ABSTRACT
“All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players,” says Jaques in As You Like It (2.7.139–40). 1 He seems “melancholy” (2.1.26) to his associates because he says such things as this: no witty jests, none of the usual sprezzatura from this woodland courtier. But Jaques is more than melancholic. He is a philosopher, or at least he is trying to be one, and his famous commentary on the theater of life can be taken not only as a symptom of his problem but a therapy for it. A man who can bring himself to paroxysms of pity over the plight of a dying deer (2.1.25–66) is in need of apatheia – to use a term familiar to readers of this Handbook – and that is the state of mind encouraged by Jaques’s survey of the “many parts” that a man “plays” throughout his life. Perhaps he does not catch the tone of Epictetus when the sage advises “thou,” in a sixteenth-century translation of the Enchiridion, to “remember that thou art one of the players in an interlude, and must play the part which the author thereof shall appoint,” whether it be “long” or “short,” and whether it be “the beggar, the cripple, the prince, or the private person” (Epictetus 1567: C2v–C3r). Jaques’s treatment of the various parts of life – “infant,” “schoolboy,” “lover,” “soldier,” “justice,” “pantaloon,” and “second childishness and mere oblivion” (2.7.143–66) – smacks more of Juvenal’s Stoic raillery than it does the cool philosophy of the Porch, as if there is something actually distasteful in the parts that one must dutifully play in a world of adiaphora. But Duke Senior has just called attention to the “woeful pageants” (2.7.138) of the wider world – “we are not all alone unhappy” (2.7.136), he says – and Jaques feels the need for strong medicine. If unhappiness can come, as Stoics insist, from too much attachment to the parts that one is playing at any point in one’s life, then this is the kind of thinking that might help Jaques and other proficientes who share his troubles.
