The first approach is a traditional textual analysis of As You Like It, which tries not to deaden the comedy with too much earnestness. However while  As You Like It appeals to all audiences, including those who enjoy on-stage comic action and rude jokes, it does have serious things to say about love, sex, marriage, morals and the clash of human temperaments.

“Approach Two,” livens things up by demonstrating that As You Like It invites interpretation as a witty attack on many of the conventions that governed love, marriage and literature in the middle and upper social levels of Shakespeare’s England.

The Title

No commentary that I’ve so far read on As You Like It has discussed the title in any detail; everyone seems to understand it without effort, but it seems ambiguous to me. Does the title:

1. Warn audiences that some of them will “like” some parts of the play, and others will “like” other parts?
2. Therefore, does the title invite audiences or readers to “like” the bits of the play that please them and discard the ones that don’t?
3. Or is Shakespeare asserting that everyone who watches or reads this comedy will like it—a kind of advertisement—“This is how you like it”? –“This is a play to please all tastes”?
4. Or does the title mean, “This is a comedy. It has a happy ending the way you like it?”
5. Or does the title mean, “This is a difficult play—understand it the way you like to” (go deep, or go shallow)?

This ambiguity isn’t a product of Elizabethan English; it’s a Shakespearean challenge or enigma which alerts us to the multi-layered texture of this work.

Dating, Early Performances and Authorship

Because of an entry in the Stationer’s Register, where English printers entered the titles of books they intended to print as a safeguard against unauthorised copies (comparable with illegal downloads today), we know that As You Like It existed as a play text by 1600. However, the 1623 First Folio text beginning on page 185 is the earliest surviving copy. The Folger “Publishing Shakespeare” website: http://www.folger.edu/publishing-shakespeare#firstfolio allows you to play virtually with the First Folio.

The earliest recorded performance of As You Like It took place in 1740. However we can assume that Shakespeare’s company, the Chamberlain’s Men, performed the play as part of its repertoire between 1591 and 1602 when sexual love was the primary theme of Shakespeare’s comedies and tragedies. As You Like It therefore belongs to the decade that produced Romeo and Juliet (1591-95), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595-96), The Merchant of Venice (1596-98), Much Ado about Nothing (1598), and Twelfth Night (1601-1602). This is also the decade when Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets first told the story of the speaker’s love for a young man and a “dark lady.”  As You Like It therefore embodies insights and feelings from Shakespeare’s first-hand investigation of sexual love. Tradition, and evidence not yet disproved, support the conclusions that Shakespeare was the writer of As You Like It; that at this time he was aged about thirty-five; that he was a husband and the father of three children, one of whom, Hamnet, the only boy, died suddenly aged eleven in August 1596; and that Shakespeare had been, or was still, passionately in love with a woman who wasn’t his wife, and with a young aristocratic man.

A word of warning about available modern performances of As You Like It, since the wrong choice here can cause problems of response and understanding. The two performances that I’ve watched so far are the Laurence Olivier film of 1936 and the Helen Mirren BBC television movie of 1978. Neither of these strikes a good balance between the central pair of lovers—Rosalind and Orlando. Olivier outweighs his co-star, Elizabeth Bergner, while Mirren plays magnificently against an over-youthful Brian Stirner as Orlando. Perhaps more than most of Shakespeare’s plays, As You Like It is easy to distort. Especially in its central section, set in the Forest of Arden, words prevail over action. As You Like It can be most clearly and accurately understood by reading an annotated edition such as those by Brissenden and Latham with patience and care (John Gray’s bibliography at the end of this lecture  gives the details of these and also a preliminary list of secondary reading).

Reputation

The critical consensus has long been that As You Like It and Twelfth Night are the “best” of Shakespeare’s comedies, and that As You Like It is the absolute peak of Shakespeare’s achievement as a comic dramatist.

According to Harold Bloom, writing in 1998, As You Like It makes an important contribution to Shakespeare’s “invention of the human.” Bloom’s approach to reading Shakespeare may seem simple and obvious. At times it’s also conservative to the point of regression. However, his contention that Shakespeare’s plays helped to shape and deepen our modern, i.e. post-Renaissance, Western notions about what it means to be human, appeals, especially since Bloom supports it by some inspired analysis:

As You Like It is poised before the great tragedies; it is a vitalizing work, and Rosalind is a joyous representation of life’s possible freedoms. The aesthetic representation of happiness demands a complex art; no drama of happiness has ever surpassed Rosalind’s. (Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human 211)

Writing many years before Bloom, in an essay entitled “Let the Forest Speak,” first published in 1959, Helen Gardner declared: “This is a play to please all tastes” (58). She describes As You Like It as “this radiant blend of fantasy, romance, wit and humour” (58), and asserts:

As You Like It is the most refined and exquisite of the comedies, the one which is most consistently played over by a delighted intelligence. It is Shakespeare’s most Mozartian comedy. (59)

Gardner has the grace to reject the deadening solemnity of scholarly analysis and critical evaluation (including her own) of what she sees as such a delicate, sprightly and intellectual comedy. I’ll try to follow her example by keeping this discussion as light as possible. I warn you, however, that my whole approach to life and art tends mostly to be deadly earnest!

TWO APPROACHES

In this first discussion I’ll offer a traditional textual analysis of As You Like It, using Bloom’s and Gardner’s evaluations as a starting point. I’ll do my best to avoid deadening the comedy with too much earnestness. However, using this approach, I’ll suggest that As You Like It has serious things to say. I’ll argue that it appeals to audiences who want to gain insights into love, sex, marriage, morals and human temperaments, as well as to those who enjoy on-stage action and rude jokes.

In “Approach Two,” I’ll liven things up by demonstrating that As You Like It also invites interpretation as a witty attack on many of the conventions that governed love and marriage in the middle and upper social levels of Shakespeare’s England. This comedy can especially be read as a light-hearted commentary on the literary conventions of the era, some of which it parodies.

