This lecture moves backwards through the text of As You Like It. Beginning with the Epilogue, it demonstrates that Shakespeare’s most loved comedy is a witty parody of medieval romance and other genres: song, dance, masque, the greenwood adventure, and courtly love.
References are to Alan Brissenden’s Oxford World’s Classics edition of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Oxford University Press, 2008.  

Shakespearean Epilogues

In my lectures on Henry IV Part 1 and Henry V, I drew your attention to Rumour’s unusual induction to the first play, and to Chorus’s metadramatic prologue to the second.  Both these openings were something new for Shakespeare, and both led to our uncovering something distinctive about the play.  I believe that the most profitable place to begin the study of As You Like It is with its distinctive Epilogue (227-228).

Have you ever asked yourself why Shakespeare plays end the way they do?  What is the function of an Epilogue?  Well, do you recall Puck’s final words in A Midsummer Night’s Dream?  He begs the audience not to blame  him for the blunders of a midsummer’s night:

If we shadows have offended,
 Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumbered here,
While these visions did appear.  (5.412-15)

Puck concludes:

 So, good night unto you all.
Give me your hands, if we be friends,
And Robin shall restore amends.  (425-27).

“Give me your hands” not only invites the audience to shake hands as a sign of friendship and to render applause.  It also invites them to join the ring of dancers. This conciliatory applause liberates the company of players, and assures the actor who played Puck that the play was not a bad one, that it “gave no offence.”

Bear with me for the next few minutes while I characterise the structure of an Epilogue, so that you can see just how As You Like It turns theatrical conventions of closure upside-down.  An Epilogue you know well is that to Henry IV Part 2. This also has both a speech and a dance, but it is far more modest than Puck’s speech in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  The actor asks,  “If my tongue cannot entreat you to acquit me, will you command me to use my legs?” (17-18).  After a dance, perhaps, it begins again, pointing out that as the gentlewomen have forgiven the play, the gentlemen will too, or disagree with them, “which was never before seen in such an assembly.”  It then finishes: “My tongue is weary, when my legs are, too, I will bid you good night” (lines 32-33).  Can you see that here again is the motif of “begging to be released,” or “acquitted,” and a motif of “freeing the actor” by forgiving such a displeasing play.  It addresses separately the gentlemen and the ladies.  It also assigns a particular movement of its speaker, perhaps a curtsy, but here the cessation of dance, as the point at which the audience is expected to applaud.

Shakespeare’s best known Epilogue is the one to The Tempest, which is spoken by an actor who has played not a mere conjurer as Rosalind claims to be (Epilogue, line 11), nor a sprite like Puck, but a high magician:

Now my charms are all o’erthrown,
And what strength I have’s mine own
Which is most faint . . .

Notice what is happening; in an Epilogue you may see the protagonist stepping out of character before your eyes and becoming the actor who impersonated the role.  Prospero continues:

                                  Let me not,
Since I have my dukedom got,
And pardoned the deceiver, dwell
In this island by your spell,
But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands.

Can you see the same motifs? 

             It finishes:  As you from crimes would pardoned be,
                                  By your indulgence, set me free.

Once again, the actor who was a magician begs your indulgence, and again, only the magic in the hands of the audience will set the actor free.  Can you see these recurrent motifs?

All the motifs recur in the Epilogue to As You Like It, but with one immediately apparent difference.  The character who speaks this Epilogue is not male.  That difference is a signal that other conventions will also be turned upside down.  If you  closely examine the Epilogue you will see that it reveals two things about Rosalind which it will certainly pay you to keep in mind when re-reading the play.

First, Rosalind is not a good Epilogue, since she is not a traditional one: 

What case am I in, then, that am neither a good Epilogue nor cannot insinuate with you on behalf of a good play? I am not finished (i.e. dressed) like a beggar, therefore, to beg will not become me.  My way is to conjure you. (lines 9-11)

Rosalind won’t beg release from the audience.  Instead  she claims to be an enchantress, like Puck and Prospero: “My way is to conjure you.” (Witches and warlocks conjure when they summon up spirits or devils by great invocations.)  

