William Shakespeare: As You Like It.
Note: This play was performed as part of the Michigan Shakespeare Festival at the Potter Center, Jackson, Michigan, in July 2016. The play was “adapted and directed” by Robert Kauzlaric, but the text discussed here is the standard version.
In the orchard at Oliver’s house, his younger brother, Orlando, converses with his elderly servant, Adam. If Adam’s name suggests the original ‘Vetus Homo,’ and an orchard suggests fruit, we might take this to be a new Eden. It isn’t—or if it is, the Serpent rules it.
Orlando’s late father, Sir Rowland de Boys, provided for him in his will. The lad is to receive either a gentleman’s education or one thousand crowns. So far, he has received neither. Although Oliver has sent the middle brother, Jaques, away to a school that befits a gentleman, he keeps his youngest brother “rustically at home” (I.i.6-7)—rustically, because without an education he might as well be a bumpkin. Or worse: Orlando likens himself to an ox in a stall; his brother’s “horses are bred better” (I.i.9-10). Instead of the good breeding of a gentleman, Orlando receives poorer breeding than an animal. Oliver undermines “my gentility with my education” (I.i.18-19)—which is no education at all—and thus “bars me the place of a brother” (I.i.17-18). That is, Orlando is by nature his brother, sharing the same father, but unnatural in his refusal to treat him in a brotherly way; in so refusing, he disables Orlando from achieving his mature nature through education. He also disqualifies him from his rightful place in the gentry class by means of the same bar. Oliver violates his brother’s nature not only as a brother but as a human being, treating the youth as if he were an animal, ineducable—training him for a life of servility, the life of a beast of burden, unfit to join his brothers and other gentlemen as a ruler.
But that isn’t his nature at all. “The spirit of my father, which I think is within me, begins to mutiny against my servitude” (I.i.20-21). The thumotic character of the natural, and not merely conventional, aristocrat, stirs in his soul. A human ox would be a beast ruled by his appetites, what Aristotle calls a natural slave. Orlando begins to be ruled by his spiritedness. What he lacks, so far, is the development of the naturally ruling element of his soul, his reason, stunted by his lack of education and perhaps his lack of experience, both of which could hone his innate capacity for phronesis. Hence, he laments, he can find “no wise remedy” for correcting his servitude (I.i.22). As yet, he can only chafe against it. But he has enough self-knowledge to appreciate his own nature, both its strengths and its (current) limitations.
Sir Rowland de Boys surely intended to exercise his own prudential wisdom in preparing his will, providing for his sons. He rightly judged that his eldest son would treat Jaques well. He wrongly judged that he would treat Orlando well. Does this suggest the limits of prudential wisdom, or merely the limits of Sir Rowland’s prudential wisdom? Why does Oliver tyrannize over his father’s youngest son?
Oliver enters the garden. Orlando complains of his treatment. He argues as follows: Oliver violates both convention and nature. “Courtesy”—the customs of the aristocracy, worldwide—require the younger brother to defer to the eldest, the first-born (I.i.42); by the same courtesy, the same courtly, ruling, convention, the older brother owes the younger brotherly treatment. Orlando demands that he be given a gentleman’s education or the thousand crowns their father willed him. He then goes further, arguing not only from convention but from nature: “I have as much of my father’s blood in me as you” (I.i.44-45). By order of birth (one sort of nature, but a sort determined by fortune), I am your inferior, but by a more fundamental order of nature I am your equal.
This latter claim infuriates his brother, and he strikes Orlando. They fight; Adam intervenes, asking them to remember their father, just as Orlando had remembered their father’s will. If Orlando shows himself a natural aristocrat in the spiritedness he shares with his father, Oliver shows that spiritedness perverted into tyranny. Oliver proves this by calling old Adam a dog; the tyrant in his anger seeks not to establish proper subordination in accordance to courtesy, the rules of which he should have learned in the course of his own gentleman’s education, but to abase his brother and his father’s longtime servant, now his own servant, whose name means ‘Man,’ to the level of animals. Hegel would say that slave-Orlando has engaged in a struggle for recognition with his master-brother. No optimist who supposes the laws of something called History will dictate the slave’s vindication in the eyes of the master, Shakespeare has the struggle issue only in a redoubling of the master’s attempt to secure his tyranny. Unable to subdue his brother by abuse of convention, unable to subdue him in animal-level natural combat, Oliver will now seek to use his ‘practical reason’ not wisely but cunningly—and murderously. And it may well be that Oliver’s apparently unreasoning rage against his younger brother erupts from an underlying fear, the cause of which isn’t hard to see.
For it transpires that a parallel but also different circumstance exists in the larger dukedom where Oliver’s house stands. Duke Frederick has usurped the office of his brother, Duke Senior; in this case, the younger brother has rebelled successfully against the legitimate elder. Oliver may be terrified that the same thing will happen to him. Fortune has sent Oliver a man named Charles, a wrestler employed by the usurper duke. Oliver asks Charles for news of the new court, the new regime. He learns that several loyal lords of the dukedom have joined Duke Senior in exile; Frederick let them go, as this gave him what he takes to have been the good fortune of adding their lands to the holdings he had previously seized. Duke Senior’s daughter, Rosalind, has stayed behind in Frederick’s household because Frederick’s daughter, Celia, raised alongside her from infancy, doesn’t want to part from her. Oliver asks Charles about Rosalind; since young men seldom inquire after young ladies for no purpose, one may be confident that he has taken an interest in her.
Duke Senior has retreated to the Forest of Arden, which means Forest of Love—another intimation of Eden. But this Eden is no apolitical society consisting of a man and a woman. Although Charles does liken Arden to “the golden world” (I.i.111), it has a decidedly political and even potentially military cast. “Many young gentlemen flee to him every day” (I.i.109-10); supposedly attracted to the ‘careless’ forest itself, the gathering reminds Charles of Robin Hood and his merry men—not merely esprits libres but outlaws who might someday threaten the unjust regime from which they have exiled themselves, under the command of the exiled duke. Frederick has cause to worry.