Approach One: As You Like It as High Comedy

Traditional literary critics like Bloom and Gardner write critical appreciations. In other words, they point out what there is to like about literary works—a project that’s in tune with Shakespeare’s title for our present play. They clarify aspects of the work that less experienced readers may miss, but which enrich our humanity and understanding of life and people, if we’re enabled to perceive them. They expound the internal textual features that have made works into classics treasured by many generations. Often they try to explain away or excuse what seem to be, or really are, weaknesses in the works.

As You Like It does have an apparent weakness, and that’s the plot. Shakespeare crams virtually the whole plot into Act 1 and into a few episodes and speeches towards the ends of Acts 4 and 5. All the plot confusions are symmetrically resolved by Rosalind’s single action of discarding her disguise as Ganymede. She promises this resolution at the end of Act 5 Scene 2 (lines 105-115) and her “magic”—“I am a magician” (5.2.68)—fully achieves it in a few lines in Act 5, Scene 4, the comedy’s last scene. Here the four courtships reach their romantic conclusions, to no one’s surprise, in the unions of the four couples: Rosalind and Orlando; Celia and Oliver; Phoebe and Silvius; and Audrey and Touchstone. These mechanics of plotting leading to a predictable resolution are handled gracefully, cheerfully and poetically, but not many in the audience would want to argue that in themselves they are the main interest of As You Like It.

Instead of focusing on plot, the play’s centre, i.e. the middle acts where most of the meaning can be found, rely on situation comedy, comedy of character, verbal comedy, inspired poetry and interesting ideas to engage the audience. As Gardner says: “Story was not Shakespeare’s concern in this play; its soul is not to be looked for there” (60).

Problems with the Plot?

• Oliver has no motive for favouring his second brother, Jaques de Boys, or for discriminating against his third and youngest brother, Orlando.
• The usurping Duke Frederick dismisses his niece Rosalind from his court suddenly and unreasonably—“Let it suffice thee that I trust thee not.” (1.3.53); later he gives to Celia the feeble excuse that he fears that Rosalind is outshining her (1.3.75-81).
• The villains’ conversions to virtue and repentance are sudden to the point of being laughable. The conversions are all narrated second-hand, not performed, late in the play. Orlando rescues Oliver from the snake and the lioness; Oliver repents, and immediately falls in love with Celia and she with him. Rosalind provides a wonderful summary of the couple’s instantaneous love, 4.2.28-39.
• Even more unbelievable is the plot line of Frederick’s repentance and his returning of his dukedom to his brother. This happens when he has just led an army into the forest with a view to destroying the exiled Duke. A chance meeting with “an old religious man” on “the skirts of this wild wood” brings this about. How marvellous it would be if all wars could be so easily prevented! The unlikely story is narrated in blank verse by Jaques de Boys, the second brother, who for no obvious reason enters the play with this news at the very last moment (5.4.146-161).

Gardner explains all these signs that Shakespeare was compressing and hurrying the plot by arguing that unlikely second chances and fantastic coincidences are the “very spirit of comedy,” which is about life renewing itself against the odds:

Comedy is an image of life triumphing over chance….it embodies in symbolic form our sense of happiness in feeling that we can meet and master the changes and chances of life as it confronts us. (61)

Much of Act 1 in As You Like It is dedicated to exposition and advancing the plot, in scenes for example between Orlando and Adam, between Oliver and Charles the wrestler, and between Frederick, his daughter and niece. However, You’ll remember that Gardner claims that “This is a play to please all tastes,” and Act 1 lightens such “housekeeping” scenes with features that appeal to different tastes.

• Lovers of on-stage action will enjoy the opening, attention-grabbing fight between Orlando and Oliver, and they’ll enjoy the wrestling match even more.
• Lovers of verbal comedy will enjoy the word play between Touchstone, Rosalind and Celia (1.2.55-85).
• Lovers of comic characterisations will respond to Monsieur Le Beau, who is an English send-up of French foppery, and possibly none too bright; but Monsieur Le Beau turns out to have a good heart, when he warns Orlando that he and Rosalind are in danger from Duke Frederick.
• Lovers of simple moral teaching will find plenty to enjoy in Act 1, in the easy distinction between good and evil embodied in the two pairs of brothers (doubles): Duke Senior versus Duke Frederick; and Orlando versus Oliver.

“Well, this is the forest of Arden” (Rosalind 2.4.13)

When the characters of Act 1 move into the forest, the audience gets to focus consistently on what Gardner calls the “soul” of As You Like It. Shakespeare locates what Bloom calls his “invention of the human” mainly in the forest.

There’s food for thought in the fact that Shakespeare’s tragedies, such as Hamlet, Othello and King Lear, deal centrally with mature family life, or with life and death after marriage. By contrast, Shakespeare’s comedies focus on courtship as a time of new beginnings, freedom, clowning, fantasy, fairies and magic. The comedies deal with a time of life—late teens and early twenties—when, at least to the imagination, most options seem open. The comedies’ choice of place supports the liberation granted to the characters and vicariously to the audience, by this choice of life-stage. Characters travel to places filled with potential, places where new discoveries and rapid change are possible. Examples are magical islands like Prospero’s in The Tempest, the fairy tale forest of Titania and Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the mysterious country of Illyria in Twelfth Night, and the rustic, romantic Forest of Arden in As You Like It. It’s no accident that scholars have found the geographical location of Arden difficult to pinpoint. Is it in England? In France? Furthermore, the play refers to the forest fringes—sheep farms and pastures, the undefined spaces between the wild and rural.

In the liminal (transitional, marginal) time of life before marriage which is the focus of Shakespeare’s comedies, and in their liminal settings like the Forest of Arden, ordinary dividing lines and levels and hierarchies are subject to play and experimentation. The rigid Elizabethan social structures suddenly become permeable, even fragile, even airborne. The Forest of Arden allows time and space for stating and debating. Gardner uses the analogy of a tennis game for the comedy’s run of debates about philosophies and ethics, love and manners. The debates lead to transformations in characters and their getting of wisdom and self-knowledge. The distanced perspective that the Forest provides produces new insights into the life of court and city depicted in Act 1.