Secondly, Rosalind changes gender, just as in the play, and speaks the Epilogue in a “double voice.” She starts as female but ends as male.  At the outset Rosalind herself points out how unusual it is for the heroine to speak the Epilogue (lines 1-2).  My friend and colleague Ross Smith would argue that this appropriation of the Epilogue by the heroine shows Rosalind’s dominance of the play. Did you notice that the other three examples were all spoken by males?  Rosalind is speaking, then, in a woman’s voice at the start of the Epilogue:

It is not the fashion to see the lady in the Epilogue; but it is no more unhandsome than to see the lord in the Prologue. (lines 1-3)

Instead of disclaiming magic like Prospero, Rosalind, who claims to be magical, puts it to use.  When she begins to conjure her audience, she conjures the women first to do what she wants, unless they want a curse brought down on them, and she charges them on a very great score–by the love they bear men.  She then conjures the men, by the equally powerful charge of the love they bear women.  So far the Epilogue As You Like It resembles that to Henry IV Part 2 in addressing the sexes separately; but now it reverses the gender stereotype, saying to the men she can tell by their simpering and giggling none of them hates ’em.  She then performs magic before our eyes, and changes gender.  She–or is it now clearly he, the boy actor?—offers to kiss all the men:

If I were a woman, I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me, complexions that liked me, and breaths that I defied not, and, I am sure, as many as have good beards, or good faces, or sweet breaths, will, for my kind offer, when I make curtsy, bid me farewell. (lines 16-21)

It’s a sneaky way to steal applause—“When this dance stops and I curtsy, guys, only if you’re handsome, clap.”

And if you think about it, just who is offering to kiss the men?  The romantic heroine, or the boy actor who was dressed as a girl who was dressed as a man?   The men in the audience are placed, are they not, in the position of Orlando earlier in the play, when this boy dressed as a girl who dressed as a man offers to kiss them.  The women in the audience are in the position of Celia/Aliena, knowing the real gender of the speaker, and looking on amusedly at male embarrassment. 

Can you see how the Epilogue craftily recapitulates two of the unusual features of the play?

First, it recalls Rosalind’s earlier claim that she is indeed an enchantress who will untangle the mesh in which the sets of cross-matched lovers had become entwined.

Secondly, the Epilogue speaks with that double-voiced sexuality that recalls for the audience this comedy’s two great love scenes:— A.  Rosalind’s encounter with Orlando in the second half of 3.2 (lines 286-414); and  B. the scene in which Orlando arrives an hour late for his appointment with “Ganymede,” whom the audience knows is Rosalind cross-dressed (4.1.28-183).

So the Epilogue to As You Like It has the unusual effect of leading us to take a backward glance back into the world of the play.

As You Like It: The Epilogue

I also believe that the two features of As You Like It that the Epilogue recapitulates are the best points at which to enter a study of the play itself.

Do you remember that it is not only in the Epilogue that Rosalind claims the skills of sorcery? She makes the same claim before the “love quartet” scene  when, disguised as Ganymede, she says to Oliver:

Believe then, if you please, that I can do strange things: I have, since I was three-year-old, conversed with a magician, most profound in his art, and yet, not damnable…. It is not impossible to me to set [Rosalind] before your eyes tomorrow, human as she is, and without any danger. (5.2-56-65)

Through dramatic irony, and through Elizabethan conventions of disguise, we know what Orlando does not: that since Rosalind herself is speaking to him, the task is by no means an impossible one; nor does it need any magical skill.  Yet, when he registers amazement, she repeats her claim:  “By my life I do, which I tender dearly, though I say I am a magician.  If you will be married tomorrow, you shall, and to Rosalind, if you will” (5.2.69-70 ).  Rosalind then begins to act like a magician, not only in the eyes of the quartet of mismatched lovers, but also in the eyes of members of the audience, who know she can’t really be magical—or can she?

Still in impenetrable disguise as the youth Ganymede, she starts repeating incantatory spells which are full of paradox both for her auditors and her audience. This is one of those comedic rituals, as I call them “ring-routines,” best seen in The Comedy of Errors but used everywhere–from Mozart’s operas to TV situation comedy.  Briefly, Rosalind addresses a ring of listeners, saying much the same words as she moves from one listener to the next, but the words have different applications.  The participants in the “ring-routine” have already been identified in this scene: each has contributed a set of chiming answers to the extravagant claims Sylvius makes about love.  But now (5.2.105) Rosalind leads them:  

First, she speaks to the scorned, love-struck shepherd, Silvius: “I will help you, if I can.” 