Charles has come to tell Oliver that Orlando intends to come into Frederick’s presence tomorrow, to wrestle the Duke’s champion. That is, Orlando, without prospects in his brother’s household regime, seeks to make his fortune at the higher level of the dukedom. Charles doesn’t want to hurt the lad, whom he has every reason to suppose is taking a foolish risk. He asks Oliver to stop him; “for your love, I would be loath to foil him” (I.i.120-21). Not at all, Oliver replies. Probably lying, he says he knew about his brother’s intention, and “labored to dissuade him from it” (I.i.130). But the lad “is the stubbornest young fellow of France” (I.i.131-32) and “a villainous contriver against me his natural brother” (I.i.134). Therefore, “I had as lief thou disdst break his neck as his finger.” (I.i.135-36). Appealing to the wrestler’s fear, he suggests that it’s kill or be killed: If Orlando can’t win the match, he’ll find some way to poison Charles; the conniving youth will never leave “till he hath ta’en thy life by some indirect means or other,” for “there is not one so young and so villainous this day living” (I.i.140-42). “I speak but brotherly of him” (I.i.143)—that is, I know him for what he really is, I know his true nature. Far from speaking brotherly of Orlando in the fraternal sense of the word, Oliver conceives of his brother’s nature as if his brother were already dead: “Should I anatomize him to thee as he is, I must blush and weep, and thou must look pale and wonder” (I.i.143-45). Blush, because his gentleman’s honor is shamed in having such a creature for a brother; weep, because I myself am a man of compassion, even for irredeemably evil souls. You, Charles, must be pale, fearful, and wondrous, uncomprehending at such a monster. It would not occur to Oliver that a man might be courageous and animated by the love of wisdom, the wonder that can lead to philosophy. Instead of rewarding his brother with the courtly recognition he deserves, Oliver sends an assassin to murder a man he couldn’t beat.
Charles leaves, and Oliver soliloquizes: “My soul, I know not why, hates nothing more than he,” Orlando (I.i.151-53). Oliver lacks self-knowledge, but at least seems to know that he does not know. This would be a promising state of soul, this knowing what’s unknown. But he does know. Orlando is esteemed among “my own people” (I.i.156). That being so, he poses a threat; aristocracy, rule of the many by the few, must always concern itself with the many; unorganized, they posed no threat, but organized under the rule of another aristocrat and they will ruin you. Orlando might prove another Frederick, another usurper, although in this case his ‘usurpation’ would be just by nature, if not by convention, given Oliver’s tyranny, which will not stop at murder to preserve itself. Rulers set examples for citizens and subjects; the example Duke Frederick has set makes even a legitimate older brother suspicious of his younger one.
Friends and cousins Rosalind and Celia meet not in an orchard but a lawn in front of Duke Frederick’s house. A lawn isn’t fruitful; it is a place for play, for the friendship family members should enjoy. Rosalind is too melancholy to be playful, despite Celia’s coaxing. Like Orlando, she is remembering her father. Celia criticizes her for loving her less than she loves Rosalind. If I were in your place, she says, I would have learned to love Duke Frederick as a new father. The argument fails, first because Frederick has done unjust injury to Rosalind’s father, and because Rosalind’s father is worthy of his daughter’s love. Were Celia in Rosalind’s place, she might be able to love her ‘new’ father if he were Rosalind’s father, the good Duke Senior, but could she love her ‘new’ father if he were her real father, the bad Duke Frederick? Indeed, will she love her real father if he puts her love to the test, now?
The Duke’s fool, Touchstone, arrives with a message from Frederick, summoning Celia to him. The resulting badinage reflects the political circumstance of the dukedom under her father’s rule. When Celia tells him that he may be whipped some day for the annoyance he causes, the fool replies, “The more pity that fools may not speak wisely what wise men do foolishly” (I.ii.80-81). In his usurpation, worldly-wise Frederick has been not only unjust but imprudent. Celia replies, “By my troth, thou sayest true; for since the little wit that fools have was silenced, the little foolery that wise men have makes a great show” (I.ii.82-84). The dukedom’s right order has been upended because practical or prudential wisdom has deserted the souls of its ruler.
A courtier of Frederick’s arrives, bearing more news. Charles has defeated three men, breaking their bones in the matches. And now another match will occur, here on the lawn: Charles versus Orlando. When the entourage appears, the ladies attempt to persuade the handsome young man not to wrestle, Celia saying he does not know himself—”your spirits are too bold for your years” (I.ii.156-57), causing your reason to fail to judge rightly. Rosalind joins in saying that his honor, his “reputation,” will not be injured if he withdraws from the contest to “embrace your own safety” (I.ii.162). This is no foolish assessment, as Orlando himself knows the limitations of his wisdom. But what has he to lose? “Punish me not with your hard thoughts” (I.ii.167-68) but “let your fair eyes and gentle wishes go with me to my trial” (I.ii.169-70). “If kill’d, but one dead that is willing to be so. I shall do my friends no wrong, for I have none to lament me; the world no injury, for in it I have nothing; only in the world I fill up a place, which may be better supplied when I have made it empty” (I.ii.170-73) Rosalind’s melancholy, heartfelt, faithful lament, the melancholy of words, meets Orlando’s melancholy of action. “Pray heaven I be deceiv’d in you!” (I.ii.180). As he locks up with Charles, she thinks him an “excellent young man” (I.ii.195). She loves him for his mood, which matches hers, and for his excellence, his courage—which, in her own way, she will match.
To the astonishment of all, Orlando proves more than a match for Charles. He knocks the bragging speech out of the Milo gloriosus, who is ignominiously carted off, unconscious. But when Frederick asks his name, curiosity and new respect turn sour. Sir Rowland de Boys was esteemed honorable by “the world,” but “I did find him still mine enemy” (I.ii.206-07). You are a gallant youth, but your lineage is wrong; to Frederick, a man’s innate nature is as nothing compared to a man’s nature-by-fortune. This, despite his own willingness to overturn the rank of nature-by-fortune by betraying his elder brother, usurping his dukedom. He leaves.