Forest Ethics and Philosophy

From Act 2, when most of the characters move into the forest, Shakespeare continues to “please all tastes.” He teaches an obvious morality—what medieval and Renaissance people called “sentence”—in the story of Orlando and the old servant Adam. Adam admires Orlando for his “graces” and “virtues,” and behaves towards the young man with exemplary generosity and loyalty. Orlando reciprocally takes the opportunity to praise in Adam, “The constant service of the antique world,/ When service sweat for duty, not for meed!” (2.4.58-59). This pair or double—the old man and the young—the third double that we’ve so far spotted—exemplifies the loving self-sacrifice that, at least in theory, was the bedrock of human interactions in Shakespeare’s Christian world.

Act 2, however, explores philosophy as well as ethics. It opens with the thesis enunciated in the famous speech by Duke Senior: that an element or core of goodness exists in nature and humans; that adversity is a path to self-knowledge and a clear understanding of other people’s motives, and to clarity and freedom from delusion. The Duke finds insight and ethical teaching in natural objects—trees, brooks, even “sermons in stones” (2.1.1-17). His optimism contains aspects of nature mysticism.

Jaques’ world view is the anti-thesis to this thesis of the Duke’s. His equally, if not more famous speech, which is often quoted misleadingly out of context, is the essence of reductionism (2.7.139-66). Bloom states that reductionism—looking on the black side—is Jaques’ approach to everything. As his name—the Elizabethan word for toilet—suggests, Jaques’ inclination is to immerse himself in life’s excrement. His most famous speech reduces the “seven ages of man” to a meaningless catalogue of acted scenes, with the whole procession from babyhood to old age ending in nothing.

But Jaques’ speech, as both Gardner and Bloom point out, is preceded and followed by Orlando’s actions of filial love towards Adam. Adam himself demonstrates that an old age founded on virtuous living in youth is a something, even if it may indeed precede “mere oblivion,/Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything” (2.7.165-166). Orlando’s care, as well as the care of him “that doth the ravens feed,/And providently caters for the sparrow” (2.3.44-45), i.e. God, also means that Adam is far from exemplifying “unregarded age in corners thrown…” (2.3.43). Adam clearly avoids this fate, which he had earlier feared, and affirms, in contradiction of Jacques, that “[his] age is as a lusty winter,/Frosty but kindly.” (2.3.53-54). The shepherd Corin is a second old man in As You Like It who challenges Jaques’ reductionist view of human life by living example. Corin is the embodiment of independent, free and productive contentment:

Sir, I am a true labourer. I earn that I eat, get that I wear; owe no man hate, envy no man’s happiness; glad of other men’s good, content with my harm; and the greatest of my pride is to see my ewes graze and my lambs suck. (3.2.69-73)

Since it is a play, and not only philosophy, As You Like It uses characterisation to explore ways that temperament shapes a person’s world view. Shakespeare carries out this investigation mainly through Jaques, who, with the pleasant singer Amiens, is one of the two named lords who attend Duke Senior. (These two form another of the comedy’s doubles.) The forest dwellers attribute Jaques’ pessimistic view of human experience to his melancholy humour. They regard melancholy as a sickness, and Jaques’ characteristic attitude does in fact have much in common with the medical condition that the twenty-first century diagnoses as depression. In 1621, Robert Burton brought Elizabethan and Jacobean ideas on the topic, often drawn upon by Shakespeare and other writers of his period, in his huge popular compendium, The Anatomy of Melancholy.

Although assumed to be sickness, Jaques’ melancholy has dramatic and thematic value. He draws attention to evils in society that need to be found out, challenged, resisted and eliminated. As a satirist It’s Jaques’ job to expedite this process, as he explains:

Give me leave
To speak my mind, and I will through and through
Cleanse the foul body of th’infected world,
If they will patiently receive my medicine. (2.7.58-61)

Burton’s Anatomy similarly combines a medical account of melancholy with satire of contemporary abuses.

Love

Although it therefore broaches broad philosophical and ethical themes, and explores issues of human temperament and world view, the central theme of As You Like It is sexual love, i.e. Eros. The drive towards self-giving to a special “other” or “others”—of the opposite, or the same sex, or of both sexes according to Shakespeare’s own model—is central to our humanity. In the Forest of Arden Shakespeare “invents the human” mainly by exploring the depth and breadth, the highways and byways of this core experience.

1. As a comedy, the play invites us as readers or audience to join the characters in celebrating the joy, the creativity in words and action, the energy, and the sheer fun of being in love. Rosalind is the character who revels and plays most delightfully and creatively with her own love state and that of others.
2. Characters in Arden often take part in witty verbal play concerned with sex and love. Examples are Orlando’s debate with Jaques (3.2.243-85) and Rosalind’s and Orlando’s many exchanges, which are the “soul of the soul” of As You Like It. On one level, the jokes appeal because they’re sometimes rude; on another level they appeal because they’re clever; on deeper level still because they’re wise. As Gardner says, “This is a play to please all tastes.”
3. The comedy also explores the frustrations and suffering of love, which is another frequent concern of Shakespeare’s poems and plays. As You Like It suggests that such miseries can be overcome by good will and patience, combined with serendipity, the improbable if not impossible good luck that decides the outcomes in comic worlds. Silvius is the simplest and clearest example of suffering rewarded.
4. As You Like It combines realism with its froth and fantasy: it insists that human love is grounded in sex, in animal drives and instincts. The references to the mating of sheep in the wit contest between Corin and Touchstone (3.2.74-81) are an example of this realistic grounding of the comedy. After Rosalind has barely said “hello” to Orlando, she names him to Celia as “my child’s father” (1.3.11).
5. Finally, like all of Shakespeare’s love comedies, As You Like It assumes that, in addition to providing necessary and inevitable plot closures, marriage is the rightful goal of love and courtship.

