Jaques takes no part in the unfolding of the plot, and confines himself to wry comment on the action and exchanges with his fellow characters.

[2][n 1] Dame Helen Gardner has described Touchstone as the parodist who must love what he parodies, and Jaques as the cynic who cannot be cured of melancholy because he likes himself as he is.

[4] Clement Scott contrasted Touchstone "the licensed whipper of affectations, the motley mocker of the time" with Jaques, "the blasé sentimentalist and cynical Epicurean" – "happy harmonising of two moods of folly".

[6] In his study of Shakespeare's characters (1817), William Hazlitt wrote: The character is introduced at second hand, at the beginning of Act II, when one of the banished Duke's attendant lords describes Jaques' distress at the killing of a deer to feed the exiles, and his comparison of the seeming unconcern of the other deer with the indifference of humanity to the troubles of fellow humans.

Jaques is seized with the idea that he has found his true vocation, and bids his comrades "Invest me in my motley" so that he can become a professional jester.