As You Like It: Melancholy Captain Jaques and the English Fugitives

A melancholy traveller, a forest filled with exiles, a treacherous captain named Jaques and a remarkable appeal to English soldiers serving abroad. Shakespeare’s pastoral comedy opens an unexpected window upon the dangerous world described by Sir Lewes Lewkenor.

The melancholy soldier

Among the characters in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, none is more enigmatic than the melancholy Jaques.

He wanders through the Forest of Arden observing the follies of mankind, reflecting upon his travels and delivering some of the play’s most memorable speeches.

He is neither a conventional courtier nor a conventional shepherd. He is a man whose experiences have left him estranged from the society around him.

His famous account of the seven ages of man begins:

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.

But Shakespeare gives Jaques another, more revealing description of himself.

When Rosalind questions his melancholy, he explains that it does not belong to any single profession or condition.

I have neither the scholar’s melancholy, which is emulation, nor the musician’s, which is fantastical, nor the courtier’s, which is proud, nor the soldier’s, which is ambitious…

His melancholy is instead compounded from his experiences abroad:

It is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry’s contemplation of my travels, in which my often rumination wraps me in a most humorous sadness.

Jaques is therefore not merely a philosopher who happens to live in a forest. He is a traveller whose experience has transformed his understanding of the world.

In The Estate of English Fugitives (1595), Sir Lewes Lewkenor described a remarkable historical figure whose name, travels, military service and estrangement from England invite comparison with Shakespeare’s character.

He was Captain Jaques Francesco.

Captain Jaques Francesco

Captain Giacomo Francesci, whom Lewkenor calls Jaques Francesco, served as a lieutenant under Sir William Stanley during the wars in Ireland and the Low Countries.

He was born in Antwerp of Italian parents, but had been brought up in England and entered the service of English gentlemen.

Lewkenor describes a man whose career had begun with considerable promise.

Francesco had served in Ireland, distinguished himself as a soldier and acquired influential friends.

Among his patrons was Sir Christopher Hatton, Lord Chancellor of England, whose favour had helped advance him.

Yet his career became entangled in the religious and political conspiracies of the 1580s.

He was suspected of disloyalty, arrested and imprisoned in London.

After securing his release, he returned to the Low Countries and eventually entered the service of Sir William Stanley, whose betrayal of Deventer had become one of the most notorious episodes of Elizabethan military history.

Francesco’s career illustrates the danger of divided allegiance in an age when soldiers could serve foreign princes and change sides during the religious wars.

The betrayal of Deventer

Sir William Stanley had been entrusted with the defence of Deventer, an important town in the Netherlands.

In January 1587 he surrendered the town to the Spanish, while Rowland York handed over the nearby Zutphen sconce.

The betrayal was a disaster for the English military effort and an embarrassment to Elizabeth I’s government.

Stanley’s soldiers subsequently entered Spanish service, becoming part of the very forces they had been sent to oppose.

Lewkenor knew this military world from personal experience.

His account of the English fugitives is crowded with soldiers who abandoned their former allegiance, entered the armies of Catholic princes and found themselves dependent upon foreign commanders.

Captain Jaques Francesco belonged to this company.

He followed Stanley into Spanish service and became notorious for his hostility towards England.

The man who had once benefited from the generosity of English patrons was now accused of working against the country in which he had been raised.

A dangerous man dressed in black

The historical Jaques acquired a formidable reputation among English agents operating in the Low Countries.

He was described as wearing black satin doublet and hose, with a sharp black beard and a sword to match.

English informants regarded him as a dangerous and violent opponent.

The manuscript preserves the contemporary description of his conduct:

injurious words, and malevolent, nay treasonable, persuasions and acts.

Such language presents a figure of considerable menace.

He was a professional soldier who had become estranged from his former countrymen, a traveller whose experience had brought him into a world of political suspicion and divided loyalty.

In Shakespeare’s comedy the melancholy Jaques is not a violent conspirator. Yet he possesses the same sense of alienation from the society around him.

He has travelled, observed and returned with a profound distrust of human conduct.

Carol Enos drew attention to the possible relationship between the historical soldier and Shakespeare’s melancholy character.

The comparison is especially intriguing because the historical Jaques was not simply another traveller named Jacques. He belonged to the military world that Lewkenor described in detail, and his story had been printed several years before Shakespeare’s comedy.