Despite the religious wars that loomed throughout Elizabeth’s reign, England remained a deeply Christian country. People could be fined or imprisoned for not attending church every Sunday, or for failing to attend Church on all seventeen of the saints’ festivals scattered throughout the year. In such a society, it was hardly possible to imagine that love, at least love displayed publicly on a stage, could have any ending other than marriage. However tempestuous the love affairs of Shakespeare’s private life may have been, the shape of his comedies, as well as his determined maintenance in Stratford-upon-Avon of a respectable, upwardly-mobile family life, suggest that he agreed. Only Touchstone, whose job as the Fool is to question accepted values, openly resists the marital norm:

As the ox has his bow, sir, the horse his curb, and the falcon her bells, so man hath his desires; and as pigeons bill, so wedlock would be nibbling. (3.3.72-74)

Conclusion

The more you read and think about As You Like It, the more you’ll find. The discoveries are as delightful as they are inexhaustible. In the short space of this first discussion, I hope that by using traditional methods of textual criticism to at least have demonstrated that As You Like It is a “high” Shakespearean comedy–that it has serious things to say about love, sex, marriage, morals, human temperaments, and life’s meaning, or lack of meaning. I also hope to have shown that, in fulfillment of Shakespeare’s title, this is a richly textured comedy that is indeed likely “to please all tastes,” —tastes that range from the most sophisticated and intellectual, to the simplest enjoyment of on-stage action and rude jokes.

WORKS CITED

Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead Books, 1998. As You Like It: Chapter 14: 202-25.

Gardner, Helen. “As You Like It.” First published More Talking of Shakespeare, Ed. John Garrett. London: Longmans, Green, 1959: 17-32. Shakespeare The Comedies,: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Kenneth Muir. Twentieth Century Views. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965: 58-71.

Shakespeare, William. As You Like It. Ed. Alan Brissenden. The Oxford Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993.

 

As You Like It: An Introductory Bibliography Compiled by John Gray

Editions

Brissenden, Alan, ed.   As You Like It.  Oxford Shakespeare. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.

Knowles, Richard,  ed.  As You Like It.  New Variorum Shakespeare. MLA: New York,  1977.

Latham, Agnes, ed.  As You Like It.  Arden Shakespeare. London: Methuen, 1975.

Oliver, H. J. , ed.  As You Like It. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968.

Bibliography

Halio, Jay L. and  B. J. Millard , ed. As You Like It: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1985.

Critical Studies

Belsey, Catherine. “Disrupting Sexual Difference: Gender and Meaning in the Comedies.” in John Drakakis, ed.  Alternative Shakespeares.  London: Methuen, 1985. 166-90.

Bono, Barbara J. “Mixed Gender, Mixed Genre in Shakespeare’s As You Like It.” in Lewalski, B. ed. Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History, and Interpretation. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Univ Press 1986.  189-212.

Park, Clara. “As We Like It: How a Girl Can be Smart and Still Be Popular.” Lenz, C.R.S. et al. The Woman’s Part: Feminist Readings of Shakespeare. Urbana, Ill.: U of Illinois P, 1980. 100-116.

Gardner, Helen. “Let the Forest Judge.’ (1959); rpr. Brown, J. R. Shakespeare: Much Ado About Nothing and As You Like It. A Casebook. London: Methuen, 1979. 149-67.

Gay, Penny.  As She Likes It: Shakespeare’s Unruly Women. London: Routledge, 1994.

Jenkins, Harold. “As You Like It.’ Shakespeare Survey 8 (1955): 40-51.

Montrose, Louis. “‘The Place of a Brother’ in As You Like It:  Social Progress and Comic Form.” Shakespeare Quarterly 32 (1981): 28-54.

Nevo, Ruth. “Existence in Arden.” Comic Transformations in Shakespeare.  London: Methuen, 1980. 180-99.

Traub, Valerie.  Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama.  London: Routledge, 1992.

As You Like It in Performance

Bulman, J. C.  “As You Like It and the Perils of Pastoral.”  J. C. Bulman and R. Coursen Shakespeare on Television: An Anthology of Essays and Reviews. London: Univ. of New England, 1988.  174-78.

Approach Two: As You Like It as Wit and Satire

I express my thanks to my friend and colleague Mr. John Gray for ideas and arguments developed in the following discussion.

Our first approach (above) considered the philosophical and ethical ideas and the endorsement of romantic love that together define As You Like It as “high,” i.e., not farcical or slapstick, comedy. This second approach explores As You Like It  as a witty attack on many of the conventions that governed love and marriage in the middle and upper social levels of Shakespeare’s England. The focus will be on As You Like It as a comic commentary on the literary conventions that expressed these themes, some of which it parodies.

Real Love—Rosalind’s “Drama of Happiness”

I’ll begin by considering Harold Bloom’s affirmation already quoted, that As You Like It is Rosalind’s “drama of happiness” (Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human 211). Rosalind embodies a wise and balanced ideal of young love, which for many people is the joyful summit of their lives’ happiness. The comedy captures this peak experience through characterisation, music, song, dance and the forest setting.

I propose further that Rosalind represents everything that Shakespeare, now aged about thirty-five, had learned about love from his relationships with both women and young men. Ample evidence in his sonnets, his long poem Venus and Adonis, Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night and his other turn-of-the-century comedies, support the inference that Shakespeare’s love life was passionate and intense, shifting frequently between bliss and torment.

Rosalind’s place as Shakespeare’s representative becomes more and more obvious as As You Like It moves towards its climax. In explaining her refined accent to Orlando when she first meets him as Ganymede, Rosalind says: “indeed an old religious uncle of mine taught me to speak, who was in his youth an inland man (i.e. not outlandish or countrified, but an educated city dweller); one that knew courtship too well, for there he fell in love. I have heard him read many lectures against it….” (3.2.329-335). The education in love that Rosalind claims to have received from her “religious” uncle can be re-attributed to Rosalind’s creator, Shakespeare. By Act 5, “the old religious uncle” has transformed into a magician: “Rosalind: I have since I was three years old conversed with a magician, most profound in his art, and yet not damnable” (5.2.58-59). She swears faithfully that she herself therefore has magic powers: “I say I am a magician” (5.2.67-68).Later, when Orlando is explaining to Duke Senior the background of “this shepherd boy,” Ganymede, Rosalind’s mentor has transformed yet again, into “a great magician/ Obscurèd in the circle of this forest” (5.4.33-34).

