone of his mind, and in his generous heart, which under reverses and wrongs, still preserves its charitable trust in his fellows, as well as in his kindly, though frosty, age, a delightful and instructive contrast to the character of Jaques, which could hardly have been accidental.

SCENE 3.

"Adam. At seventeen years many their fortunes seek; But at fourscore, it is too late a week."

I have never heard this passage on or off the stage that it was not read without a pause after 'fourscore' and with the pause of a comma after 'late,'—thus :

But at fourscore it is too late, a week;

as if Adam said, that at fourscore it was a week too late to seek one's fortune; than which nothing could be flatter, tamer. 'Week' is used here for a period of time, and the old man says that at fourscore it is too late a time to seek one's fortune.

SCENE 4.

"Ros. Oh Jupiter! how weary are my spirits!"

Mr. Knight would read with the first folio, "how merry are my spirits." Whiter suggests that Rosalind's merriment was assumed; and Malone that she invokes Jupiter because he was always in good spirits. It seems plain that 'merry' is a misprint for "weary." Rosalind, worn out by her desponding journey, exclaims "how weary are my spirits!" and the Clown replies, "I care not for my spirits, if my legs are not weary," that is: "I would not care how weary my spirits might be, if my legs were not so." If Rosalind were to say that her spirits were merry, Touchstone's reply would have no point. Besides, it is not like Shakespeare to open a scene in which the condition of the parties is so obvious as it is in this, with an ironical remark.

Steevens quotes from a fragment of Petronius, "totus mundus exerceat histrioniam," and Malone from Damon and Pythias, 1582,—

"Pythagoras said that this world was like a stage
Whereon many play their parts,"

also another similar passage from Orpheus and Euridice,

1579. But the following passage from Erasmus' Praise of Folie, Englished by Sir Thomas Chaloner, occurred to me as much more to the purpose, and likelier to have been the source whence Shakespeare had the hint. It is, besides, a very curious and interesting picture of the drama as it existed in the generation preceding the great dramatist.

"If one at a solemne stage plaie, woulde take upon him to plucke of the players garmentes, whiles they were sayinge theyr partes, and so deciphre unto the lokers on the true and natiue faces of eche of the plaiers, shoulde he not (trowe ye) marre all the mattier? and well deserue for a madman to be peltid out of the place with stones? ye shoulde see yet straightwaies a new transmutacion in thinges: that who before played the woman, shoulde than appeare to be a man: who seemed youthe, shoulde show his hore heares: who counterfayted the kynge shoulde turne to a rascall: and who played god almighty, shoulde become a cobler as he was before. Yet take awaye this errour, and as soon take awaye all togethers, in as much as the feignyng and conterfaytyng is it that so delighteth the beholders. So lykewyse all this life of mortall man, what is it else but a certain kynde of stage plaie? whereas men come foorthe, disguised one in one arraie, an other in an other, eche playinge his parte, till at last the maker of the plaie, or bokebearer causeth them to auoyde the skaffolde, and yet sometyme maketh one man come in two or three times, with sundry partes and apparayle, as who before represented a kynge, beinge clothed all in purpre, hauinge no more but shifted hym selfe a little, shoulde shew hym selfe agayne lyke a woobegon myser."

The Praise of Folic. Ed. 1549, Sig. E. iii.

Here we not only have the life of man a play, and men and women players, but each one playing many parts; which, it seems, was required by the exigences of the rude stage which had amused the youth of Shakespeare.