Orlando avers that he is “more proud to be Sir Rowland’s son” than “to be adopted heir to Frederick”(I.ii.213-15)—perhaps thereby revealing his intention in challenging Charles at the duke’s court. To Rosalind, however, his lineage confirms his excellence: “My father lov’d Sir Rowland as his soul, / And all the world was of my father’s mind” (I.ii.216-17) As for Celia, her eyes are opened, too. “My father’s rough and envious disposition / Sticks me at heart” (I.ii.222-23 “Your mistress shall be happy,” sir, “if you keep your promises in love / But justly as you have exceeded all promise” today (I.ii.224-26).
When Rosalind gives him a chain from her neck (“Wear this for me,” as I too “am out of suits with fortune” [(I.ii.227]), Orlando is felled almost as soundly as he felled the wrestler. As the ladies walk away, he can speak only to himself, telling himself he cannot speak to them, as “my better parts / Are all thrown down” (I.ii.230-31) even as she for her part walks back to say, “You have overthrown more than your enemies” (I.ii.235-36). His better parts are his courage and his human ability to speak to others. “O poor Orlando,” he tells himself, watching them depart for a second time, “thou art overthrown” by your “passion,” which “hangs these weights upon my tongue,” preventing the reason which no longer rules him from forming so much as a word to say (I.ii.238-40).
Frederick’s attendant, Le Beau (“The Beautiful”), returns to the scene to make a handsome gesture in reasoned speech. “I do in friendship counsel you / To leave this place,” as the Duke “misconstrues all that you have done” (I.ii.242-46) and also now “hath ta’en displeasure ‘gainst his gentle niece,” Rosalind (I.ii.259). Le Beau adds that “Hereafter, in a better world than this, / I shall desire more love and knowledge of you” (I.ii.265-66). He is likely thinking of Heaven, but one tyrant doesn’t necessarily make a world—even this world.
Alone, Orlando reflects on needing to return “from tyrant Duke unto a tyrant brother” (I.ii.269). Like Le Beau, he thinks of Heaven, or more precisely a glimpse of it on earth, “heavenly Rosalind!” (I.ii.270). Rosalind, indeed: hated, as he and his father’s memory are, by the tyrant Duke, and now loved by himself and, in all likelihood, his tyrant brother.
In the Duke’s palace, to which they have withdrawn, the ladies deliberate. “O, how full of briers is this working-day world!” (I.iii.10-11). Rosalind begins. With “his eyes full of anger” (I.iii.36), as Celia describes them, the Duke enters, calling Rosalind a traitor and exiling her under penalty of death if she refuses to remove herself from his court. Why? “I trust thee not” (I.iii.51). Recalling her long residence at the palace and her long friendship with his daughter, Rosalind replies, “Your mistrust cannot make me a traitor” (I.iii.52). Frederick then shifts from ‘subjectivity’ to ‘objectivity’: “Thou art thy father’s daughter” (I.iii.54). When Celia defends her, the Duke exposes his real thought. The people of the dukedom sympathize with Rosalind. You, Celia, “art a fool” for trusting her (I.iii.76). You will “show more bright and seem more virtuous when she is gone” (I.iii.76-78). Without the daughter of the exiled former Duke in the dukedom, a perpetual reminder of the deposed man’s virtues, the lesser but real virtues of his daughter will serve to reflect well on himself. The people will no longer incline in the favor of the deposed aristocrat, and will then incline in the favor of the new one, securing his authority. ‘As you like it,’ indeed. Like Oliver, Frederick misuses his reason, making it into calculation, which he mistakes for prudential wisdom.
Two who do not like it are the faithful friends. Rosalind will go into exile, but where? The Forest of Arden is far away, and between the dukedom and the forest many dangers menace a traveling lady. Celia chooses true friendship over a false, unfatherly, father. She will go into exile with her friend. Rosalind has her own counterplot, a prudential plan to answer the Frederick’s calculated policy. As she is tall, she will disguise herself as a man in order to intimidate would-be thieves. They agree to bring Touchstone with them, as they find him to be the touchstone (or perhaps whet-stone) to their wits and “a comfort to our travel” (I.iii.127)—providing entertainment and perhaps at least a modicum of manly protection, however unimpressive. [1] Celia says they go “to liberty, and not to banishment” (I.iii.134) and (sensible lady that she is), they’ll bring their “jewels and our wealth” with them (I.iii.130).
With the conclusion of the First Act, Shakespeare’s audience can conclude two things about the “you” in the play’s title. They know that they are the “you” who are promised a play they will like. ‘The few’—in this case the playwrights—know that they must please the many playgoers, if they are to continue writing plays for a livelihood. The people also may suspect that “you” means the people in a political community, who hold the balance of power by consenting to the rule of those whom they deem legitimate, authoritative. Some rulers will attempt to wipe out their consent by making them fearful, but such rulers themselves are fearful—of them, and of rivals of ruling status and character, whose very virtues make them the more dangerous to tyrants and more appealing to the people. In both instances, the many hold the real power, and the few know it. The few must therefore reason, prudentially; some will reason calculatingly, instead.
In the Forest, Duke Senior tells his allied lords, his “brothers in exile,” that “old custom” has “made this life more sweet / Than that of painted pomp” (II.i.3-4). The forest is less dangerous, free from peril, as they no longer feel “the penalty of Adam” (II.i.5). Here the winter wind, harsh but free of malice, “bites and blows upon my body” (II.i.8) but with none of the breezy flattery of the court. Nature’s winds “feelingly persuade me what I am” (II.i.11) not, like flattery, what I am not. “This our life, exempt from public haunt, / Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, / Sermons in stones, and good in everything” (II.i.15-17). Lord Amiens (which means friend) finds him happy in so “translat[ing] the stubbornness of fortune / Into so quiet and sweet a style” (II.i.19-20)
The Duke feels compassion for the deer they kill for food—”poor dappled fools” dressed in nature’s motley (II.i.22). Another of the allied dukes, Amiens, tells him that Jaques suffers a melancholy fit over the deer, calling the Duke a worse usurper than his brother, for killing them. Like the Duke, Jaques is alienated from, made-foreign to, court life, but unlike him he cannot find solace in nature, in Arden, as nature requires humans to usurp and tyrannize, killing stags. Jaques rebels against life itself. The Duke would seek him out, as “I love to cope him in these sudden fits,” when “he is full of matter” (II.i.68-69).