Surely these descriptions hint at the playwright’s secret positioning within his creation. Furthermore, it is in her allotted role as this magician’s apprentice, i.e. as the dramatist’s stand-in, that Rosalind fulfils her promise to resolve the confusions and bring about the weddings of the four couples in the comedy’s last scene. Rosalind’s magician uncle is the predecessor of the magician Prospero in The Tempest, who is a more obvious stand-in for Shakespeare as internal creator within his creation. As the magician’s apprentice in As You Like It, Rosalind embodies all the love lore and wisdom that Shakespeare had learned over the course of his tempestuous youth.That Shakespeare chose a female character as the main transmitter of his play’s meaning says much about his willingness to sidestep or overstep some of the gender rules of his rigidly patriarchal late Elizabethan world.

The French feminist theorist Luce Irigaray argues that all other social distinctions, such as class and ethnicity, originate in the “phallic” preferring of the masculine over the feminine. Much in Shakespeare’s work confirms that he was a firm supporter of stability in the state, and I don’t at all believe that As You Like It seeks to overturn the social order. However, subversion, i.e. hidden challenging, revolt and questioning, is evident in the way Shakespeare plays with gender, especially Rosalind’s gender. In As You Like It a boy actor plays a girl, who plays a boy, who, in Orlando’s company, plays at being a girl. The epilogue, spoken by Rosalind, begins by pointing out Rosalind’s feminine gender: “It is not the fashion to see the lady the epilogue” (1-2), but ends by admitting that “her” (the boy actor’s) femininity is only playing: “if I were a woman” (16-17).  Rosalind’s multiplying and constantly shifting gender identities embody As You Like It’s central, mercurial, delighted play with gender. They also suggest Shakespeare’s own gender ambiguity and shifting identification, expressed through his attachments to both male and female lovers.

The truth, spontaneity and totality of Rosalind’s love for Orlando are clear from her first conversations with him at the wrestling match, where she declares: “Sir you have wrestled well, and overthrown/ More than your enemies” (1.2.238-239). Like Juliet, Olivia in Twelfth Night, and other young Shakespearean female characters, Rosalind is honest with herself and her lover about her feelings. Throughout the comedy, the depth of her love is evident in her spontaneous reactions. For example, when Celia first reports Orlando’s arrival in the Forest, Rosalind is dismayed at her male disguise:

Alas the day, what shall I do with my doublet and hose! What did he when thou sawest him? What said he? How looked he? Wherein went he? What makes he here? Did he ask for me? Where remains he? How parted he with thee? And when shalt thou see him again? Answer me in one word. (3.2.211-216)

Rosalind’s love manifests again when she faints at the sight of the Orlando’s napkin dyed in his blood, following his battle with the lioness (4.3.154-157).

Given Rosalind’s self-knowledge, which some philosophers see as the foundation of any wisdom achieved by humans, we may ask why she decides to maintain her disguise as Ganymede, and to tutor Orlando on the subject of love, under the guise of Rosalind (Love 101!). Her behaviour may seem like a refined form of torture, but in fact it’s the opposite to the behaviour expected from a cruel courtly lady. The “lady” is precisely the part that Rosalind/Ganymede refuses to play. Instead she uses her disguise as a boy to teach Orlando what love is, and how to love her.

The pragmatic “plot” reasons for the pretend “Rosalind” role, on top of Ganymede, on top of the true Rosalind (on top of the Elizabethan boy actor) are:

1. Rosalind is already in disguise before she meets Orlando in the Forest. She can hardly just give this up, since it affects people other than Orlando.
2. Her doubled disguise is an engaging game of chance and wit—it’s a creative form of fun. Rosalind revels in escaping detection by her cleverness, and, egoistically but also for reassurance, enjoys discovering Orlando’s feelings for her. This game of love embodies the playfulness of youth—the all-too-short time of courtship and freedom (see Lecture 1).
3. Rosalind’s disguise as Ganymede ensures that from the very beginning, Orlando appreciates her as a human, and not just as a beauty icon and sex object.
4. The camaraderie of two boys together establishes a friendship between the lovers that will endure the ups and downs of sexual attraction and the challenges of married life. (The words of the traditional marriage service are grounded in a realistic recognition of these: “for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part.”) As Duke Senior says when he blesses Rosalind’s and Orlando’s union: “You and you no cross shall part” (5.4.126). (“cross” means:  a) burden of suffering; b) being at odds, at cross purposes; and c) being angry with each other).
5. Although Orlando’s love is as sincere and deep as Rosalind’s, he needs educating about love’s true nature; he needs to grow up from being “young Orlando” as he is so often called; he needs to disentangle himself from conventions and acting, because love as Rosalind understands and experiences it transcends artifice.

Although he doesn’t undergo improbably sudden and complete changes of heart like Oliver and Duke Frederick, Orlando develops more radically than any other character in As You Like It. He enters the play as an angry young man, eager to win justice by asserting his rights. He learns loyalty, patience and compassion by suffering hunger and by caring for Adam. He learns about struggle through his battles with Charles the wrestler and the lioness. He learns generosity when he chooses to forgive Oliver. By the play’s end Rosalind has educated him to share her own youthful-mature appreciation of love’s integrity and centrality to human experience. Orlando’s graduation from Rosalind’s university of love comes when he realises: “I can live no longer by thinking” (5.2.48)—i.e. his time for dreaming and for playing at love has come to an end.

Love Realism in As You Like It

As You Like It offers a nuanced representation of erotic love which seems to many readers and viewers to be true to this central but complicated human experience.