Lewkenor’s account of Jaques

In The Estate of English Fugitives, Lewkenor describes Francesco’s advancement under Stanley:

Lately (the old English and Irish soldiers being worn out) Sir William Stanley was fain to fill up his regiment with Wallons and Dutchmen, appointing new captains over them, and making one Jaques Francesco his lieutenant coronel; one born in Antwerp of Italian parents, but from his infancy brought up in England…

Lewkenor continues by recalling the benefits Francesco had received from English patrons, especially the Lord Chancellor.

He had been advanced to honourable positions in Elizabeth’s service and had enjoyed the generosity of influential friends.

Yet he subsequently became an enemy of the country that had supported him.

Lewkenor condemns his ingratitude:

there is not any beyond the sea that doth run a more violent and unreverent course against the person of her majesty, and the state of our country, than he doth

His account ends with a warning:

if he will needs run on his desperate course, forgetful of the oaths and protestations he made when he departed out of England, let him likewise attend that scourge and punishment which ever followeth such infidelity.

The passage is more than a denunciation of one soldier.

It reveals Lewkenor’s wider concern with the consequences of exile, the loss of national allegiance and the moral corruption of men who had abandoned their former loyalties.

These are precisely the questions Shakespeare explores in a gentler and more ambiguous form through the exiles of Arden.

Jaques and Rosalind: the price of experience

In one of the most revealing exchanges of As You Like It, Rosalind mocks the melancholy traveller.

When Jaques explains that his sadness has been produced by his experiences abroad, she replies:

A traveller! By my faith, you have great reason to be sad: I fear you have sold your own lands to see other men’s; then, to have seen much and to have nothing, is to have rich eyes and poor hands.

The observation might almost serve as an epitaph for the disappointed soldiers described by Lewkenor.

Men left England seeking advancement, wealth, religious freedom or military honour, only to discover that foreign service could bring poverty, imprisonment and disgrace.

Jaques answers Rosalind:

Yes, I have gained my experience.

She responds:

And your experience makes you sad: I had rather have a fool to make me merry than experience to make me sad; and to travel for it too!

The comedy here turns upon a serious question.

What has the traveller gained by abandoning the security of home?

Knowledge may be purchased at the cost of happiness, property and belonging.

Lewkenor had experienced the hardships of military service abroad and repeatedly contrasted the apparent opportunities of foreign adventure with the dangers that accompanied them.

Shakespeare gives the same question a comic form through Rosalind’s irreverent interrogation of Jaques.

The Forest of Arden and the world of exile

The Forest of Arden is the central setting of Shakespeare’s comedy.

It is a place where dispossessed courtiers, younger sons, servants and travellers seek refuge from political injustice.

Duke Senior has been driven from power by his brother Frederick and now lives among his followers in the forest.

Orlando flees the hostility of his elder brother Oliver, accompanied by the faithful servant Adam.

Rosalind escapes the court in disguise, taking Celia and Touchstone with her.

The forest gathers people who have lost their places in the established social order.

The geographical setting also invites comparison with the Ardennes, the wooded region extending across parts of France, Belgium and Luxembourg.

During the religious wars, the Low Countries and the neighbouring French territories became routes of travel for English Catholic exiles, soldiers and students moving towards the colleges at Douai and Rheims.

These were regions familiar to Lewkenor and the English soldiers whose experiences he recorded.

Carol Enos observed that Shakespeare’s play displays an unusually vivid understanding of the social experience of exile.

The inhabitants of Arden must learn to live outside the protections of courtly society, depending upon friendship, hospitality and the resources of the countryside.

The forest is therefore not simply a pastoral paradise.

It is also a place of displacement, uncertainty and the possibility of return.

Sir William Stanley and the exiled Duke

Clare Asquith has proposed a political reading of As You Like It in which the exiled Duke represents Sir William Stanley.

In this interpretation Orlando has been associated with Stanley’s son Rowland, while the Welsh parson Sir Oliver Martext has been connected with figures from the Catholic exile community.

Such readings belong to a wider attempt to recover the religious and political circumstances behind Shakespeare’s pastoral drama.

The historical Stanley had indeed become a prominent figure among English Catholic soldiers abroad.

His betrayal of Deventer and subsequent service to Spain made him an important symbol of the dangers of divided allegiance.

Lewkenor’s Estate of English Fugitives provides a detailed contemporary account of this world.

The political interpretation becomes more interesting when read alongside the documented career of Captain Jaques Francesco, who served under Stanley and shared the experience of military exile.

Here we encounter a network of historical figures whose names and experiences can be compared with the characters inhabiting Shakespeare’s forest.

Edmund Spenser and Rosalind

The literary connections extend beyond the soldiers.

Shakespeare’s principal narrative source for As You Like It was Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde, published in 1590.

