jaques by alan rickman - from players of shakespeare 2

Alan Rickman - RSC 1985

You can dress As You Like It in any clothes, jump up and down on tree stumps or slip and slide on white silk as we did, but it goes into a big sulk if you don't remain open to what has always been sitting there on the page. What it is will change its resonance from production to production but more as a result of particular individuals playing the roles than of directorial schemes. 

That is not meant to be actors' megalomania. I say it with some confidence, however, because over the eighteen months that we played it the production's emphasis did shift from a concern for staging effects towards making its characters' inner lives more visible. By the time it closed in London there was hardly a moment which hadn't been simplified so that the play could breathe more easily. Maybe that process should have been in operation earlier, but it is true to say that it could have continued indefinitely-- no one felt we had ever "arrived," there was always a desire to keep the production alive and changing, and it was good to know that predominant among its devoted fans were school parties to whom Shakespeare had previously meant exams and boredom. I feel very protective towards Jaques, the play, and the production in all their elusiveness. I have a love-hate relationship with white silk.

What follows is my version of the thoughts and decisions made between Adrian Noble, the other actors and myself which resulted in this Jaques in this production of As You Like It. None of it should be confused with fact; it is a piece of total bias.

Before rehearsals began, I knew that for many people Jaques is either their favourite or least favourite Shakespearean character, that he carries with him a reputation for having his arms permanently folded and eyebrows forever arched, and that he's the one who does "All the world's a stage." I had played the part before, eight years previously, so I was already sure that he was more than a famous speech on legs. However, as we worked, I found an even clearer picture of a Jaques who is perceptive but passionate, vulnerable but anarchic, and a man whose means of expressing these qualities was completely unpredictable. He's very sure of himself and a bit of a mess.

There was certainly no room to explore all that in rehearsals, and the production did ask us to lay ourselves on the line, but I wanted to keep a sense of Jaques the improviser-- a jack-in-the-box quality of what's he up to? Who's he getting at?-- particularly with the Duke and the lords. In fact, writing this I'm not sure how conscious a decision it was-- mostly the memories are of missing the boat; the other actors must have tired of wondering where I was going to enter from next, or if there would every be a recognisable shape to the scene, but we created an air of mutual surprise to work in which seemed profitable, and it was born out of what I saw as evidence on the page.

What is Jaques's story? Was he one of the three or four loving lords described by Charles as having initially followed the Duke into exile, or is he one of the merry men who turned up later to live like old Robin Hood of England and to fleet the time carelessly?

Jaques does not deny the Duke's accusation that he has been "a libertine," he calls the court "pompous," and his lyrics to Amiens's song speak for themselves.

If it do come to pass,

That any man turn ass,

Leaving his wealth and ease

A stubborn will to please,

Ducdame, ducdame, ducdame!

Here shall he see

Gross fools as he, 

And if he will come to me. 

This, after we have heard the Duke's attempt to raise morale among the freezing troops by suggesting that they kill some venison, coupled with the story of Jaques crying over a dead deer. Does this add up to a picture of harmony in the woodland glades? Before Jaques has even appeared the image I receive of him from the lord's story is already one of antagonism, compassion, and energy. Nor is the Duke's response one of concern for Jaques, but an immediate desire to find him.

I love to cope him in these sullen fits,

For then he's full of matter.

Jaques the entertainer, the radical, someone to wind up. Good value.

I think Jaques is in the forest because it's a less boring option than Duke Frederick's court (where he would surely have been certified) and because, ex-devil that he is, he still needs the odd brick wall to bang his head against. Jaques seeks, ferrets, prods, and interferes but he doesn't do. His self-sufficiency is shaky at the best of times, but he definitely needs the other lords to cook his food.

Taking a few liberties with the order in which these lines appear in the play, here's how Jaques describes himself:

I can suck melancholy out of a song, as a weasel sucks eggs. 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. O that I were a fool! I am ambitious for a motley coat. It is my only suit. I must have liberty withal, as large as a charter as the wind, to blow on whom I please, for so fools have. Give me leave to speak my mind and I will through and through cleanse the foul body of th'infected world, if they will patiently receive my medicine. What, for a counter, would I do but good? Tis good to be sad and say nothing. So to your pleasures, I am for other than for dancing measures. To see no pastime I. I have gain'd my experience. God buy you, and you talk in blank verse.

The first new acquaintance Jaques makes in the forest is Touchstone, who of course wouldn't dream of addressing anyone in blank verse, and when Jaques runs back to the lords like a child with a new toy and start on "A fool, a fool! I met a foot i'th'forest...." it is at once a description, a flight of fancy, and an idealism. The improvisatory quality is at its height, and this is Jaques flying, but he is also at his most vulnerable and wide open for attack. "What for a counter would I do but good?" he says, and I always thought this was the most naked view of Jaques that we are given. A simple line that is immediately punished by the Duke's knowledge of Jaques's past. It is as if Jaques is saying "Let me be a fool, let me say what I think and I'll cure the world." "You?" says the Duke, "You're diseased. They'll all catch it."

