George Soule

Most people feel guilty about comedy. They know what plays they are supposed to like: searing indictments of the social order, unblinking probes of our psychic ills, profound utterances about the human condition. And they do like many of these. But often when they find themselves enjoying equally well an entertainment which does not appear to indite, provoke, or utter, they feel that their taste must be low, that they are guilty of savoring childish sweets inappropriate to serious adult life.

As You Like It is a case in point. A duke, his daughter Rosalind, and her eventual husband Orlando are exiled for very slight reasons. All wander about the Forest of Arden, where they meet various absurd characters and discourse on life and love. Finally, as if on schedule, a few miraculous conversions allow everyone to return to court and live happily ever after. What could be sillier, more light-weight? Bernard Shaw apparently could think of nothing. Though Rosalind, to Shaw, "is not a human being [but] simply an extension into five acts of the most affectionate, fortunate, delightful five minutes in the life of a charming woman," the other roles are "impostures," related neither to "human nature or dramatic character." Shaw much preferred inditing or probing plays such as Measure for Measure or Hamlet. To enjoy As You Like It, one has only to see it. To enjoy it intelligently, one may have to ask whether tragedy is inherently a greater form than comedy, whether the unhappy truths about life are any more true than the happy ones.

As You Like It opens in a typically Shakespearean fashion: Act I is as spare, as unrealistic and as fascinating as a folk tale. But in Act II, we do not find the happy-go-lucky forest we expected. The play's pace slows to reveal a sweetly melancholy duke, a cynical Jaques, two brave girls and their fool, and the desperate Orlando. The forest is a bitter place (winds bite, deer are killed), yet it is somehow better than the hypocritical court. In spite of Jaques' railing, a tone of melancholy fellowship reigns. By Act III, the winter winds are forgotten, and Rosalind, Orlando, Touchstone the fool, and Jaques comment on love until it is time to bring the action to a close.

Touchstone and Jaques make the most acid comments on the possibility of love and happiness. In Act II, Jaques' famous speech, "All the world's a stage," puts man before us as a futile creature, forever decaying, essentially physical and isolated. Touchstone too remarks on the destructive powers of time: "from hour to hour we ripe and ripe,/ And then from hour to hour we rot and rot." These cynical notes continue into Act III, but there they are subordinate to the sentiments of the lovers.

Though Rosalind is the charmer Shaw describes, she is much more. Like most of the heroines of Shakespearean comedies, she is a complicated girl. She is strong, courageous, intelligent, and witty: she often speaks with a joyous verbal extravagance, as when she tells Orlando she lives "in the skirts of the forest, like fringe upon a petticoat." Yet she is completely feminine. She speaks both openly and enigmatically; she tantalizes he lover while she is testing him; her emotions can momentarily reduce her to near speechlessness.

We see her most clearly in the two scenes in which Orlando woos her without realizing he is talking to his beloved disguised as a boy. Early in Act III, when Orlando identifies himself as the man who has tacked up verses to Rosalind on every tree, Rosalind teasingly observes that because he has none of the marks of a lover--lean cheeks, sunken eyes, and a neglected beard--he must not be in love. Further testing the unsuspecting Orlando, she tells how she once cured another of love:

I set him every day to woo me at which time would I, being but a moonish youth, grieve, be effeminate, changeable, longing and liking, proud, fantastical, apish, shallow, inconstant, full of tears, full of smiles, for every passion something and for no passion truly anything, as boys and women are for the most part cattle of this color; would now like him, now loathe him; then entertain him, then forswear him; now weep for him, then spit at him; that I drave my suitor from his mad humor of love to a living humor of madness; which was, to forswear the full stream of the world and to live in a nook merely monastic.

Orlando understanably replies "I would not be cured, youth."

When he returns later to practice wooing Rosalind, Orlando protests that if he cannot possess his beloved he will die. Rosalind glibly replies:

No, faith, die by attorney. The poor world is almost six thousand years old, and in all this time there was not any man died in his own person . . . in a love-cause. Troilus had his brains dashed out with a Grecian club; yet he did what he could to die before, and he is one of the patterns of love. Leander, he would have lived many a fair year, though Hero had turned nun, if it had not been for a hot midsummer night; for, good youth, he went but for to wash him in the Hellespont and being taken with the cramp was drowned: and the foolish chroniclers of that age found it was 'Hero of Sestos.' But these are all lies: men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love.

