The presiding deity of melancholy was Saturn - crafty, secretive, inimical to love, unforgiving. More generally, the study of melancholy was one of the ways in which the Elizabethans tried to make sense of the inner workings of the human mind - Hamlet provides the fullest instance. A professional melancholic like Jaques was someone who declared impatience at human pretence and scorn of mortal folly. Like the fool, he had a licence to speak plainly to his lord, to offer satire and criticism directly where other courtiers had to be more oblique. Duke Senior keeps Jaques by him for the 'matter' that flows from him in his 'sullen fits'.
Experience eventually leads most characters in the play towards love, forgiveness and companionship.
Most find that the certainties with which they had approached their time in Arden, or the proverbs with which their education had equipped them to combat the blows of fortune, do not survive the pastoral world. For the melancholy Jaques, however, his profit from experience is a sense of separation, isolation and removal from the procreative impulse. Like Malvolio, he is excluded from the unions that end the play, though his exclusion is presented as a conscious choice to be separate. The verbal battle between Jaques and Orlando, 'Monsieur Melancholy' versus 'Signior Love', is finally resolved when Jaques is proved to be a fool, someone absorbed in himself' gazing on his own image. Love is figured in the play as the opposite of narcissism, as union with the other, as a force that drives individuals out from themselves to discover their identity in society and in their loved ones.