The best way to rattle Jaques is to interrupt or alter his rhythm in this way. The "Who cries out on pride" speech which follows is notoriously difficult, and in early rehearsals I would cling to the sense for dear life. The effect of this, of course, was to make it more dense than ever, and it wasn't until I put all its disjointedness and seeming non-sequiturs into the mouth of a wounded and trapped animal that the speech had any real focus in the scene. Or in other words, put rhythm and sense together and you find that yet again Shakespeare has done the work for you.

This also opened up what looked like a more accurate route into "All the world's a stage." Orlando's entrance, his hunger and his concern for Adam, elicits a massive platitude from the Duke. "This wide and universal theatre..." (etc., etc.). Jaques has had time to gather his resources and is ready to pounce. "All the world's a stage" starts on a half-line so it is an immediate reply. He has been provoked into it by what he sees as the leaden sensibilities around him-- "There then! how then? what then?"-- but in a way it is also an example of Jaques as his own worst enemy. It is a speech of indelible imagery, shot through with savage apparent-truths, but it is the speech of an extremist. Seven ages, not one with a glimmer of hope. Of course, he's wrong. After "Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans every thing," Adam is brought on exhausted but not senile-- the essence of courage and loyalty.

Bearing all this in mind, I could never see a measured trip through life as a real possibility. In fact, I thought there should be occasions during the speech when Jaques might be in real danger of losing control. And it is impossible to be unaware that you are delivering one of the most famous speeches in literature. "Mount Everest?... Where?"

If, as Beerbohm writes, As You Like It is not a play but an extended lyric, then "All the world's a stage" is one of its great arias. That's what I went for anyway, trying also to keep its roots tethered in the scene. Hang on to it and let it go at the same time. A suitably impossible aim. It was also used as a kind of fulcrum to the production since the interval was taken at the end of that scene. The play moved from Winter to Spring, and the design from white to green. The second half was always a more relaxed experience for me. If "All the world's a stage" shows Jaques cursed by his own perception, the second half shows the result-- condemned to wander forever, endlessly trying to relocate some innocence, endlessly disappointed. And it is Jaques who initiates conversations with Touchstone, Orlando, and Rosalind, and Jaques who, when disarmed, runs away. Therein lie both his vulnerability and his arrogance.

There is another irony, too. He is also able to function as an occasional breeze to an audience who might otherwise become too heady on Roaslind and Orlando, because of course he doesn't change. He starts the play under a tree by a stream, and ends it offstage sitting in a cave. He hasn't gone off to look for the convertite Duke-- Duke Senior says "Stay, Jaques, stay," and this he happily misinterprets as meaning the Duke has things to discuss. This is the Duke of whom Jaques says, "I think of as many matters as he, but I give heaven thanks, and make no boast of them." This is the Duke who, at the end, seems to have learned little from Arden-- "Now you had three acres, and he had seventeen, and I had three hundred and eighty-four..." What would they have to talk about? I think Jaques is just running on the spot.

So you are left with an image of complete aloneness, mirrored, incidentally, by the fact that the actor walks into the wings and twiddles his thumbs while everyone else is dancing. And in some ways it is a lonely part to play; Jaques starts each scene with his ears pricked and ends them with his tail between his legs. But a curious complicity is established with the audience which allows a lot of warmth in. They frequently seem to share the same set of eyes, and idiosyncratic though it may be, I think he's got a great sense of humour:

And I did laugh sans intermission

An hour by his dial.

As I have already mentioned, I played Jaques once before. This was in a production by Peter James at the Crucible Theatre, Sheffield, and I think that is where those seeds were sown. The production was certainly not flippant but Peter has never been adverse to a cheap gag, and that was as joyous an experience as this one as complex. It was in modern dress, played in the round (famous speeches have to be done revolving slowly on the spot) and on an abstract set-- a huge roof of white strips of cloth which could be called down to conceal anyone who needed to hide. I have vivd memories of Audrey, Touchstone, and William singing "Shake it up Shakespeare baby," while eleven hundred people rocked with laughter, and it never seemed even remotely an error of taste. That's how tolerant the play can be. It was a production rooted in a corporate joy. This one seemed to place its characters at a succession of crossroads in order to watch their individual choices. Indeed, Jaques this time round was quite literally old and wiser, but given that first instincts should be guarded jealously, those early discoveries were invaluable.

After one of our last performances, knowing that I was to contribute to this book, I wrote this:

Today we have performed As You Like It twice, and tiredness sometimes brings a freedom which lets you know how much the "work" has been pushed into the background and the character just behaves. There are discoveries I only really make in performance. He is a bit uncoordinated, given to daring about or standing very still, finding imaginary itches, restless and nervy, not comfortable ever. Periods of great concentration and others when easily distracted. Full of private smiles. 

That day, I was also to be visited by the ex-head of the English department at my old school. He had sent a card saying "How are you getting on with Jaques? I always thought he was an old bore." He was coming to my dressing-room at the same time as a young "A" level student who wanted me to answer questions for her theatre-studies project. "Did I see Jaques as anything more than a self-indulgent cynic?"

There must be fifty years between those two questions but Jaques seems to have been imprisoned by teachers', pupils' and audiences' preconceptions as much as by those of Duke Senior.

I just wanted to let him out.