How then does the play accomplish its realistic exploration of love?

The first answer is that it does so by giving much stage time to love-realists. The two leading love-realists are Rosalind and Touchstone, but characters like Jaques, Celia and Corin also contribute to this comedy’s realism about love. Shakespeare gives Rosalind lines that have since become famous, because they state bedrock truths. For example, she educates Orlando, who protests that Rosalind’s frown “might kill me,” by pointing out that: “Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love” (4.1.97-98).

Towards the end of the textual (first) approach above to As You Like It, I mentioned that Rosalind realistically recognises the reproductive, sexual foundation for love-feelings when she names Orlando early as “my child’s father” (1.3.11). Touchstone pushes this attitude to excess, because he sees sex—without reference to children—as the whole of love. His one-eyed view makes Touchstone an effective weapon for satirising unreal, over-romantic love conventions and ideas, a function that his very name proclaims. (Free Dictionary defines “touchstone” as “a hard black stone, such as jasper or basalt, formerly used to test the quality of gold or silver by comparing the streak left on the stone by one of these metals with that of a standard alloy”). In Shakespeare’s turn-of-the-century plays, Touchstone is first in a procession that consists of Feste in Twelfth Night and King Lear’s unnamed but unforgettable Fool–three wise fools who expose the folly of others. More than Feste and Lear’s Fool, however, Touchstone also exposes his own weaknesses and genuine folly.

In As You Like It Orlando, Silvius, and William—the last named may be another self-parody by Shakespeare—are among the victims of Touchstone’s reduction of love to sex. Read, for example, Touchstone’s bawdy representation of Silvius’ pining love for Phoebe in a speech (2.4.43-55) which builds concentrated references to testicles, penises, intercourse and orgasms into a final, sweeping chiasmus: “But as all is mortal in nature, so is all nature in love mortal in folly.”

Furthermore, Touchstone wants to marry the delightful, honest (as she rightly affirms) and naïve Audrey solely for sex: “I am not a slut, though I thank the gods I am foul” (3.3.33-34). As a clown (=jester) of the court and the city—unlike his rival William, who is a country clown (=yokel), Touchstone sees himself as Audrey’s superior. However, his flights of wit and fancy go right over her head, and one feels that after the wedding she’ll continue effortlessly to hold her own.

It’s clear from Sonnet 129—“Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame /Is lust in action,” that, at least in some moods, Shakespeare detested lust per se, even or especially in himself. His sonnet captures those occasions, when, instead of a caring passion for a loved other, hopefully leading to the birth of children, lust took control in the form of a mindless irresistible drive—a compulsion divorced from human feelings and relationship. Sonnet 129 recognises that this drive is the opposite of freedom, love and happiness. The sonnet’s powerful statement of this idea further supports Bloom’s thesis that Shakespeare’s plays “invent the human.” They do this by seeking to control what Shakespeare and most of his contemporaries judged to be a sub-human and therefore animal appetite. The Flemish painter Paul Bruegel’s allegorical engraving in the late 1550s of Luxuria—the sin of Lechery–conveys this judgement by depicting many animal-like creatures .

In As You Like It Shakespeare’s rejection of lust per se surfaces in a forest debate, when Duke Senior responds to Jaques’ claim to credentials as a satirist, i.e. to his boast (already quoted) that he will “Cleanse the foul body of th’infected world.” Duke Senior replies:

Most mischievous foul sin in chiding sin;
For thou thyself hast been a libertine,
As sensual as the brutish sting itself,
And all th’embossèd sores and headed evils
That thou with licence of free foot hast caught
Wouldst thou disgorge into the general world. (2.7.64-69)

The metaphors of the sores, swellings and scabs of venereal disease, of vomit, and even, again with reference to Jaques’ name, of excrement (see Brissenden’s annotations on this passage) are a powerful warning against lust that lurks, like the author-magician himself, in a dark corner of this comedy’s overall sunny exploration of love. Yet that doesn’t mean that the warning should be overlooked.

Hunting metaphors occur frequently in dialogue in As You Like It, and an actual hunt ends with the killing of a deer for food. Hunting, especially of deer, has been seen as a noble pastime from early medieval times to the present day. Shakespeare’s intertwining of hunting and love imagery in As You Like It invites deeper consideration: is this conjunction an argument against cruelty in love? Or does the play perhaps seek to highlight the differences between hunting and courtship?

Rosalind and Touchstone are the chief (though very different) means through which As You Like It advocates realism in the pursuit of love. However, among his other targets, Jaques’ “seven ages of man” speech satirises “the lover,/ Sighing like a furnace, with a woeful ballad/ Made to his mistress’ eyebrow” (2.7.147-149). Before she falls in love herself, Celia too is a love realist. She makes fun of Rosalind’s sudden passion for Orlando; for example, she teases Rosalind by holding back the name of the young man who is hanging love poems on the trees (3.2.158-220), and comments: “It is as easy to count atomies as to resolve the propositions of a lover” (3.2.224-225). I wish there was time to discuss Celia and Rosalind’s friendship, which is yet another of the play’s symmetrical doubles, and a trans-gender parallel to the boyish friendship between Rosalind and Orlando. Celia sacrifices her wealth and position as the Duke’s daughter when, out of friendship, she quits safety and the court to accompany Rosalind. This ethical action, which liberates Celia from the constrictions of rank, contributes much to the freedom that most of the characters attain to in the Forest of Arden.

Literary Love Conventions

The playing with literary love conventions in As You Like It is delightful and above all lighthearted, because Shakespeare encourages his audiences simultaneously to identify with the conventions from the inside and to laugh at them from the outside. Or, perhaps what’s happening is that some audience members will “go with” the inner experience, while others will “go with” the laughter, and there will be crossovers at different points in the performance. This conjunction of sincerity and laughter makes As You Like It an equal mixture of two genres—it is comedy and it is satire. But through it all, Eros, the essence of true love, escapes from Shakespeare’s treatment unscathed!