Back at the usurper Duke’s palace, Frederick rages about the runaway ladies. One of his underlings suggests that since they are enamored of Orlando they may be in his company. Frederick sends for Oliver; he will command him to find Orlando. But Orlando isn’t with the ladies; he is in front of Oliver’s house. Adam intercepts his “young,” “gentle,” and “sweet master,” this “memory of old Sir Rowland” (II.iii.2-4). Your very virtues, he tells him, are “sanctified and holy traitors to you” (II.iii.13), bringing not only exile but the possibility of death. Having heard of Orlando’s victory over the court wrestler, knowing that it has stirred admiration for him among the people, Oliver would burn Orlando’s house with him in it. “O, what a world is this, when what is comely / Envenoms him that bear it!” (II.iii.14-15). This old Adam knows a venomous snake when he sees one. He offers Orlando his life savings in exchange for the privilege of continuing to serve him in exile. He will prove no burden, as “my age is a lusty winter”—a human nature parallel to the good non-human nature Duke Senior has found in the forest—”Frosty but kindly”—”kind” being a synonym for natural (II.iii.52-53). He knows the reason for his health: He has practiced moderation throughout his life. If Orlando’s leading virtue is courage, Adam’s leading virtue is moderation. This Adam has learned the lesson of Eden, which is not to reach too eagerly for forbidden fruit, however good it may look.
Orlando sees in this “good old man” an example of the virtue of ‘the ancients’—of “the constant service of the antique world, / When service sweat for duty, not for meed!” (II.ii.56-58). In the modern world, men will only sweat for promotion, for reward. “We’ll go along together” (II.iii.66), fellow men of antiquity, when man lived closer to nature and accepted its limits as lessons in humanity. Adam replies, “Fortune cannot recompense me better / Than to die well and not my master’s debtor” (II.iii.75-76). He counts loyal service to a worthy master not merely as duty but as a kind of privilege, which he has paid for in advance by tendering the savings he earned in service to the worthy father back to the worthy, true, natural son. They will head for the forest.
Rosalind, Celia, and Touchstone are already there. Rosalind too is a figure from the ancient world, telling Jupiter of her weariness of spirit. For her part, Celia’s weariness is bodily. They rest. They meet two shepherds, old Corin and young, love-sick Silvius (whose name means “woods”). Rosalind sees in Silvius the mirror of herself. Touchstone observes that “We that are true lovers run into strange capers; but as all is mortal in nature, so is all nature in love mortal in folly” (II.iv.50-52). Rosalind agrees, seeing that nature sets limits, even to seemingly unending love-sickness.
When they learn that the shepherds have no food to share because the local landowner is “of churlish disposition” (II.iv.75), refusing to offer hospitality to travelers, and in fact intending to sell his farm, Rosalind tells Corin that if he will buy it she will pay him back. The ladies like the forest, and would settle there, within the malice-free limits nature imposes. Elsewhere in Arden, Orlando and Adam have found the same thing; Orlando goes in search of food for his servant—serving his servant
Meanwhile, a self-pitying courtier in Duke Senior’s party, Lord Jaques, takes a certain pleasure in exile. This Jaques finds his contentment in melancholy—although, like Duke Senior, he understands that in the forest he has no enemy but “winter and rough weather” (II.v.8). The Duke can’t find him, wondering if he has “transform’d himself into a beast” (II.vii.1)—as in a way he has, a maudlin pitier of deer rather than a human hunter of the food necessary for life. As fortune would have it, Jaques finds the Duke, or rather wanders in on him, having met a fool (presumably Touchstone) in the forest. The fool, he reports, moralized on the reality of time, whereby “from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe, / And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot” (II.vii.26-27). Jaques took delight “that fools should be so deep contemplative” (II.vii.31). He would be one: “Motley’s the only wear” (II.vii.34); “I am ambitious for a motley coat” (II.vii.43) like that of fool-men and fool-deer. Duke Senior is confident that “Thou shalt have one”(II.vii.44).
Jaques explains that he would be a fool because as a fool he’ll have liberty “to blow on whom I please” (II.vii.49). Since by his nature a fool won’t be taken seriously by anyone, and especially by the powerful, like nature’s wind he can whip all alike, with salubrious effect. “Invest me in my motley; 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” (II.vii.58-61). Having lost his trust in dubious promise-makers upon having been deposed, Duke Senior will give him no such leave, knowing him to have been “a libertine” in his civil life, “as sensual as the brutish sting itself” (II.vii.65-66). To such a man, liberty would be nothing more than “license” to “disgorge” his sins on a world that’s bad enough now (II.vii.68-69).
Jaques’ ‘hurt’ rebuttal of these suspicions is mercifully interrupted by Orlando, sword drawn, who challenges the men to a fight if they refuse to give him food. The Duke calms him: “Your gentleness shall force / More than your force move us to gentleness” (II.vii.102-03). Upon seeing that he’s stumbled upon gentlemen (albeit ones described as having dressed as “outlaws”—presumably to deter just such attackers), Orlando apologizes, confessing to incivility but explaining that physical necessity, and not only his own, motivated his threat—a right statement of the natural law.
