SOURCE: Bennett, Robert B. “The Reform of a Malcontent: Jaques and the Meaning of As You Like It.” Shakespeare Studies 9 (1976): 183-204.

In the following essay, Bennett assesses Shakespeare's rationale for including Jaques—a cynical malcontent—in the pastoral realm of Arden, concluding that Jaques provides a satirical complement to the idealized romantic behavior of the other characters in the forest.

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Shakespeare's portrayal of Jacques in As You Like It is one of the earliest significant studies in Elizabethan drama of the malcontent, that age's version of the social dropout or alienated intellectual. Moreover, Shakespeare is the only playwright to subject the malcontent to a pastoral experience, to make him more an object of social criticism and romantic correction than an authorial mouthpiece for anatomizing the ills of society. Jaques' kinship with the Italianate Englishman and with the behavioral patterns which are typical of the figure commonly labeled...