Lodge belonged to the literary world of Edmund Spenser, whose poetry repeatedly explored pastoral exile, disappointed love and the relationship between the poet and his patrons.

Spenser had celebrated a Rosalind in The Shepheardes Calender, while Lodge’s pastoral romance developed the story that Shakespeare would later transform for the stage.

Juliet Dusinberre, editor of the Arden Shakespeare edition of As You Like It, has emphasised the play’s relationship with Spenser’s poetry.

She describes Spenser’s influence as so extensive that the comedy might almost be regarded as a tribute to him.

This connection is particularly interesting because Spenser was an admirer of Sir Lewes Lewkenor.

In his commendatory sonnet for The Commonwealth and Government of Venice, Spenser praised the translator’s literary style.

Lewkenor thus belonged to the same literary environment in which pastoral romance, foreign travel and the experiences of exile were transformed into poetry and drama.

Adam and the faithful servant

Orlando’s elderly servant Adam is one of the most moving figures in the play.

He offers his savings to his young master and accompanies him into exile, despite his age and physical weakness.

Adam’s loyalty contrasts with the treachery and ingratitude displayed by Oliver.

The contrast belongs to one of the central moral concerns of Lewkenor’s Estate of English Fugitives.

Lewkenor repeatedly condemns soldiers who have betrayed patrons and benefactors whose generosity should have secured their loyalty.

His account of Jaques Francesco is particularly severe because the captain had received so much assistance from English gentlemen before turning against his former countrymen.

Adam embodies the opposite principle.

He remains faithful even when loyalty requires personal sacrifice.

The play places the virtue of the old servant beside the instability of political and familial relationships.

In Arden, honour is not determined simply by rank or profession.

It is revealed through conduct.

The wounded deer and the politics of the forest

One of the most memorable episodes in As You Like It concerns the wounded stag observed by Jaques.

The animal has been abandoned by its companions and stands weeping beside a stream.

Jaques interprets its suffering as an emblem of human injustice.

The scene turns a familiar hunting image into a meditation upon exile, cruelty and the treatment of the vulnerable.

Recent research by Chris Laoutaris and Yasmin Arshad has proposed a political interpretation of the wounded stag in relation to the Earl of Essex and the circumstances of his disgrace.

That reading supplies another possible contemporary context for Shakespeare’s forest.

But the central dramatic function of the episode is already clear.

Jaques sees in the abandoned animal a reflection of the injustices he has encountered among men.

His melancholy transforms the forest from a place of innocent recreation into a landscape of moral judgement.

The return from exile

The conclusion of As You Like It restores the dispossessed Duke to his former position.

Frederick, who had usurped his brother’s authority, undergoes a religious conversion and abandons his campaign against the exiles.

The restoration allows the inhabitants of Arden to return to society.

Yet Jaques refuses to accompany them.

He chooses instead to seek out the newly converted Frederick and continue his life of contemplation.

The decision is striking.

The character most closely associated with travel, melancholy and estrangement cannot simply return to the world he has left behind.

Experience has changed him too profoundly.

Lewkenor’s Estate of English Fugitives ends with an impassioned appeal to English soldiers serving foreign princes.

He urges them to abandon their dangerous and unrewarding service and return to their native country.

His language is extraordinarily emotional.

Lewkenor’s appeal to the English fugitives

At the conclusion of The Estate of English Fugitives, Lewkenor turns from the particular experiences of soldiers abroad to a direct appeal for their return.

He asks the Englishmen serving foreign princes to consider what they have sacrificed: their native country, their families, their former companions and the security they might have enjoyed at home.

The book has already exposed the disappointments of foreign military service. Soldiers have been cheated of their wages, betrayed by commanders, imprisoned, impoverished and drawn into religious and political conspiracies.

Now Lewkenor urges them to abandon their dangerous hopes of advancement and recover their place within English society.

His appeal is both patriotic and deeply personal.

He writes as a man who has himself experienced the uncertainty of military service abroad and understands the longing for home.

The ending of Shakespeare’s As You Like It transforms the same desire for restoration into comedy.

The exiled Duke recovers his authority. Orlando is reconciled with Oliver. Rosalind and Celia can return to the society from which they were expelled.

But Shakespeare also recognises that not every exile wishes to return.

Jaques refuses the restoration

When Duke Senior learns that his brother Frederick has abandoned his hostility and restored the dukedom, the inhabitants of Arden prepare to resume their former lives.

Jaques, however, announces that he intends to remain apart.

He wishes to seek out the newly converted Frederick, whose decision to abandon worldly ambition interests him more than the celebrations surrounding the restoration.