After Orlando departs to fetch Adam, Duke Senior takes the opportunity to offer Jaques some needed instruction—moral necessity being as real as physical. “Thou seest we are not all alone unhappy; / This wide and universal theatre / Presents more woeful pageants than the scene / Wherein we play in” (II.vii.130-133). This enables Shakespeare to give Jaques one of the playwright’s most celebrated speeches, the one beginning “All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players” describing the “seven ages” of man (II.vii.139-43). Two things need remarking on the these ages or “acts” on the world stage, ranging from the inarticulate (“mewling and puking”) infant to the “whining school-boy” to the “sighing” lover to the honor-loving soldier “seeking the bubble reputation” to the well-fed, latitudinarian judge to the broken-down dotard, a senile wreck in his “second childishness” on the brink of “oblivion,” “sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything” (II.vii.144-166). First, this gamut puts in motion and places in time the three parts of the soul as described by Socrates in Plato’s Republic: appetite, spiritedness, and reason. But it does so in an entirely un-Socratic way. Jaques denigrates both the life of the spirited soldier—the reputation, the honor he seeks is next to nothing, a bubble—and the practical wisdom of the judge, “full of wise saws and modern instances” (II.vii.156), a platitudinous fool. Second, man begins in feebleness and resentment (mewling, puking—rejecting even food—and whining), ends in like feebleness followed by death, nullity. That is, Jaques’ melancholy either derives from or produces a sort of nihilism based on a denial of the reality of anything much more than the body, itself only temporary.
Duke Senior does not refute this Epicurean claim. Orlando does. He does it in action, not words—his liberal education having been denied by his unbrotherly brother. Orlando returns with the Vetus Homo, old Adam. While just as mortal as Jaques or any man, Orlando proves himself nonetheless loyal, compassionate for a man instead of deer, and just. Always courageous, his experiences in the forest have strengthened more virtues, virtues as needful as courage in a man, a woman, a ruler. Duke Senior, whose hospitality contrasts with the tight-fisted landlord, welcomes them, invites them to dine, calls for music. The song remarks the winter wind’s superior kindness, naturalness, to ungrateful men, most of whose friendships and most of whose loves bespeak “mere folly” (II.vii.181). Insofar as this is so, Jaques is right. But it isn’t entirely so. The Duke tells Orlando, “I am the Duke / That lov’d your father” (II.vii.195-96). He invites him and the “good old man” (II.vii.197) to tell him their stories, so that he may “all your fortunes understand” (II.vii.200). All men want to know, Aristotle writes; all political men want to know the fortunes of potential allies. Duke Senior is both political man and man, simply.
From tyranny in the family and tyranny in the dukedom, from just disobedience to the family by Orlando and to the dukedom by Rosalind, in the First Act, to harsh, malice-free and just nature’s regime in the Second Act, a regime where friendship and genuine civility can rekindle, Shakespeare now takes us to the heart of his play, the Third Act, whose theme is love. Love animates families and dukedoms, whether they are just or unjust, natural or unnatural, because there are several kinds of love, ranging from the self-love that would ruin all others in its scramble for domination to the self-sacrificing agapic love of Christ on the Cross. For Shakespeare, erotic love infuses the finest friendships and marriages, but it is erotic love inflected by agapic love, a love neither selfish nor selfless but mutual, and good for both lover and beloved. If politics is ruling and being ruled, loving and being loved gives politics life, whether in a family or a dukedom, because true lovers want the good for themselves but also for the ones they love.
But first, the haters. Act III begins in Frederick’s palace, to which the usurping Duke has summoned the lesser tyrant, Oliver. God loves by His grace; the Duke presents his listeners with a false imitatio Dei, proclaiming that he embodies “the better part made mercy” (III.i.2). He orders Oliver to find his brother and to bring him back, “dead or living” (III.i.6). As a precaution, he will hold Oliver’s lands as guarantee of his fidelity. When Oliver tries to assure him that “I never lov’d my brother in my life” (III.i.14), Frederick replies, “More villain thou” (III.i.15)—true, both as regards Oliver and himself. When Oliver leaves, he commands those among his officers who are “of such a nature” (III.i.16)—villainy—undertake an assessment of the lesser tyrant’s house and lands, preparatory to seizing them. After all, any man who matches the tyrant’s villainy might endanger the tyrant’s rule as surely as an association of good men in exile does. The greater tyrant’s self-love ruins subjects and soul alike, stealing from subjects and blocking knowledge of himself by corrupting his natural ‘self,’ or soul, the self that would have loved his brother, the true Duke. One might say that Shakespeare here gives a portrait of a man who has made the Machiavellian exchange of soul for self.
True lover Orlando hangs a paper with a poem on it, on a tree in the Forest of Arden. His poem praises his beloved, testifying to “thy virtue.” (III.ii.8). His love must be pure, entirely non-manipulative, because he has no reason to think she will ever see it; it is rather his witness to any who might pass by. After he departs, the first to see it will be good old Corin and the roguish court-fool, Touchstone. Corin asks Touchstone, “How like you this shepherd’s life?” (III.ii.13). This elicits a sophistical and self-contradictory non-answer, culminating in a patronizing, intendedly satirical counter-question: “Hast any philosophy in thee, shepherd?” (III.ii.21) Corin has enough to know the causes and effects that anyone can see, that fire burns and rain wets, and to have common sense: “he that hath learned no wit by nature nor art may complain of good breeding, or comes of a very dull kindred” (III.ii.26-28). Evidently, the shepherd has enough philosophy in him to know how to frame an ironic rejoinder to a snobbish fool. Quite possibly sensible of the wound he has received, Touchstone declares Corin “a natural philosopher” (III.ii.29), asking him if he’s ever been in court.
The natural philosopher’s response recalls Socrates’ critique of Greece’s natural philosophers. They attempted to understand nature directly, failing to see that their impressions of nature might be twisted by their own opinions, by what we would call their ‘assumptions.’ The way to philosophize is not, Socrates says, by naive observation of dumb rocks and trees but by examining the opinions of fellow-citizens and foreign visitors to one’s native city. Political philosophy is the gateway to knowledge of nature, and especially of human nature. Touchstone would touch the philosopher’s stone by bidding the natural philosopher to consider politics.