The comical symmetrical exchanges, when all the lovers appeal to Rosalind in a series of refrains at the end of Act 5, Scene 2, are a climactic meeting point between the two genres:

Phoebe: Good shepherd, tell this youth what ’tis to love.
Silvius: It is to be made of sighs and tears,
And so am I for Phoebe.
Phoebe: And I for Ganymede.
Orlando: And I for Rosalind.
Rosalind: And I for no woman. (5.2.78-83)

This pattern of speeches repeats three times, and is followed by a another, different chorus, until Rosalind is driven to comment: “Pray you, no more of this,/ ‘Tis like the howling of Irish wolves against the moon” (5.2104-105)—a satirist’s demand for realism, but one which doesn’t diminish the comic excess of the preceding declarations of love and longing.

For the sake of brevity, I’ll simply list and exemplify the four literary genres that Shakespeare comically and satirically uses and abuses in As You Like It:

1. Courtly Love Poetry: The 1580s and 1590s had produced a brilliant series of sonnet sequences and lyric poetry. Like all great traditions, this one reflected critically on itself. As You Like It raises this process of rueful comical self-reflection to a fine art through Orlando’s love poems. Act 3, Scene 2 quotes these at length, as hilarious examples of bad poetry, full of clichés, bad rhymes and failed scansion: “Rosalind: ….some of them had in them more feet than the verses would bear. Celia: That’s no matter; the feet might bear the verses….Rosalind: Ay, but the feet were lame….” (3.2.160-65). Furthermore, Touchstone provides an on-the spot bawdy parody, which ends: “He that sweetest rose will find/ Must find love’s prick, and Rosalind” (3.2.07-108). In the thirteenth-century French allegorical poem, The Romance of the Rose, the rose stands in Guillaume de Lorris’ serious part of the narrative for the lady’s love, but in Jean de Meun’s satiric sequel, the rose stands for the lady’s sexual organs. An obscure pun on Rosalind’s name (meaning “exquisite rose”) is probably also at play in Touchstone’s parody.
2. Courtly Love Conventions: These evolved in Europe in the early Middle Ages, and remained powerful into modern times. They depict the lover as the suffering servant of his cruel, high-born lady.Three couples in As You Like It comment on courtly love conventions:

Orlando/ Rosalind: The name “Orlando,” the Italian form of “Roland,” a famous knight, has strong romantic connotations—see Brissenden’s note, p. 97. Orlando is a highly attractive example of a courtly lover, full of energy, sincerity and spontaneity. However, while he runs about the forest, ostentatiously pinning his praises of Rosalind to the trees, he is consciously playing the part of lover, as decreed by the conventions of courtly love. This makes Orlando almost as much of a performer as Rosalind herself, in her roles of boy playing girl, etc. Rosalind takes on the task of curing Orlando, so that he can approach her as his true self, and without a predetermined extravagant display. I suspect that in Orlando Shakespeare may be affectionately parodying his younger sonnet-writing self.

Silvius/ Phoebe: Silvius’s extreme servitude to Phoebe parodies the masochistic, idealistic servitude of the courtly lover, who under the conventions worships his lady as a goddess. Phoebe even manoeuvres Silvius into delivering her love-poem letter to his rival, Ganymede/ Rosalind (3.5. 4.3.77-140). Silvius’ speech following sums up the courtly lover’s role from the point of view of the lover; it is both touching and satiric:

So holy and so perfect is my love,
And I in such a poverty of grace,
That I shall think it a most plenteous crop
To glean the broken ears after the man
That the main harvest reaps. Loose now and then
A scattered smile, and that I’ll live upon. (3.5.99-105)

Notice the religious diction: “holy,” “grace”; and the ultimate value given to the lady’s smile as the lover’s reward.

Touchstone/  Audrey:  Touchstone is the opposite of a courtly lover, since, as I’ve argued above, he wants sexual fulfillment from Audrey, without concerning himself with her smiles. Touchstone and Audrey are both lovable characters in their different ways. However, together they remind the audience that the emotional and spiritual aspirations of the play’s other pairs of lovers are, after all, grounded in their bodies. Touchstone and Audrey constitute a realistic, lower-class comment on “noble love.”

3. Pastoral Conventions and Poetry: Pastoral is a highly contested term in recent theoretical discussions of the environment, literature and society. However, we can start to understand it through a definition that I have adapted from Yelland, Jones and Easton’s Handbook of Literary Terms:

Pastoral. From Latin pastor meaning a shepherd, the adjective applied to writings about shepherds and simple country life. The word bucolic, from Greek boukolos meaning a herdsman, has the same significance. The genre originated with the Greek poet Theocritus (third century B.C.), who wrote poems about the country life of Sicily. He was imitated in the first century B.C. by the Roman poet, Vergil, who called his poems bucolics and wrote about the land of Arcadia. Perhaps because these bucolics were selected for reading in the schools, they were also called eclogues. Through Italian, French and Spanish literature, the pastoral was introduced into English, and Spenser was its first great exponent in The Shepherdes Calendar (1579).

At first a little picture of country life in an actual place, the Greek pastoral poem became in later ages a conventionalised picture of ideal or Arcadian rusticity.  Nature was depicted in her most benevolent moods, shepherds and shepherdesses (swains and nymphs with classical names like Chloe, Phoebe –moon goddess, bright moon–, Silvius—from Latin silva, wood, forest–, Corin, Daphne, Phyllis) mingled to sing and make love in groves and meadows eternally green, and all was peace. A sophisticated conception of rural life was created, unreal and artificial but satisfying to the bored town-dweller who sighed for the Golden Age. (141)

Yelland, Jones and Easton go on to categorise As You Like It as a “pastoral play” (142). A closer consideration reveals, however, that this comedy’s relationship to pastoral conventions is just as unstable and complex as its relationship to the courtly love conventions with which the pastoral quickly became enmeshed. At one extreme, As You Like It shows up the unreality of pastoral by emphasising the muckiness of actual sheep and of real shepherds like Corin, and the harsh realities of winter weather. At the other extreme, As You Like It shows up the artificiality of pastoral by emphasising the literary nature of Silvius’s fantasy-love for Phoebe and of Phoebe’s more fantastic love for Ganymede—made even more fantastic because Ganymede is a woman. To complicate matters further, As You Like It also exploits pastoral conventions so that the audience can vicariously experience the pleasures of freedom in the Forest of Arden, with its joyful songs and dances.

