This play has divided critics and enthusiasts of Shakespeare for centuries; it has divided me, too. Some fifteen years ago I believed this not a comedy but a troll job by a bitter, disengaged author. Just this past week, though, I found myself chuckling along and enjoying it.
As You Like It’s playful spirit and pastoral setting have won over many critics; so too has one of Shakespeare’s most dynamic and voluble characters, Rosalind. Back then I was checked in my pleasure by a bitter, persistent undertone of betrayal and disappointment. Perhaps time has conditioned me to accept such bleaker notes now.
The narrative is still choppy and its finale a rushed, nonsensical mess. George Bernard Shaw described the title as a dig at an audience too easily pleased; it’s hard not to agree when much of the action involves offstage conversions and rescues.
The play presents Rosalind as love object of Orlando, a young man stripped of his inheritance by a jealous brother. After her uncle evicts her from his duchy, Rosalind follows Orlando into the Forest of Arden. There they meet a group of dispossessed nobles led by her father, Duke Senior, who we learn has adapted well to the rustic life:
DUKE
SENIOR
Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;
And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything. [Act II, scene i, lines 12-17]
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| Rosalind discovers love at first sight when she spies Orlando as the underdog in a wrestling match. After he wins, she sighs: "Sir, you have wrestled well and overthrown / More than your enemies." [I, ii, 244-245] Painting by Daniel Maclise from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Daniel_Maclise_-_The_Wrestling_Scene_in_As_You_Like_It.jpg |
A reeducation is in order for our main characters; Orlando in particular must try being less a poet (at which he’s not that good) and more a lover. Rosalind’s lessons involve disguising herself as a young man, Ganymede, and offering to either cure Orlando of his folly or help him realize his dream. Orlando, recognizing himself as hopelessly smitten and not guessing with whom he’s dealing, accepts the arrangement.
The back-and-forth of the pair is by far the most enjoyable and compelling part of the play. There is also a famous speech delivered by Lord Jaques, Duke Senior’s most dyspeptic follower, where he discourses upon the Seven Ages of Man:
JAQUES
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. [II, vii, 139-143]
This begins with a helpless infant, “mewling and puking,” and carries on with assorted follies involving “woeful ballad” and “bubble reputation” before closing on this grim note:
JAQUES
Last
scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. [II, vii,
163-166]
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| Lord Jaques contemplates the lesson of a wounded stag. "Tis just the fashion: wherefore do you look / Upon that poor and broken bankrupt there?" [II, i, 56-57]. Painting by William Hodges from https://shakespeare-navigators.ewu.edu/as_you_like_it/As_You_Like_It_Scene_Index.html |
How do you get back to the business of laughter after that? Strangely, As You Like It does so rather smoothly. Bitter notes keep popping up, yet nothing unpleasant hangs in the air long.
Something does seem to be bothering Shakespeare in the construction of the play; namely his constant references to unfaithful women. The lords of Duke Senior’s court sing about wearing the horns of cuckolded husbands. Rosalind in the guise of Ganymede teases Orlando about it:
ORLANDO
A man that had a wife with such a wit, he might say, “Wit, whither wilt?”
ROSALIND
Nay, you might keep that check for it till you meet your wife’s wit going to your neighbor’s bed. [IV, i, 158-161]
Many of As You Like It’s sharpest jabs are directed at the ideal of love, specifically how it fails to measure up to reality. The play’s characters are constantly being rooked by their own designs for finding and keeping love.
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| "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." [IV, i, 139-142]." Maggie Smith as Ganymede (Rosalind in disguise) coaches Jack Wetherall's Orlando in a 1977 Stratford Festival production. Image from https://www.facebook.com/StratfordFestival/photos/ |
Orlando has the hardest time of it; even if he won over his love object Rosalind as early as Act I, he is too self-absorbed to notice. His flowery verse marks him as an excessive romantic: “Run, run, Orlando, carve on every tree/The fair, the chaste, and unexpressive she.” [III, ii, 9-10]
Meanwhile, Silvius, a shepherd, loves shepherdess Phebe, his desire fueled by her contempt for him. Phebe can’t abide someone who loves her, so when she meets aloof Rosalind disguised as Ganymede, she is intrigued. Rosalind is curtly dismissive, calling out Phebe’s “inky brows” and “bugle eyeballs.” This renders Phebe even more besotted.