But what kind of politics does Touchstone know, if not the corrupt politics of Frederick’s dukedom? Rosalind and Celia have used him philosophically, as a whetstone for their wit, as Socrates (called “the Athenian buffoon” by one humorless German) did with many a clod in Athens, but has any of the ladies’ wit rubbed off on clownish Touchstone?
Not so. Still hoping to dominate the conversation, Touchstone claims that if Corin has never been at court he never can have seen good manners; without having seen them, his manners must be wicked; and since wickedness is sin and sin is damnation, “Thou art in a parlous state, shepherd” (III.ii.40). But it is Corin who understands the Socratic distinction between nature and convention: “those that are good manners at the court are as ridiculous in the country as the behavior of the country is most mockable at the court” (III.ii.41-43). His example is the courtly custom of kissing hands, which “would be uncleanly if courtiers were shepherds” (III.ii.44-45). Ignoring this pointed example, Touchstone demands additional ones, which Corin supplies, rewarded only with more entertaining sophistries in reply. As a court jester, Touchstone is a good entertainer; as a philosopher, he is the buffoon sober-sided citizens say Socrates is. “You have too much courtly wit for me” (III.ii.62), Corin allows, probably remembering his distinction between court and country and applying it to shows of wit, a natural virtue that requires apprehension of circumstances to be well-aimed. [2] As for himself, “I am a true laborer: I earn what 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” (III.ii.65-68). Relentless Touchstone jibes that this makes him a worse sinner still, a bawd to cattle and sheep. Beatus illi: Happy or blessed is the man who lives in the country, working his own land with no landlord. In Horace’s classic statement of this theme, irony pervades the presentation, as the man who speaks is a usurer. In Shakespeare’s version, the countryman praises his way of life without irony, the courtier-jester provides the sarcastic denials. It may be significant that Touchstone touches twice on the religious theme of sin, attempting to make corin, wose name derives from ‘heart,’ cringe before him in guilt. His heart sound in the midst of nature, Corin refuses the bait.
Rosalind unwittingly puts a stop to the dialogue. Dressed as Master Ganymede, supposed brother of Aliena, she enters, holding one of Orlando’s poems, which she found on a tree-branch. “Let no face be kept in mind / But the fair of Rosalinde,” she reads (III.ii.84-85). This pledge, a faithful act of mind, Touchstone answers with a parody which reduces love to physical terms and animal-imagery, after which he derides “the very false gallop of verses” (III.ii.103). ‘Ganymede’ calls him a “dull fool” (III.ii.105) to which he replies, “Let the forest judge” (III.ii.111). Indeed: in time nature will judge who is the fool, who the wise.
Celia enters, another of Orlando’s poems in hand, one praising Rosalind as Nature’s distillation of all the best features of classical heroines, and again citing virtues of the mind—reading, teaching—in verses acknowledging the human pilgrimage in time, recalling Jaques’ speech but ending with a vow of loyalty instead of a counsel of despair. Dismissing Touchstone and Corin, Celia confides that she has found not only the poem but its author. The man himself comes along, accompanied by Jaques; the ladies hide, listening. Jaques wishes Orlando would “mar no more trees” by carving poems on them (III.ii.244)—his exaggeration, since while Orlando may have carved his beloved’s name in trees, he has damaged no trees by hanging papers inscribed with poems. As always, Jaques’ compassion, his feelings toward nature, veer toward the maudlin and misanthropic.
No friendship arises between them, nor could it; the lover and the melancholic are ill-suited to one another. Genuine friendship calls for virtue, but “the worst fault you have is to be in love,” Jaques charges (III.ii.265)—a ‘vice’ Orlando will not correct in himself. Jaques judges him a fool; Orlando judges him a Narcissus, a self-regarding lover of his own reflection. Both men are lovers, then. Who is the greater fool? Nature will judge.
After Jaques leaves, Rosalind/Ganymede discovers herself. Her witty remarks show her a superior substitute for caviling Jaques. Remarking his good grooming, she challenges his claim to be a lover. Lovers are disheveled, she says. He seems to love himself more than any other, an unconfessed Narcissus. She subjects him to a courtly love-test, here in nature. Steering the conversation to his poems, she induces him to confess that he wrote them and then, calling love “merely a madness” (III.ii.368), promises to cure him of it if he will pretend that ‘he’ is Rosalind. She will then drive the madness out of him by driving him mad with her contradictory moods. But, the patient insists, “I would not be cured, youth” (III.ii.389). Oh, but “I would cure you, if you would but call me Rosalind, and come every day to my cote and woo me” (III.ii.390-91). Does Orlando now guess the ruse? For he agrees to go.
The central scene of this central Act is a comedy within the comedy, the natural equivalent to Shakespeare’s device of presenting a play within a play. Touchstone has found himself a country girl and woos her, as sarcastic Jaques trails behind, eavesdropping and commenting as they go. Touchstone asks Audrey if his features content her, prompting her to ask “What features?” (III.iii.4). What, indeed? Touchstone compares himself to the “capricious poet” (III.iii.6), Ovid, poet of changelings, of a nature without nature, a nature of metamorphoses effected by gods more capricious than any poet. Audrey doesn’t know what ‘poetical’ is. “Is it honest in deed and word? Is it a true thing?” (III.iii.14-15). Truly, not, Touchstone tells her, as “the truest poetry is the most feigning, and lovers are given to poetry; and what they swear in poetry may be said as lovers they do feign” (III.iii.16-18)—Rosalind’s worry about Orlando, the reason she puts him to the test. Punning on “honest,” Touchstone says he wishes Audrey were poetical because he would not have her be honest—honorable, chaste—unless she were ugly (III.iii.21-22). Honesty “coupled to beauty is to have honey a sauce to sugar” (III.iii.25-27); he would have his beauties incautious of their honor. Melancholy Jaques calls him “a material fool” (III.iii.28); he means that Touchstone gets right to what’s on his mind, sexual conquest. Playgoers may hear another sense of “material”—physicality, neither rational, spiritual, nor honorable. In this Touchstone does serve as the touchstone for Jaques’ nature, he the equal materialist (and, one recalls, the equal or even greater libertine) and the sadder man for it.
