As You Like It: Jaques and the Seven Ages

Jaques turns the world around him into arguments. He divides life into seven ages, distinguishes kinds of melancholy, and asks for the degrees of the lie. That combination of learning and classification suggests a particular, ultimately tragic, figure in Neville’s circle: Henry Cuffe.¹²

Cuffe was Oxford’s Regius Professor of Greek before becoming Essex’s secretary. Henry Savile, Neville’s tutor, had supported his studies and brought him to Merton. Cuffe later drew Neville into the Essex crisis.³

The strongest connection with Jaques is Cuffe’s The Differences of the Ages of Man’s Life. Printed in 1607, six years after his execution, its title page dates the book to 1600. As Cuffe’s close associate, Neville would likely have read the work in manuscript when Cuffe was alive.⁴⁵

Enlarge image

Open full sizeSource

The seven ages, with the sunlight removed

Alan Taylor Bradford’s 1976 study in Shakespeare Quarterly explains how Shakespeare transforms the traditional seven ages of man. Bradford uses Cuffe to set out the planetary scheme: the seven ages follow the seven heavenly bodies, from the Moon to Saturn. At the centre stands the Sun, governing the prime of life. Cuffe describes its effect:

our youthful prime, by the Sun’s lively operation, is lifted up from base delights to a loftier and more man-like resolution and liveliness.⁴

The planetary scheme, as Cuffe describes it, gives life a flourishing middle, as desire rises into resolution and mature strength. Jaques keeps the number seven but removes that prime:

JAQUES All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.
Then the whining schoolboy with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
— As You Like It, 2.7.⁶

Mars and Jupiter move forward; Saturn’s decay expands into two stages, preserving the total of seven. As Bradford puts it, “Jaques’ cosmos is sunless.”⁷

Jaques seems to be satirizing Cuffe’s solemn delineation. Mercury’s readiness for learning becomes a child creeping unwillingly to school. Cuffe’s Mars stirs men to “a more venturous boldness in quarrelling combats”; Jaques’s soldier is “sudden and quick in quarrel,” spending that boldness on a reputation as insubstantial as a bubble. Jupiter’s gravity dwindles into a well-fed justice’s solemn appearance and stock sayings.⁴⁷

Shakespeare turns the learned scheme into an ironic character study: Jaques leaves no place for the flourishing prime in which human powers mature into something worth achieving.

“Compounded of many simples”

Jaques’s description of his own melancholy makes the comparison more specific:

JAQUES I have neither the scholar’s melancholy, which
is emulation; nor the musician’s, which is fantastical;
nor the courtier’s, which is proud; nor the
soldier’s, which is ambitious; nor the lawyer’s,
which is politic; nor the lady’s, which is nice; nor
the lover’s, which is all these; but it is a melancholy
of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted
from many objects, and indeed the sundry
contemplation of my travels, in which my often
rumination wraps me in a most humorous sadness.¹
— As You Like It, 4.1.

“Simples” are constituent ingredients. Jaques first separates melancholy into kinds, then describes his own as a mixture, its ingredients “extracted from many objects.” He calls it “the sundry contemplation of my travels” and ends with “a most humorous sadness.” The language of ingredients and humours makes his account of himself sound like an analysis of a substance.⁸

Cuffe uses the vocabulary of composition to explain the human body. He describes the body before the Fall as:

compounded of the contrary natures of the four elements

He traces natural death to “contrariety in the compound,” then explains that continued life depends on:

the due and just proportionable temperature of the four first qualities, Heat, Cold, Dryness, Moisture.⁹

Here “temperature” means the balance of the qualities. Cuffe then applies this account to the bodily complexions, including melancholy:

Lastly, melancholy resembling the earth and its qualities, cold and drought, both enemies to life, hasteneth the destruction of the body whereunto it is incident.¹⁰

Jaques turns this language of composition into a portrait of his own mind. Cuffe’s melancholy belongs to the body’s mixture; Jaques insists on a melancholy “of mine own,” assembled from the world he observes. His joke is more pointed because he first rejects the scholar’s melancholy, then explains himself in a scholar’s language of ingredients, compounds and kinds. As with the seven ages, Jaques adapts a learned account of human nature to his own outlook.