When Orlando innocently participates in a mock wedding, he protests he will love Rosalind "forever and a day." "Say a day," Rosalind replies,

Without the 'ever.' No, no, Orlando; men are April when they woo, December when they wed: maids are May when they are maids, but the sky changes when they are wives. I will be more jealous of thee than a Barbary cock-pigeon over his hen, more clamorous than a parrot against rain, more new-fangled that an ape, more giddy in my desires than a monkey: I will weep for nothing, like Diana in the fountain, and I will do that when you are disposed to be merry; I will laugh like a hyen, and that when thou art inclined to sleep.

In these speeches, Rosalind's characteristic wit is at its highest peak, even when a note of pathos at the brevity of love creeps in. But lest we think that Rosalind is only a mocker of love, she tells Celia after Orlando has gone:

O coz, coz, coz, my pretty little coz, that thou didst know how many fathom deep I am in love! But it cannot be sounded: my affection hath an unknown bottom, like the bay of Portugal.

A witty, extravagant speech, but also a heartfelt one. She perhaps strikes us as more sincerely in love because she recognizes love's limitations.

As You Like It is a play about love; yet its theme is not early summarized. Shakespeare circles around his central subject, giving us this view and that, implying that the full truth is not one or the other, but a combination of all views, logically inconsistent though they may be. And at the center is Rosalind, as witty and incisive as Jaques, yet as foolishly in love as Orlando. Time and time again we see the two sides of her nature alternate-she weakens, she recovers strength-or exist side by side: "My affection hath an unknown bottom, like the bay of Portugal."

Shakespeare does appear to take sides, however, if we look at what happens to Touchstone, the sophisticated and courtly clown. Though he has a cynicism worthy of Jaques, he becomes a lover of the slatternly Audrey. And before he is married, he too thinks of the limitations of love as symbolized by the horns of a cuckold: "As horns are odious," he concludes, "they are necessary"--i.e., unavoidable. And he goes on to say that the horned forehead of a married man is "more honorable than the bare brow of a bachelor."

Here perhaps we are close to the theme of the play: In the forest the characters learn about love and its limitations. Jaques chooses to desist from loving (and its analogue, deer hunting); the rest stake their all on love's uncertainties. Their willingness to hazard all they have with an open heart and without illusions, without a neurotic need for security, makes the theme of this play similar to that of several of the great tragedies in which we are told that "ripeness" or "readiness" is "all."

Bernard Beckerman, in his book Shakespeare at the Globe, reveals that many critics have called Shakespeare a crude dramatist because his plays do not come to a single moment of climax which reveals a theme. He, however, maintains that a typical Shakespeare play has not a climax but a "climatic plateau" in which the theme is examined. This plateau is not hard to find in As You Like It; it probably extends from Orlando's love-sick entrance in Act III until his brother Oliver reappears to precipitate the conclusion. For some readers the ending of the play may seem weak; the Rosalind we love retreats into near speechlessness, all the strands of the plot are neatly tied up, the goddess of marriage sings, and the play is over.

I would regard the last act of As You Like It, not as falling off from the richly suggestive middle of the play, but rather as a celebration of what has happened. The song "It was a lover and his lass" summarizes the gaiety and brevity of love, Touchstone has his last foolery, and Hymen enters to express the hopes for love which the play has generated:

Wedding is great Juno's crown:
O blessed bond of boards and bed!
Honor, high honor and renown,
To Hymen, god of every town!

This verse may not make as interesting reading as other lines in Shakespeare, but when effectively sung and elaborately produced, it can be wonderfully effective. As Northrop Frye has remarked:

Shakespearean comedy illustrates . . . the archetypal function of literature in visualizing the world of desire, not as an escape from 'reality,' but as the genuine form of the world that human life tries to imitate.

Here is a clue to the business of comedy in general and As You Like It in particular. This play is not only a thematically rich exploration of love; it is also a work of art which brings us to a celebration of some of those harmonies that only persons like Rosalind--sane, witty persons with open hearts--can occasionally achieve.

from Setting The Stage: A Guidebook to Season '66. Minneapolis: The Guthrie Theater, 1966.