Other Measures: The Ultimate Cynic and His Exit into Complexity

In the very last scene of As You Like It, Jacques, the cynical man who spent most of the play coming between the pairs of lovers, surveys the happy ending and solemnly proclaims to the Duke that he will return to court from the forest. His reason for doing so is simple, as he explains: "I am for other than for dancing measures." It's not that Jacques is evil; he doesn't maliciously manipulate like Iago or Don John and he's not coldly ambitious like Claudius or Richard III. His crime, rather, is one of cynicism, and his proclamation that he is "for other than for dancing measures," is not an angry strike at the others there; in the line before, he had wished them well. His description there is simply that: a description of himself. In this one line, he tells the audience and the other characters that he cannot stay because he cannot fit into the happy world of the play. He is not happy, he cannot be happy because of his nature, and similar to Richard III, he cannot survive in a world of dancing and happiness.

I've always seen a link between Jacques and Shakespeare, simply because of this line. After all, Shakespeare left Stratford and his mother Mary Arden as well as the nearby Arden Forest for London and the world of the court. And when Jacques leaves Arden Forest at the end of his speech in Act V, scene 4, he heads to the city and the court. But, to me, there is something deeper, something more personal that Shakespeare associated with in Jacques.

At the time Shakespeare was writing, plays were comedies, histories, or tragedies. And the comedies were comedic, and the tragedies were tragic. But what Shakespeare did, particularly in his later plays such as As You Like It, was to blend the two; suddenly, his comedies were as tragic as they were comedic. Later scholars would dub these plays tragi-comedies for this reason, although now they're often referred to as romances. But scholars also have another name for them: problem comedies. Problem, because the ending seems out of sync with the rest of the play, as if Shakespeare was trying to write a play true to his characters and suddenly, when he realized it had to have a happy ending, reversed gears at the last minute to match the main characters together and present the façade of happily-ever-after.

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