A more cynical and thus successful practitioner of love is Touchstone, a clown who joined Rosalind (and her cousin Celia) in exile:
TOUCHSTONE
We that are true lovers run into strange capers. But as all is mortal in
nature, so is all nature in love mortal in folly. [II, iv, 51-54]
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| Touchstone makes his move on the simple shepherdess Audrey in a scene depicted in this 19th century advertisement for canned meats. As first he plans to have some sport with her, but gradually love catches him up. Image from https://www.digitalcommonwealth.org/search/commonwealth:v692t791h |
Touchstone enjoys the upper hand through most of the play, but ultimately even his wings are clipped by his need for the simple country lass Audrey. For the most part, Touchstone is more insult comic than clown, mocking the country ways of kindly Corin and the jaundiced views of Lord Jaques. He’s fun that way, if extraneous to the plot.
Which is not saying much, given As You Like It’s plot is very thin. It boils down to a woman who loves a man pretending to be a man to toy with the man who loves her until she finally lets him off the hook. This is a shame because the opening set-up, involving conflicts with a jealous brother and a cruel uncle, offer rich story possibilities mostly abandoned after an action-packed Act I (there’s even a wrestling match!) The next four acts play like a string of interludes to a story that is never resumed.
There is much ready humor on display, enjoyable on page as on stage:
JAQUES
By my troth, I was seeking for a fool when I found you.
ORLANDO
He is drowned in the brook. Look but in, and you shall see him. [III, ii,
282-285]
As You Like It is known as a “pastoral play” like Love Labor’s Lost and A Midsummer’s Night Dream, but is more open-ended than either. Much of the humor comes from country and courtly living being contrasted often, like in this exchange between Touchstone and Corin:
TOUCHSTONE
Why, if thou never wast at court, thou never saw’st good manners; if thou never
saw’st good manners, then thy manners must be wicked, and wickedness is sin,
and sin is damnation. Thou art in a parlous state, shepherd.
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| Corin lays out the virtues of the simple life to a skeptical Touchstone, a back-and-forth which leads to some quotable moments. From a 1902 painting by Frederick William Davis at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_You_Like_It |
CORIN
Not a whit, Touchstone. Those that are good manners at the court are as
ridiculous in the country as the behavior of the country is most mockable at
the court.
[III, ii, 40-48]
Whether one is better than the other is not clear; at play’s end, after having declared his preference for the great outdoors, Duke Senior returns to his duchy anyway, as do all of his followers excluding Lord Jaques, who apparently prefers living in a cave.
The lack of coherence can be a feature or a bug, depending on the disposition of the reader. On stage, I suspect that crafty direction and broad comic acting could lift potentially dreary scenes and keep an audience entertained enough to not notice what they are watching is not so much a play but a revue examining the many pitfalls of love.
Shakespeare was about to begin his last full decade as a playwright when As You Like It was staged, if the 1599 date scholars give it is correct. If so, he was on the verge of his most famous work.
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| "Only in the world I fill up a place, which may be better supplied when I have made it empty." [I, ii, 182-183] Laurence Olivier played Orlando in a 1936 movie adaptation of As You Like It, Olivier's first venture into cinematic Shakespeare and the only one of those he didn't also direct. Image from https://californiaherps.com/films/snakefilms/AsYouLikeIt.html |
A reference to Christopher Marlowe gives a dating clue when Phebe sighs: “Dead shepherd, now I find thy saw of might: / ‘Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?’” [III, v, 81-82] Marlowe, famous in his time for his poem “The Passionate Shepherd To His Love,” had died back in 1593, but Phebe is quoting from Marlowe’s “Hero And Leander,” a narrative poem first published in 1598.
As You Like It is full of incident but winds up being a one-character play; fortunately that character is winning enough company. Rosalind bursts with such dynamic energy; you never quite know whether she is going to pull a rabbit out of her hat or burst one’s bubble with a dose of common sense, like with Orlando’s claim of dying from love. Love is no tragedy, she replies; at worst it’s a painful inconvenience:
ROSALIND
The poor world is almost six thousand years old, and in all this time there was
not any man died in his own person, videlicet, in a love-cause…Men have
died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love. [IV, i, 89-92;
101-102]
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