4. Medieval and Renaissance Prose Romance: From the printing by Caxton in 1485 of Sir Thomas Malory compendium, Le Morte D’Arthur, prose romances had blossomed, in both England and continental Europe, as entertainment for the newly literate and upwardly mobile middle classes. Shakespeare’s main source for As You Like It was just such a work—Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynda: Euphues Golden Legacy—which Lodge wrote during a voyage to the Canary Islands in 1586-87, and published in 1590. The story was therefore topical when Shakespeare converted it into a play. Brissenden summarises the plot of Rosalynda and explains the many changes that Shakespeare introduced (Introduction 5-13).

According to my friend and colleague, John Gray, to whom I am indebted for ideas in this lecture, “Shakespeare is satirising romance plot-motifs for all he is worth.” This insight is a convincing explanation for the possible “Plot Problems” of As You Like It—the unlikely romantic incidents that we considered above under “Approach One.” Shakespeare is simultaneously:

• Using medieval romance conventions to make his story come out as he wants it to;
• Taking pleasure in these same creative conventions;
• Making affectionate fun of them.

To remind you, they consist of: the symmetrical sibling rivalries between Orlando (good) and Oliver (evil), and between Duke Senior (good) and Duke Frederick (evil); the wicked uncle who dismisses his good niece from his court without moral justification; the laughably rapid conversions of the two villains, Oliver and Frederick; Orlando’s heroic victory over the lioness; and finally the two young men (Orlando and Oliver) who flee to the forest where they court and marry two princesses (here Duke’s daughters) pastorally disguised. As John Gray writes:

Celia and Orlando’s evil elder brother, Oliver, are the third unlikely pair of lovers who are to be married before the end of the play.  They represent medieval courtly lovers.  Like Sir Orfeo (a medieval romance hero), the once malicious Oliver is wandering beard-bedraggled in the forest.  He falls in love instantly with the beautifully spoken shepherdess, Aliena, who like Perdita in The Winter’s Tale, turns out to be a rich princess all the time.  The speed with which Celia and the now-reformed Oliver fall in love is remarked on in Rosalind’s account; it too is part of Shakespeare’s parody of the conventions of medieval romance.

The Happy Ending

Shakespeare’s comedies all close with weddings—A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It, with LOTS of weddings! In comedy weddings and marriage are traditionally seen as doorways to a deeper fulfillment and happiness than mere courtship. However, they also have the effect, following the freedom and confusions of the time of courtship, of re-establishing and reaffirming the social order, including hierarchies of gender and class. This conformist discourse dominates the ending of As You Like It.

Like Shakespeare’s late romance The Tempest (1611), As You Like It contains a betrothal masque. In As You Like It the Roman marriage god, Hymen, embodies the wedding ideal. Quiet and serious music precedes his entrance, and the two poems that he speaks stress that marriage brings the harmony of heaven down into the sphere of earth. The lovers make their vows to each other in a sequence of tightly rhyming lines which symbolise this concord. Hymen blesses the unions of the four couples and a song—the last in the play—praises him, as it praises Juno, protectress of women and goddess of marriage and childbirth:

Wedding is great Juno’s crown,
O blessèd bond of board and bed.
’Tis Hymen peoples every town.
High wedlock then be honourèd.
Honour, high honour and renown
To Hymen, god of every town. (5.4.136-41)

The dancing and music that introduce the Epilogue are further symbols of the harmony and settled happiness of the married state, feelings that dominate the play’s ending.

However, the love realism of As You Like It introduces some fractures even into the joyful wedding closures:

• Jaques announces that he will join Duke Frederick as a convertite (monk): “There is much matter to be heard and learned” (5.4.180)—so Jaques will continue to be a seeker and philosopher. His aloneness is a discordant note in this scene of people coming together in love and harmony. Before his exit Jaques pronounces a satirist’s judgment on each of the four couples: he sees good where there is good, but predicts a marriage of only eight weeks for Touchstone and Audrey (5.4.186-87).
• Jaques’ realism about the married state supports Touchstone’s negative view of it (3.3.72-74; quoted under “Approach One” above).
• Rosalind herself warns about changes that accompany courtship’s transformation into marriage. In Act 4 Scene 1 she uses a trial wedding ceremony, which the audience may well understand as a wedding parody, to educate Orlando about the realities of gendered relationships within marriage:

“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.”  (4.1.134)

• Even the Epilogue, in which Rosalind as speaker undergoes mercurial changes of identity and gender, shows just how unstable a closure marriages can be, not because Shakespeare didn’t believe in marriage as a true sacrament and an essential social institution, but because change and instability are at the heart of human  life. For humans, change is almost the only constant.

“There’s No Clock in the Forest”

A final observation to be made about love, courtship and marriage in As You Like It is that, compared with Twelfth Night and Shakespeare’s sonnets, this play seldom refers to carpe diem, the “Gather ye rosebuds” theme which is central to Elizabethan writing about love. It’s as if, in escaping to the forest, the characters have escaped from time’s power, and that by returning to the city and the court, they again come under time’s spell. Beginning with Orlando’s discovery that “There’s no clock in the forest,” Orlando and Rosalind make fun of time’s fluctuations in an early dialogue that draws on distant citified examples (3.2.290-320). However Act 5 Scene 3 reintroduces the theme of time’s passing through Thomas Morley’s lovely song, “It was a lover and his lass”— “life was but a flower”; “love is crowned with the prime.” Because the time of youth and spring is short, the song urges “sweet lovers” to “take the present time.”