When Jaques launches into the play's most famous speech in 2. 5, he is performing several important functions. At the simplest dramaturgic level, as we realize at the speech's conclusion, his disquisition on the seven ages of man creates the impression of time passing, a cover for Orlando's absence from the stage as he goes to rescue old Adam. He enters, supporting or even carrying Adam, just as Jaques speaks the lines that Adam's presence exemplifies:

At the most obvious level of signification, Jaques’ speech is a moralization or secular sermon, complete with illustration. But its very rhetoric, its carefully elaborated use of the Elizabethan commonplace Totus mundus agit histrionem, points also to its selfconsciousness, to a recognition that the speaker is an actor on a stage, with a dual audience – the Duke and his retainers in the play's story, and the watchers of the scene in the Globe theatre. Much of the pleasure to be had from this play and other Shakespearean comedies arises from the acknowledgement of this stage–audience collaboration, a sophisticated playing with the very idea of theatre. The audience, as Michael Mangan argues, enjoys a dual consciousness:

As well as laughter, there is also the pleasure to be gained from watching a virtuoso perform, whether it be juggling with clubs or playing with words, as Jaques is doing here. Because of Shakespeare's linguistic genius, almost all the characters in a Shakespearean comedy have the opportunity to display this virtuosity; but most specifically, it is the province of the stage's clowns.