Touchstone proposes marriage, saying that the nearest vicar, Sir Oliver Martext, can do the dubious honor. And Fortune causes that gentleman to walk by; when asked to perform the ceremony, however, he requires that there be someone to give the bride away. Jaques steps forward to volunteer, but advises Touchstone to marry not in nature but in a church with “a good priest who can tell you what marriage is” (III.iii.74-75); “this fellow” will mis-join the two of you, mar the text of the ceremony (III.iii.75). Touchstone tells the audience in an aside that he prefers not to be married well, as that “will be a good excuse for me hereafter to leave my wife” (III.iii.81). In this he is Ovidian-capricious, a would-be metamorphoser of himself. Nonetheless, he goes off with Jaques, in search of a more courtly, a less natural, priest, leaving Vicar Martext happy not to have been “flout[ed] out of my calling” by either “fantastical knave” (III.iii.93-94).
This comedy in the middle of the comedy embodies in farce the themes of the more (as it were) serious comedy that frames it. The lover’s folly, the question of trust—which cannot exist if nature is metamorphic, and language metaphoric, ‘dishonest’—the nature of love itself (mindful or only physical?), and the legitimacy, the lawfulness, of the marriage, the reliability of the vows, the words, central to the marriage ceremony, that should result from love: here they are.
All these matters, material and immaterial (in both meanings of both words), stir the two ladies. They are now frustrated because Orlando has failed to fulfill his promise to visit them. But faithful Corin appears instead, telling them to come with him “If you will see a pageant truly play’d / Between the pale complexion of true love / And the red glow of scorn and proud disdain” (III.iv.47-49). Rosalind/Ganymede can hardly resist, as “the sight of lovers feedeth those in love”; “I’ll prove a busy actor in their play” (III.iv.53-55). The “pageant” consists of Corin’s young friend Silvius courting his beloved shepherdess, Phebe. She is playing hard to get. When the youth complains of the wounds inflicted on him by her scornful eyes, she (another materialist) demands to know how eyes can have wounded him, how eyes can wound anyone, as they have no weight and cannot injure like a hurled stone. One recalls that Rosalind has seen in Silvius a mirror of herself, and she does indeed busy herself as an actor in the play, reproving the girl for her “proud and pitiless” rejection of a good suitor (III.v.40). Phebe promptly falls in love with ‘him’—with ‘Ganymede’. Promptly, because (she burbles) “Who has loved that lov’d not at first sight?” (III.v.81). Even if eyes could not wound souls they can serve as portals to souls, portals open to love’s arrows. The hard armor of the girl-materialist proves less solid than she has imagined. In this, love humbles the proud, who suppose themselves invulnerable to it. ‘As you like’ is one condition, ‘as you love’ quite another.
The center of As You Like It and its follow-on scenes suggest that love metamorphoses all. But it metamorphoses them back to nature, which is steady, the right foundation of fidelity, although twisted by bad forms of rule in family and polity. How will love realign families and polities here?
Rosalind (still as Ganymede) and Jaques dialogue while Celia listens. Rosalind offers an Aristotelian critique of his melancholy: like its opposite, giddiness, it is an extremity; melancholics are “worse than drunkards” (IV.i.6). Jaques admits, “I do love it better than laughing” (IV.i.4), claiming it is “good to be sad and say nothing” (IV.i.7). “Then, ’tis good to be a post,” the lady ripostes (IV.i.8)—somewhat inaccurately, since though posts do say nothing, they are never sad. This gives Jaques a chance to contradict himself by saying something—explaining that his melancholy isn’t that of a scholar, a musician, a courtier, a soldier, a lawyer, a lady, or lover (which combines the qualities of all the other kinds), but “a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and, indeed, the sundry contemplation of my travels; in which my often rumination wraps me in a most humorous sadness” (IV.i.15-18). One might be tempted to call Jaques a comparative political scientist, but Shakespeare likely means that he is worldly, and world-weary. Rosalind/Ganymede will have none of that. Exiled, she quickly purchased a new home. “I fear that you have sold your own lands, to see other men’s; then to have seen much and to have nothing is to have rich eyes and poor hands” (IV.i.19-22).
Is that so bad? Jaques replies, “Yes, I have gain’d my experience” (IV.i.23). Before they can converse further, in a dialogue that might lead to philosophizing, Orlando enters. The lady posing as a young gentleman gains a dialogic partner of greater interest to herself, one who seeks not to philosophize but to establish a household, to love her country (you “disable all the benefits of your own country”), and to feel gratitude to her God (you “almost chide God for making you that countenance you are”) (IV.i.31-34). A lover of her own, and of he whom she wants for her own, she dismisses Jaques’ experience as saddening, preferring “a fool to make me merry than experience to make me sad—and to travel for it too”(IV.i.25-26). She turns from the melancholy fool-from-experience to the ardent fool she prefers.
Apparently still fooled by her disguise, Orlando addresses Ganymede as Rosalind, as per their agreement to stage a sort of play-within-the play. Since Jaques’ speech on the six ages of man, time has run its course as an undercurrent throughout the play. Rosalind tells him that if he arrives late for a promised appointment again, “never come in my sight more” (IV.i.37). She relents soon enough (in comedy as in love, timing is everything), and they soon co-produce a play-marriage. But marriage, she tells him, doesn’t solve the problem of time: “Men are April when they woo, December when they wed: maids are May when they are maids, but the sky changes when they are wives” (IV.i.134-136) They exchange witticisms on infidelity; when it comes to sharpening her wit, fool Orlando proves a superior touchstone than Touchstone. But when Orlando tells her he must end their repartee and leave to dine with the Duke, ‘Rosalind’/’Ganymede’/Rosalind makes his prompt return from that dinner a test of his fidelity in the course of time. Indeed, she says, “Time is the old justice that examines all such offenders, and let Time try” ((IV.i.183-184). If men and women, especially husbands and wives, often change over time, time will judge, separating the faithful from the unfaithful, identifying those whose characters are firm enough to satisfy the vows they make to others concerning what they will do and not do, in future times. The soundness of families and dukedoms alike depends on that.