Then, to her admirer Phoebe, the shepherdess who scorns Silvius and loves Ganymede: “I would love you, if I could.”

Next, she introduces her word of magic power: “Tomorrow, meet me all together.”

Next comes the incantation, as she performs her verbal tour around the ring of listeners:

(To Phoebe): I will marry you, if ever I marry woman, and I’ll be married tomorrow.

(To Orlando): I will satisfy you, if ever I satisfied man, and you shall be married tomorrow.

(To Silvius): I will content you, if what pleases you contents you, and you shall be married tomorrow.

Then once again she encircles them with words:

(To Orlando): As you love Rosalind, meet.

(To Silvius): As you love Phoebe, meet.

 (To Phoebe): As I love no woman, I’ll meet.  So fare you well, I have left you commands.

Rosalind sounds like an enchantress weaving a spell, doesn’t she?  Well, she will need to be to one to untangle that crossed-over series of mismatchings!  There is a recapitulation of her powerful spells, but not before the lecherous clown Touchstone’s lust for Audrey the goat-girl makes him echo the incantation: “Tomorrow is the joyful day, Audrey, tomorrow we will be married” (5.3.1-2).

Touchstone has been attempting to bed Audrey by any mock-marriage he can arrange, the shakier the better, since he intends to dump her.  Earlier in the play he employed the illiterate country vicar, Sir Oliver Mar-text, to “marry them under a bush” and bungle the ceremony. Hence his argument to Jaques that he needs to be married badly, because the worse the wedding is done, the easier for him to leave his wife.  But here in 5.3, Audrey and Touchstone are cut across by one of the so-called “improvisational entertainments” with which Shakespeare’s comedies abound.  Two boy Pages enter and sing a song, one of Shakespeare’s best, ravishingly set later by the English composer Thomas Morley–“It was a lover and his lass.”

This lovely song is one of those devices which are both expected and integral to comedy: it is not merely an entertaining addition.  There are numerous entertainments in Shakespeare’s comedies, like the dances at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Much Ado, the pageants and masques in The Tempest, and Feste’s song in Twelfth Night.  These are essential features of comedic closure: they imply that an ending, a harmonious ending, is at hand, even if the dramatic problems are not yet entirely resolved.  And do you recall those dances, ending with a curtsy, which mark the end of Epilogues? 

I would argue that these improvisations are expected and integral, as the bergamasque at the end of “Pyramus and Thisbe” shows.  [bergamasque: defined by Merriam-Webster as a folk dance of the Bergamo region of northern Italy popular mainly in the sixteenth century]. “Pyramus and Thisbe” is a play within a play; it represents what a performance staged within a great household looks like, even if it is farcically bad.  The performance had a Prologue (even if a ridiculous one) but Theseus does not permit an Epilogue “your play needs no excuse.”  The Duke chooses the other acceptable means of comedic closure, a dance, here a bergamasque.  All the bergamasques I have heard are incredibly fast, the Elizabethans’ version of heavy metal rock.

Can you see my argument?  The song “It was a lover and his lass” is not merely a diversion in As You Like It, and it does more than separate the two appearances of Rosalind as enchantress.  It drives the  comedy towards the dénouement, towards an ending.

            In the next scene (5.4.6-17) Rosalind, still disguised as Ganymede, is even more numinous as she runs a third ring-routine around the group:

(To Orlando): And you say you will have Rosalind when I bring her? (5.4.9)

(To Phoebe): You’ll marry me, if i be willing? [but now catch 22]…but if you do refuse to marry me, you’ll give yourself unto this most faithful shepherd?

(To Sylvius): You say that you’ll have Phoebe, if she will?

When they all in their various ways consent, Rosalind, like the enchantress in a fairy story, repeats all the lovers’ magical vows (5.4.18-25) including her own: “I have promised to make all this matter even….and from hence I go, / To make these doubts all even.”

Well, it is impressive–but the play is drawing to a close. Do you see the result dramatically of preceding Rosalind’s vow with that song?  How will she untangle these cross-woven strands in that time?  There are barely six pages of text to go, or the videotape is running out, or taxis are starting to arrive at the rank outside the theatre.  At this late point, the love-matches still seem so uncertain that you might find yourself struggling to remember how each of them came about, and how the present mismatches contrast with other likelier marriages looming in the next few minutes. 

