Are there two characters named Jaques in As You Like It?
The question of the two Jacques emerges because two characters named Jacques appear in the play's character list. One is Jacques de Boys, Orlando and Oliver's brother. The other is the melancholy Jacques, the only Jacques character with a significant, if minor, role in the play.
The melancholy Jaques provides needed "shade" to counter the romantic brightness of a play that is, as the title suggests, more about the way we would like life to be than it is in reality. This Jacques notes that humans kill animals in the supposedly idyllic Forest of Arden and that summer's beauty turns to winter. He adds a needed does of realism to the play's pastoralgenre, which represents the longing of the rich and well connected for an illusory simple life in nature.
The other Jacques, the "Second," or middle brother, appears only in Act 5, at the end of...
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the play, though Orlando mentions him in Act I, Scene 1. Some critics have suggested that the melancholy Jacques, though he appears as Duke Senior's servant, really is Jacques de Boys, but in disguise, as are other characters in the play. These critics have suggested that he sounds educated and might have developed his melancholy outlook at a university. An eNote link below offers articles on this topic with a variety of views by several scholars.
Why does As You Like It have two characters named Jaques?
One role of the melancholic Jaques is to symbolically embody the oppressive, depressing realities of town/court life in the thematic debate within As You Like It that pits town against country. Jaques is bitter, cynical, unromantic--he is one of the few central characters who doesn't wind up in a marriage--and given to depressive melancholy.
On the other hand, the other Jaques is Orlando's and Oliver's younger brother. Not only does he serve to show just how loathsomely Oliver has treated Orlando--by detailing all Jaques advantages and opportunities--Jaques also serves as a contrast to Oliver and Duke Frederick, thereby showing the true character and nature of a man from town. Even more importantly, he is the opposite of melancholic Jaques.
That both are named Jaques is a device for drawing audience attention to their contrasting qualities so that when the differences debated throughout about town versus country are brought into balance in Scenes III and IV of Act V, the audience/reader has a firm foundation from which to draw the correct conclusions, those being that town and country are each good in their own ways and it is the quality of a person's inner nature that makes either location good or bad.