Jaques declares:

Out of these convertites
There is much matter to be heard and learn’d.

The decision is entirely consistent with his character.

He has spent the play observing human conduct, collecting examples of folly and transforming experience into melancholy reflection.

The restoration of the court cannot restore his earlier innocence.

He has travelled too far, seen too much and acquired a temperament that makes ordinary society difficult to endure.

Shakespeare therefore gives the comedy two endings.

For most of the characters, exile concludes with reconciliation and return.

For Jaques, the experience of exile has become a permanent condition of mind.

The real Jaques and the imagined Jaques

The historical Captain Jaques Francesco and Shakespeare’s melancholy Jaques are very different figures.

Francesco was a soldier whose career became entangled in the religious and military conflicts of the Low Countries.

He entered Spanish service, became associated with Sir William Stanley and acquired a reputation for violence and disloyalty.

Shakespeare’s Jaques is not presented as a conspirator or military traitor.

He is a contemplative traveller whose melancholy is the consequence of experience.

Yet the relationship between the two figures becomes interesting when examined through Lewkenor’s account of English fugitives.

Both belong to a world of travel, displacement and estrangement from former allegiances.

Both have acquired identities shaped by their experiences abroad.

And both remain separated from the settled society to which other characters hope to return.

The comparison is especially valuable because Lewkenor’s book provides a contemporary account of the historical captain and the circumstances of his exile.

The comedy of exile

Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden is a place of apparent freedom.

Its inhabitants escape the restrictions of courtly society, adopt disguises, pursue romantic adventures and discover new relationships.

But the forest also exposes the insecurity of those who have lost their homes.

Duke Senior depends upon the loyalty of his followers.

Orlando and Adam face hunger and exhaustion.

Rosalind must conceal her identity to protect herself.

And Jaques finds that travel has left him permanently dissatisfied.

The comedy repeatedly returns to the difference between the pleasures of imagined exile and the hardships of actual displacement.

Lewkenor’s Estate of English Fugitives examines the same contradiction from the perspective of men who had abandoned England in pursuit of military honour, religious conviction or worldly advancement.

Many discovered that the promises of foreign service were illusions.

Some returned home. Others remained abroad, unable or unwilling to recover their former lives.

Shakespeare gives that historical predicament a pastoral and theatrical form.

The cumulative connection

The investigation into As You Like It brings together several distinctive strands of Lewkenor’s experience.

His Estate of English Fugitives describes the historical Captain Jaques Francesco, whose military career and exile have been compared with Shakespeare’s melancholy traveller.

The betrayal of Deventer and the subsequent careers of Sir William Stanley’s soldiers supply a historical background to the play’s concerns with loyalty, displacement and return.

Lewkenor’s own military experience gives substance to the difficulties faced by Englishmen serving abroad.

The Forest of Arden evokes the wooded landscapes and routes of continental exile, while the comedy’s treatment of travel repeatedly questions whether experience abroad brings wisdom or unhappiness.

The literary connections extend towards Edmund Spenser, Thomas Lodge and the pastoral tradition in which Shakespeare developed his comedy.

And the ending of the play returns us to the central question of Lewkenor’s book: what becomes of the individual who has abandoned his native country?

For most of Shakespeare’s characters, reconciliation makes return possible.

For Jaques, the experience of exile has become inseparable from his identity.

The historical and literary worlds meet in that distinction.

❦ ✥ ❦

Continue:

Love’s Labour’s Lost — Navarre and the French Wars →

Film: As You Like It

Explore the connections between Shakespeare’s
As You Like It, Sir Lewes Lewkenor’s
The Estate of English Fugitives, the historical
Captain Jaques Francesco, and the world of
exile, military service and the Forest of Arden.

Sources and Further Reading

Sir Lewes Lewkenor, The Estate of English Fugitives (1595), particularly the account of Captain Jaques Francesco, Sir William Stanley and the English soldiers serving abroad.

The Privy Council and intelligence correspondence concerning Captain Giacomo Francesci, the Babington conspiracy and the betrayal of Deventer.

Thomas Lodge, Rosalynde (1590), Shakespeare’s principal narrative source.

Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender; Juliet Dusinberre, introduction to the Arden Shakespeare edition of As You Like It.

Carol Enos, research concerning Captain Jaques Francesco and Shakespeare’s melancholy Jaques.

The Master of the Ceremonies, October 2026 manuscript, chapters concerning the English fugitives, Captain Jaques, the Low Countries and Shakespeare’s pastoral comedy.