Lets consider the commencement of the rising action:

 All these crossings-over of affections came about because of a subversive action by the heroine.  With no thought at all except of affording protection to Celia, Rosalind changed gender.  At 1.3.113-115 Rosalind suggested:

                                           Were it not better,
Because that I am more than common tall,
 That I did suit me at all points like a man?

She has donned, we learn later, a youth’s garb of “doublet and hose,” and her change wreaks havoc.   First, there are those she confuses by her disguise: her father and her lover both keep thinking she reminds them of someone.  The converted Oliver notes how much the youth looks and acts like a girl.  Is the boy who faints so realistically, Oliver wonders, actually in love with his brother Orlando?  She utterly confounds Phoebe, the shepherdess, an embodiment of pastoral conventions who scorns her faithful shepherd only to fall in love with Ganymede/Rosalind.  Tough talk turns Phoebe on.  The more Rosalind chides her, the more Phoebe falls for the young man she thinks she sees before her, and the more she uses her true lover Sylvius as a doormat.

What are these stereotypes doing in the middle of a romantic comedy?  Don’t they rather belong to the world of pastoral poetry, a genre much enjoyed by the Elizabethans, and, until the nineteenth century, much in vogue in literature, theatre, painting, the decorative arts and music? Shepherds shouldn’t be able to write literary love-letters. Real shepherds should be like the yokel, William.   Real shepherdesses should be like the goat-girl, Audrey. Goat-girls don’t speak in blank verse.  They don’t adopt Petrarchan conventions and images, and they certainly don’t (as Phoebe does) quote Christopher Marlowe’s tragic love poem, Hero and Leander (First Sestiad, line 176): “Whoever loved, who loved not at first sight?”  (3.5.82).

Their diction shows that Sylvius and Phoebe come from a different literary genre: what are they doing in the middle of our play?  Certainly the “real” shepherd, Old Corin, who gets his hands mucky among the sheep, cannot fathom them. He therefore treats them as a spectacle, a pageant that might interest passers-by in the forest.  It’s as if two-dimensional cartoon characters were to start talking to a human hard-boiled detective, as they talk to Bob Hoskins in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?  How can two such conflicting modes of representation exist side-by-side in the same work?

The answer is that Shakespearian comedy envelops other genres.  In As You Like It you find lyric, song, masque, the medieval greenwood romance of Gamelyn, bawdy farce, satire, some comedy of humours, and courtly love.  If you think about it, Shakespearian comedy can even envelop tragedy, like the “Death of Hero” (she’s the heroine) in Much Ado About Nothing, or it can transform tragedy into farce as in “A tedious brief scene of Pyramus and his love, Thisbe, very tragical mirth” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

 As You Like It is not only a play about outrageously mixed genres; its a play about mixed genders as well.  Each of the sets of lovers represents a literary genre, and that is why their situation seems so irretrievably hopeless; lovers can’t marry across genres.  Even if Rosalind were a boy (which of course he is) he couldn’t marry Phoebe (who’s a boy-actor, too) for the same reason that Jessica Rabbit couldn’t marry her agent.  A cartoon can’t marry a human;  genres don’t mix.

As You Like It is typical of Shakespearian comedy in being not only a comedy of situation, but also is also a comedy of wit.   You will remember how John Donne’s Songs and Sonnets contrast Platonic, Petrarchan, and religious love.  Well, in As You Like It three similarly irreconcilable modes of love are contrasted. 

I. Phoebe and Sylvius cannot escape from their fixed mode of Petrarchan love until Phoebe is tricked.  “Sylvius”–the name means “god of the forest”–is an archetypal faithful shepherd. He will even write and deliver the love-letters of the shepherdess who scorns him to his rival, whom he knows Phoebe loves. Teleported from some classical Arcadia, these lovers talk like educated courtiers. No wonder Jaques complains about forest-dwellers talking in blank verse (4.1. 29)! Sylvius also woos after the fashion of a textbook Petrarchan lover.  The Petrarchan poem Sylvius writes for Phoebe is far better than the laughable doggerel the untalented Orlando carves into trees for Rosalind.  Silvius nevertheless has some dramatic functions: he prophesies to Phoebe that she will only know how he feels if she falls unrequitedly in love.  Do they find a common interest when Phoebe is rejected in 3.5 ?

