We at least are not at a loss to explain Antonio’s depression. It is not alone the boredom of “unruffled prosperity”[141:2]—this sorts ill with the character of the noble merchant: it is rather a peculiarity of temperament which colours both adversity and prosperity. For such melancholy as marks Antonio’s farewell to Bassanio:
“I am a tainted wether of the flock, Meetest for death,”[141:3]
is not the necessary concomitant either of prosperity or of adversity. The two speeches quoted are examples of the same condition of mind; the melancholy which they exhibit has the double dramatic purpose of beautifying the character of Antonio and of giving the spectator that “preadjustment” which is so valuable an aid to the plot.
Similarly we have in “Richard II” the melancholy of the Queen, which prepares us for the troubles about to befall her. This melancholy may best be attributed, not necessarily, as Dr. Bucknill suggests, to her temperament, certainly not to any prosperity she may have enjoyed, but rather to a vague fear as to the results of her husband’s perilous journey, coupled possibly with her experience of the King’s rashness and a recognition of his recent weakness in dealing with Mowbray and Bolingbroke. It is, at all events, merely a passing sadness of the “inward soul” and her “heavy sad”-ness is soon dispersed, changing first to real grief, which gives place before her weaker husband—true woman that she is!—to a resolution concealing for a time her sorrow.
In Jacques we have a character of more complexity. His humour he describes as “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.”[142:1] He wishes, in his own words, to
“Cleanse the foul body of the infected world, If they will patiently receive my medicine.”[142:2]
But the Duke, usually so gentle, is quite out of sympathy with the pseudo-reformer. Jacques, he says, has been a libertine, and like many a reformed sinner, the ex-voluptuary would merely “disgorge into the general world,” “all the embossèd sores and headed evils” of his unregenerate days.[143:1]
So much discussion has been lavished on the “case” of Jacques that we shall not attempt to do more than shew what we believe to be its perfectly superficial nature. Judging from the play as a whole, and more especially from the Duke’s contempt and Rosalind’s banter, we should suppose this to be Shakespeare’s view. As Dr. Moulton very justly remarks, egotism is plainly shewn to be at the root of his disposition. He has lived out his life in a short time; now he turns everything, for sheer self-love, into matter not for jests but for scurrilous abuse, or at best for a malevolent, sarcastic humour.