[Campbell interprets Jaques from a historical perspective, noting events in Shakespeare's own lifetime that strongly influenced his dramatization of the character. According to the critic, Jaques reflects the stock Elizabethan literary figure of the malcontent traveler who, upon returning home from his sojourn to other countries, is corrupt, bitter, and bored with life. Jaques's melancholy, like that of the character-type in Elizabethan literature, is thus both real and exaggerated, Campbell states. The critic further maintains, however, that Jaques is also "something much more significant," namely Shakespeare's "amusing representative of the English satirists whose works streamed from the press during the years from 1592 to 1599 inclusive." Importantly, Campbell argues that Jaques's pessimistic tirades against humanity-even his famous soliloquy on the seven ages of man in Act II, scene vii are never accepted by Shakespeare as complete.....
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