Phoebe scorns Sylvius until she finds herself forced to reject Ganymede.  Phoebe is given some wonderful speeches, especially the finely tailored 3.5.109-32, in which she is allegedly stating that she dislikes the “peevish boy” Ganymede, but convinces her audience she is crazy about him.  Although Phoebe is two-dimensional, Rosalind’s interchanges with her are one of the high-points of As You Like It.  Debunking pastoral conventions of love, including the conventional descriptions of beautiful shepherdesses, Rosalind says sharply to Phoebe:

           Tis not your inky brows, your black silk hair,
          Your bugle eye-balls nor your cheek of cream,
          That can entame your spirits to my worship (3.5.47-49)

A little later she warns Phoebe to accept Sylvius:

For I must tell you friendly, in your ear,
Sell where you can, you are not for all markets.
Cry the man mercy, love him, take his offer.

But what’s the use of trying to convince a stereotype?

II. Orlando and Rosalind are the typical lovers of romantic comedy.  Orlando is a hunk, and Rosalind as the more intelligent protagonist is smitten.  (Is there here a reversal of gender-roles?)  By 1.3.11-12, she is already thinking of him as the prospective father of her child, but obstacles bar the way: “Oh, how full of briers is this working-day world.”  The course of true love never did run smooth in her disinherited world. She will have to escape to the golden world of romance, and, to “have him!” turn to what she later calls “a holiday humour” (4.1.63), not a work-a-day one.

Rosalind drops broad enough hints at the wrestling match “Sir, you have wrestled well, and overthrown more than your enemies” (1.2.238-39), but Orlando is a hunk, and cannot think of a thing to say.  As Homer would have put it, “a great ox stands on my tongue” or as Orlando says:  “What passion hangs these weights upon my tongue?” (1.2.242). As in television teenage romantic comedy of today, they are both smitten at first sight, but cannot speak to one another about it.  It is only when Rosalind gets her gear off and becomes Ganymede that she can talk to Orlando man to man, and can debunk those very conventions of romantic comedy which gloss over male inconstancy.

Everyone in fact debunks Orlando’s notions of love.  The clown Touchstone makes a bawdy parody of Orlando’s verses, again much better than the risible doggerel Orlando writes.  And the gloomy Jaques, Monsieur Melancholy, casts a mordant eye on Orlando’s view of Romantic Love.  But the arch de-bunker of that kind of love is Rosalind herself, disguised as a brash boy.  Read the great love scenes in 3.2 and 4.1 carefully, and see the wonderful performance by Helen Mirren on BBC video.

Duke Senior claims that in the forest of Arden one may find tongues [that teach moral philosophy] in trees, books in the running brooks, and sermons in stones….  This famous near-sighted eulogy of the green world prepares dramatically for Jaques, the first literary environmentalist, to chide Orlando for carving love songs in their bark: “I pray you mar no more trees” (3.2.251-52). 

Rosalind echoes this attack about the idiot who “hangs odes upon hawthorns and elegies on brambles” (3.2.345-46). She argues that since love is merely a madness, it can be educated out of Orlando.  When they meet in 4.1, Orlando has arrived one hour late, and Rosalind as Ganymede now convinces him to attempt a practice-wooing scene. (Note, as with Falstaff and Prince Hal’s mock-interview scene in Henry IV Part 1 (2.4.368-475), Shakespeare finds a way to introduce role-playing into a play.)  For the first time, under the cover of an attack on the most famous lovers of history, Rosalind can enunciate her fears.  Troilus had his brains dashed out with a Grecian club; Leander died swimming on a hot night–not for Hero, as later chroniclers claimed: “These are all lies; men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love”  (4.1.93).

A little later, under the guise of man-to-man talk, Rosalind instructs Orlando in a woman’s-eye-view of love, for example in the devastating: “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). Is this Elizabethan feminism?  Rosalind’s friend and confidante Celia certainly does not think so; she says at 4.1.184: “You have simply misused our sex in your love-prate.”

III. Celia and Orlando: 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 in the Middle English romance poem of that name, 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.  It’s like the lame hero in a Mills and Boon romance eventually revealing he’s a millionaire.  The speed with which Celia and the now-reformed Oliver fall in love is remarked in Rosalind’s account; it is also part of Shakespeare’s all-out parody of the conventions of medieval romance. 

