As You Like It

Overview

Written around 1599, probably for the newly built Globe, and first printed in the Folio of 1623. The source is Thomas Lodge’s prose romance Rosalynde of 1590, which Shakespeare follows for the plot and improves in every other respect, adding Jaques, Touchstone, Audrey, William and Corin, who are the characters that make the play what it is.

It is one of his shortest and among his most popular, and it is a strange piece of work. Very little happens. There are two wrestling matches, two usurpations that are resolved offstage by conversion, and about two hours of people talking in a forest.

The talk is the play. Shakespeare set up a pastoral, the standard Renaissance fantasy in which courtiers retreat to the country and find simplicity, and then filled it with people who argue about whether any of it is true. Duke Senior praises the wind for teaching him what he is; Jaques weeps over a wounded deer and is mocked for it; Touchstone proves that a shepherd is damned; Corin says he earns what he eats. Nobody gets the last word.

The title is a shrug, and the epilogue, alone among Shakespeare’s plays, is spoken by a woman who immediately points out that she is not one.

What happens

Act 1. Orlando, youngest son of Sir Rowland de Boys, has been kept in ignorance by his brother Oliver, who hates him for no reason he can name. He demands his inheritance, and Oliver arranges for the court wrestler Charles to break his neck.

At court, Duke Frederick has usurped his brother Duke Senior, who is living in the Forest of Arden. Frederick has kept his niece Rosalind for the sake of his own daughter Celia, who loves her. The two young women watch the wrestling, Orlando wins, and he and Rosalind fall in love and are unable to say anything to each other.

Frederick then banishes Rosalind, on no grounds at all. Celia refuses to be parted and goes with her. Rosalind, being the taller, will dress as a man and call herself Ganymede; Celia will be Aliena, his sister; and they take Touchstone the court fool with them. Orlando, warned that Oliver means to burn his lodging, flees with the old servant Adam.

Act 2. Arden. Duke Senior, in the play’s most quoted sermon, tells his companions that exile is sweet, that the winter wind is a better counsellor than flattery, and that there are tongues in trees, books in brooks and sermons in stones. Then he goes hunting.

Jaques, a lord in his company, is discovered weeping over a wounded stag and moralising the scene into fifty similes. He is the play’s professional melancholic, a man who has seen the world and made a career of finding it wanting, and Shakespeare treats him with amused affection and no respect at all.

Orlando and Adam arrive starving. Orlando bursts in on the Duke’s meal with his sword drawn, demanding food, and is offered it courteously, which shames him. While he goes to fetch Adam, Jaques delivers the seven ages of man: the infant mewling, the schoolboy creeping, the lover sighing, the soldier quarrelling, the justice with his fat belly, the lean pantaloon, and last, second childishness, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. On the word everything Orlando enters carrying the old man on his back, and the speech is answered without a word of reply.

Act 3. Orlando hangs bad love poems on the trees. Rosalind, as Ganymede, finds them and learns he is in the forest.

Then the play’s central invention. Ganymede tells Orlando that he can cure him of love, by pretending to be Rosalind and being so capricious, changeable and perverse that Orlando will be sick of the whole business. Orlando agrees, and for the rest of the play the woman he loves courts him in the person of a boy pretending to be her.

The arrangement lets Rosalind do what she could not do in her own name: hear what he actually thinks, correct his poetry, attack the conventions of love-melancholy, and tell him that men have died and worms have eaten them but not for love. It also lets her be visibly, comically in love with him while denying it, and faint at the sight of his blood while insisting she is counterfeiting.

Meanwhile Touchstone courts Audrey, a goatherd who does not know what poetical means, and arranges a sham marriage he hopes will be invalid. And Silvius adores the scornful Phebe in the exact language of Elizabethan sonnets, whereupon Phebe falls in love with Ganymede, which is to say with a woman, and the tangle is complete.

Act 4 and 5. A mock wedding, with Celia as the priest, in which Rosalind and Orlando exchange vows that are technically binding.

Oliver arrives, having been rescued from a lioness by the brother he tried to kill, and is instantly converted into a good man. He and Celia fall in love at sight, which Rosalind describes with derision even as she arranges it.

Rosalind promises everyone what they want: Orlando shall have Rosalind, Phebe shall have Ganymede or else marry Silvius, and all shall be settled tomorrow by magic. She appears as herself, the couples pair off, and Hymen arrives to bless four marriages.

Word comes that Duke Frederick marched on the forest with an army, met an old religious man at the edge of it, and was converted, and has restored the dukedom. Jaques declines to return, announcing that he will go and join the convertites, since there is much matter to be heard and learned among such people.

Then Rosalind steps forward for the epilogue, notes that it is not the fashion to see the lady speak it, charges the women to like as much of the play as pleases them and the men likewise, and says that if she were a woman she would kiss as many of them as had beards she liked.

How to read it

Read it for the talk, not for the plot. If you are waiting for events you will find the middle of the play empty; if you follow the arguments it is continuously busy.

Keep the disguise layers straight, because the comedy depends on them. Rosalind is a woman, played in 1599 by a boy, disguised as a young man, pretending to be Rosalind, being courted by a man who does not know that any of this is going on.

Notice when Rosalind drops out of the game. She keeps control of every scene until she hears Orlando is hurt and faints, and her recovery, claiming it was all counterfeited, is the best acting in the play.

Read Jaques and Touchstone as a pair. They are both professional commentators, one sour and one bawdy, and neither is allowed to be right. The seven ages speech is the play’s most famous passage and is immediately refuted by a stage direction.

Do not skip Corin and Touchstone in Act 3 scene 2. The debate about whether court manners or country manners are better is the play’s actual position on pastoral, and it ends with a working shepherd stating plainly that he earns what he eats and owes no man hate.

And read the epilogue last and think about who is speaking. Shakespeare ends a comedy about identity by having a performer step out of the fiction, name the boy under the dress, and offer to kiss the audience.

Questions it raises

• Why can Rosalind only speak honestly to Orlando when she is in disguise?
• Duke Senior praises the wind and then dines and hunts. Is the play endorsing the pastoral ideal or laughing at it?
• Jaques is ridiculous and also says the most memorable lines. What is he for?
• Two villains convert offstage without preparation. Is that carelessness or a comment on how comedies end?
• Four marriages, four kinds of love. Which does the play think is the real one?
• The epilogue breaks the fiction to draw attention to the actor’s body. What does that do to everything before it?