It's pronounced "Zzhay-queez." Go figure that one.

Any artist or engraver seeking inspiration from Shakespeare's plays need not fear a dry well; it is one filled with iconic moments of beauty and of pain. From the balcony scene of Romeo and Juliet to the three witches huddling in Macbeth (like those in the masthead at the top of this page), the illustrator faces an embarrassment of riches.

One poignant moment from this medley of human experience, perhaps too often overlooked in our own century, is that of Shakespeare's melancholy philosopher Jaques in As You Like It, ruminating at the side of a stream on the lonely fate of a wounded stag that has appeared at

"the extremest verge of the swift brook,
Augmenting it with tears....
....giving thy sum of more 
To that which had too much..."                            (Act II, Scene 1)

 

The stag's abandonment by a herd that does not share its misfortune is equated by Jaques with the heartlessness, cruelty and indifference of human behavior. Jaques sees, in the halting movements of the wounded forest animal "left and abandon'd of his velvet friends" the vicissitudes of life.

Pictured above is William Ridley's engraving of the scene, as it appears in an octavo copy of  As You Like It, with a notation at the bottom of the page, "Published by Vernor & Hood, 31 Poultry, Jan. 1, 1799." Also included in the volume are Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and Love's Labours Lost.

Seen from the sublime heights of early-nineteenth century Romanticism, the ruminations of Jaques provided ample nourishment for the gods. The scene has been painted by the likes of Eugene Delacroix and William Blake, among many others. For the Romantics, life was meant to be a rush downstream, with occasional brief pauses in pools of stillness apt for reflection.