Parodying the Romance Plot

Shakespeare knows every bit as well as his critics that the hatred Oliver bore his brother (and could not say why) is dramatically unmotivated.  In this unmotivated hatred, he is like the “humorous” Duke Frederick, given to inexplicable changes of mood.  Oliver tyrannised over his younger brother, but was himself cast out into the forest by an even more powerful tyrant. Duke Frederick for no dramatically clear reason hates Oliver.  In the wood, like the lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Oliver becomes “wood,” or unhinged, and, as his beard emblematically shows, like Orfeo in the fourteenth-century romance poem (lines 201-330) he becomes a wild man.  Will he recover? We find him as the centre of a comic-strip tableau: as he sleeps, a venomous snake is about to crawl into his mouth, and a lion lurks nearby, about to devour him the moment he wakes.  Will he escape?   This parodies the lack of credibility common in medieval romances, even  great ones like Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale.

That Shakespeare is satirising romance motifs, becomes clear in the solving of the predicament.  In the nick of time, Oliver’s long-lost brother Orlando blunders on the scene, scares off the snake and wrestles the lion. With what result?  Oliver is instantly reformed.  We learn all this from his own narrative to Celia, and, when she asks him to explain his conversion, Oliver says: “I do not shame to tell you what I was, since my conversion so sweetly tastes, being the thing I am.” (4.3.136-38). If you are in any doubt that the Shakespeare’s outrageous liberties with plot are intended, remember, later, that with the curtain about to fall, the second brother, the second son of Sir Rowland de Boys appears, saying (would you believe it): “I am the second son of Rowland de Boys” (5.4.147). Confusingly, his name too is Jaques. He reports that the “humorous” Duke Frederick, who had just now been advancing with an army to wipe out everybody in Arden, has been instantaneously converted by an old friar he happened to converse with en route.  When earlier critics complain about Oliver’s unbelievable change in character, and about the rapidity with which Celia falls in love with him, and about how unfair it is to partner her with the ex-villain, they seem to me to be overlooking the set of romance conventions Shakespeare was himself parodying with this set of lovers.

Shakespeare has constructed the play so that one can ask of all the lovers so far, “Whoever loved, but loved not at first sight?”  (III. v., 83). Well, the answer is “Touchstone.” The bawdy love-romp between the court jester and Audrey the goat-girl needs little gloss; it parodies most of the other couplings in the play. And return to the end of the play to see how Touchstone and Audrey’s love undergo another unflattering evaluation: they will be lucky if it lasts eight weeks.  As Jaques tells him, “thy loving voyage/Is but for two months victualled [supplied]” (5.4.186-87).    How can this crazily matched crew all be “married tomorrow” as Rosalind promised?

I restart the pause button on the video player. We are back with less than six pages of play-text.  How does Rosalind, as she promised at the beginning, “make all this matter even”? The answer is, she simply reverses her subversion: she takes off her gear a second time.  When Rosalind appears dressed as a woman again, but with Ganymede’s face, all is made clear. But her entrance is accompanied by magic after all, in the form of a minor classical divinity called Hymen. (No, I don’t believe it is a shepherd in disguise, this deus is very much ex machina. Yet another genre, the world of classical myth, has been brought into the embrace of comedy.  Hymen says:

 Then, is there mirth in heaven,
 When earthly things made even,
         Atone together. (5.4.103-105)

This begins the last of the ring-routines as the right couples acknowledge each other, and are matched.  Then, in a way which mirrors Oberon’s blessing at the end of  A Midsummer Night’s Dream she/he (for Hymen is androgynous) blesses all the marriages (save one):

You and you are sure together,
As the winter to foul weather. (5.4.130-31)

If Touchstone is a touchstone for all the characters in the forest, Hymen is a touchstone for him. Only the melancholy Jaques refuses to participate in a world where the old order is restored, or to join in the comedic dance: “So. to your pleasures, I am for other than for dancing measures” (5.4.1887-88).  They all link hands in a dance, until Rosalind leaves the dancers and speaks the Epilogue, which is where this lecture began.

Further Reading:

For more on Rosalind’s gender-bending androgyny, read Catherine Belsey, “Disrupting Sexual Difference: Meaning and Gender in the Comedies” in John Drakakis ed. Alternative Shakespeares (Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Taylor &​ Francis, 2002); or Barbara Bono, “Mixed Gender, Mixed Genre in Shakespeare’s As You Lie It,” in Renaissance Genres, edited by Barbara Lewalski (Harvard University Press, 1986): 189-212.