The scholar’s jokes and categories

Against that background, Jaques’s Greek joke acquires a more personal point. When Amiens sings, Jaques adds a verse with the refrain “Ducdame, ducdame, ducdame.” Asked to explain it, he replies:

AMIENS What’s that “ducdame”?

JAQUES ’Tis a Greek invocation to call fools into a
circle. […]¹¹
— As You Like It, 2.5.

Jaques invents the puzzle and enjoys his companions’ need for an explanation. Beside Cuffe’s Greek professorship and his treatise on human ages, it contributes to the proposed portrait of a learned man making sport of his authority.

Jaques also asks Touchstone to name “the degrees of the lie,” which Touchstone sets out in seven stages. Across age, temperament and conduct, Jaques wants human experience sorted into its constituent kinds.²

Underhand persuasion

Oliver claims he has secretly tried to stop Orlando from wrestling:

OLIVER Charles, I thank thee for thy love to me, which
thou shalt find I will most kindly requite. I had
myself notice of my brother’s purpose herein, and
have by underhand means labored to dissuade him
from it; but he is resolute. […]
— As You Like It, 1.1

Neville reports Henri IV’s private pressure on the Dutch States on 24 September 1599:

the king did underhand dissuade them from peace

Both use “underhand” with “dissuade … from” for private persuasion.¹²

Among the EEBO-TCP texts searched through 1623, the close construction appears only in Shakespeare’s First Folio. Neville’s dispatch supplies a dated private use in 1599.¹³

A clause and a voyage

Two further comparisons turn diplomatic language into comedy. In July 1599 Neville wants ships to carry both a flag and a passport, rather than either alone:

to make the clause copulative, which is now disjunctive, either to flag or passport.

At the play’s wedding gathering, Touchstone announces:

TOUCHSTONE God ’ild you, sir. I desire you of the like. I
press in here, sir, amongst the rest of the country
copulatives, to swear and to forswear, according as
marriage binds and blood breaks. […]
— As You Like It, 5.4

The word joins conditions in Neville’s treaty discussion and couples in Touchstone’s joke.¹⁴

That same July, Neville reports the Dutch fleet “victualled for a year.” Jaques gives Touchstone’s marriage a shorter allowance:

JAQUES […]
[To Touchstone.] And you to wrangling, for thy
loving voyage
Is but for two months victualled.—So to your
pleasures.
[…]
— As You Like It, 5.4

The naval expression becomes a joke about how long a marriage’s supplies will last. “Victualled” occurs in only three of the 239 plays dated 1590–1615 in the collection examined.¹⁵

Chapter 17 examines “purlieu” alongside Neville’s dispute over his free chase.

Morley and Neville’s stepmother

The play’s music supplies a household connection. Thomas Morley’s First Booke of Ayres (1600) printed “It was a lover and his lass,” sung by two pages in Act 5, twenty-three years before the play appeared in print.¹⁶

In 1595 Morley had dedicated his First Booke of Canzonets to Two Voyces to Lady Periam—Elizabeth Bacon, Neville’s stepmother and the Lady Nevell of Byrd’s keyboard manuscript, as John Harley identifies her. Morley explains that his wife had formerly served her and had intended these pieces for her before their completion. The canzonets would take her place, “not being able as heretofore still to serve you.”¹⁷ The composer who printed the play’s song thus had a personal connection with Neville’s stepmother’s household.

Enlarge image

Open full sizeSource

Amiens and the journey home

Amiens, the exiled duke’s companion, has a name absent from Lodge’s Rosalynde but present in Neville’s French itinerary. On 14 May 1600 Neville wrote to Cecil from “Between Amiens and Abbeville,” travelling from Paris to Boulogne. He joined the English peace commissioners there on 16 May; Chapter 5 describes the negotiations and maps the route.¹⁸

Later that summer, Neville returned from the Boulogne negotiations. He landed at Dover on 2 August, left on the fourth and reached London on the sixth. On 4 August the Stationers’ Register listed As You Like It among four plays “to be staied.” The entry gives no reason for the stay.¹⁹