{"id":14423,"date":"2013-02-27T14:19:23","date_gmt":"2013-02-27T19:19:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2013\/02\/27\/14423.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T19:05:01","modified_gmt":"2018-03-14T00:05:01","slug":"who-am-i-this-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2013\/02\/27\/who-am-i-this-time\/","title":{"rendered":"Who am I this time?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

As I wait for our version of As You Like It<\/cite> to arrive, I am of course reading and rereading the play. Or at least the forest court bits. II,i (for set-up, although Jaques does not appear), III,ii and IV,I (which are not in the court but dialogues), II,v and V,ii (Jaques loves music), III,iii and V,iv (Touchstone and the end) and of course most of all II,vii (from A fool! A fool!<\/i> to All the world’s a stage<\/i>. My scenes being seven ages. Although I could appear in more or in less, actually, depending on how the thing is shaped in the cutting.\n

You could do the play just fine without my part at all, really. The plot ignores him. What do you need for the plot? The two cousins, of course, and the brothers they eventually marry. The two fathers. You need, I think, the shepherdess and her swain. You need the clown that accompanies the cousins, and then you need the country wench that he marries, to make up the four couples at the end. The others are presumably dispensable, although I suppose you really do need someone to bring in the messages. You can have the wrestling offstage, though, right?\n

My point (if I have one) is that Jaques floats above the plot, or behind it, or beneath it, which gives a production a tremendous latitude in how to present him. Actually, the play as a whole admits of a terrible range of possible interpretations, but Jaques in particular is untethered. I’ve read that he stands between the audience and the play, preferably as a bridge rather than a wall. A recent production put Jaques in the prop trunk at the end, which I think speaks to a somewhat different level of respect. He can be played for laughs or for pathos, as the ultimate wit or the ultimate twit, as a man of mystery or as the butt of the cosmic joke.\n

For me, as I’ve been reading and rereading it, there’s one Big Question, though: is Jaques really one of the Duke’s men? Well, and he is an outsider to some extent, of course, but how much so? Is he a beloved mascot? Is he a tolerated freak? Is he a distrusted Duke’s pet? Does he, in turn trust that they aren’t laughing at him—or that they are laughing at him with love, anyway? When he launches into one of his bits, can he expect cheers and applause? Groans and eye-rolls? Blank bewilderment? Indifference? Snickers?\n

This is tied up with, but not entirely dependent on, a bigger question about the production: is the banished Duke the leader of a magical court in a magical forest, or of a desperate insurgency? Over the last few decades there seems to have been a trend to emphasize the usurpation of the Duchy as a civil war, and thus the Forest of Arden as a dangerous place, wild and unsettling. This goes along with an undertone of danger in the wooing—Orlando and Rosalind, Orlando and Ganymede, Aliena and Ganymede, Celia and Rosalind, the possibilities of love and hope amid very real terrors of exposure and death. In such a production, I might well play Jaques as a complete outsider, hesitant and fearful of his own exposure and death, even as his uncontrollable wit further alienates him from each companion.\n

And in the text as I read it, there’s this: When Jaques finds something sad (or funny) he finds it much much<\/i> sadder (or funnier) than anyone else around him. He has tremendous difficulty matching his tone to the people around him (expressed as verse\/prose issues among other things). He appears cold and disdainful most of the time. He is given to long stretches of silence, and then bursts into seemingly endless monologues. His enthusiasms extremely focused and are totally incomprehensible to anyone else. All of these seem to me consistent with Asperger syndrome. I don’t know if an actor and a production could pull off an actual Asperger Jaques, but there could certainly be some of that sense of outsider alienation and bewilderment on both sides.\n

Or not. Jaques can also be just a witty guy, getting off zingers in the magical dream forest and play-acting the Seven Ages with an appreciative band of brothers. That would work, too. It’s not my choice—and it’s not really a choice about Jaques, either.\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which Your Humble Blogger is looking for a fool in the brook.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[209],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14423","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-theeyater"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14423","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14423"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14423\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16713,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14423\/revisions\/16713"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14423"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14423"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14423"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}