As Rosalind and Celia await Orlando’s return, Silvius delivers a love-letter from Phebe. Rosalind sends him back to her with the command: “If she love me, I charge her to love thee” (IV.iii.71-72). At this point, her ruling powers seem secure, having repelled an unwanted suitor and welcomed the better one. But now her capacity to rule men and events, and even herself, gets thrown into hazard, again, in the person of Oliver.
The audience must assume that he has arrived in his hunt for his brother. He carries a “bloody napkin” IV.iii.94), which he presents to Rosalind as Orlando’s. He tells how it was bloodied. “A wretched ragged man, o’ergrown with hair”—the opposite of Orlando, well-groomed or civilized, even in the forest—lay “sleeping on his back,” with a green and gold snake wrapped around his neck, preparing to slither into his open mouth (IV.iii.107-11). This man was himself, who has indeed spoken serpentine words, outside the Forest of Arden. The satanic reptile would enter its own home. “Seeing Orlando, it unlinked itself, / And with indented glides did slip away / Into a bush” (IV.iii.112-14). In the shade under the bush was a lioness, waiting for the man to move; “for ’tis / The royal disposition of that beast / To prey on nothing that doth seem as dead” (IV.iii.117-19). The queen of beasts in this forest is the predator preying upon the predator-brother. In the forest, the bush doesn’t burn; not God but beasts that are enemies of man make use of it. Lioness and snake are the only deadly females in the play, and the only deadly animals. The forest needs the virtue of human beings to rule the animal-evil that does dwell in it. Human beings cannot rule when asleep, and neither can they mis-rule.
This gave wide-awake Orlando a choice to make. He could let his lying and lying-down brother lie, and die. Celia first wants to know if the sleeping man was Oliver, Orlando’s “most unnatural” brother (IV.iii.123). “I know he was unnatural,” Oliver confesses (IV.iii.125). He reports that his brother nearly walked away. “But kindness, nobler ever than revenge, / And nature, stronger than his just occasion, / Made him give battle to the lioness,” which he killed. (IV.iii.129-131). “I awak’d” (IV.iii.133). In saying all this Oliver must have trusted his brother to have given him a true account—a trust reinforced, as it must have been, by the sight of the dead lioness. If kindness is nobler than revenge, then Orlando had proven himself more the gentleman than his brother, to his brother. If nature is stronger than an opportunity to act justly, then the overall framework of human judgment has prevailed over the occasion—the larger understanding over the smaller.
Celia now wants to know if the man before them is the unnatural brother himself. “‘Twas I; but ’tis not I” (IV.iii.136). Past and present, the difference time can make, when a just action is timely within the ‘space’ of nature, the forest: Asleep in sin, Oliver woke up to his true nature. “I do not shame / To tell you what I was, since my conversion, / So sweetly tastes being the thing I am.” (IV.iii.137-39). This is a metamorphosis not out of Ovid but out of Plato and the Bible—the turning-around of the human soul toward the ideas, when a prisoner of the cave of political conventions begins the journey to philosophy, and the conversion of the sinner to citizenship in God’s regime. It is classical eros inflected by Christian agape.
The brothers didn’t stay out in the woods. They returned to the house of “the gentle Duke,” who “gave me fresh array and entertainment, / Committing me to my brother’s love” (IV.iii.143-45) Civility requires clothing (in this case new clothes for a renewedly human man) and leisure; it also requires faithful, declared bonds betokening shared brotherliness in a family and shared citizenship in a regime ruled by a man whose gentlemanliness contrasts with the savagery of his own unnatural brother, the usurper-tyrant whose uncivil society he fled.
All of this points to the cause of the blood on the cloth. In combat with the lioness, Orlando lost blood. He sent me here, Oliver says, to tell you why he couldn’t keep his promise to return, “that you might excuse / His broken promise” in light of this physical evidence of his continued fidelity to me and to “the shepherd youth / That he in sport doth call his Rosalind.” (IV.iii.154-57).
At this, ‘Ganymede’ faints, then recovers sufficiently to request that she be taken home. That is, unlike homeless ever-traveling Jaques, she continues to fix her attention on, seek comfort in, the household. Oliver cannot understand why a man lacks “a man’s heart” (IV.iii.165). Honestly enough, she confesses that it is so; she does lack one of the manly virtues. Nonetheless, Rosalind has recovered her wit with her consciousness, asking Oliver to tell Orlando that she only counterfeited her swoon. Oliver recognizes the noble lie as a lie, but will do as she asks.
Love begins the transition from nature to civil society with plotting. If wrongly-directed, the plots of lovers amount only to scheming, as Frederick and Oliver demonstrated. If rightly directed, toward mutual good, the plots of lovers prove reasonable pathways to consummation in marriage. Rosalind’s well-intended and reasonable, if comically elaborate plot almost fails when she loses her reason for a moment, fainting dead away. But she recovers and sticks to her story, which now moves toward its end.
The final Act sees the lovers binding themselves firmly to one another. This begins with the unlikely pair of Touchstone and Audrey. A rival appears, the shepherd William. Touchstone interrogates him. He asks him several questions of ascending difficulty: How old are you? What is your name? Where were you born? Are you rich? And finally, are you wise? William says he is wise, upon hearing which claim Touchstone recalls “a saying, ‘The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool'” (V.i.30-31). Like Socrates, the wise man knows he does not know; he loves wisdom, without supposing he has it in any comprehensive, godlike way. William fails the Socratic test. Touchstone then cites “the heathen philosopher” who, “when he had a desire to eat a grape, would open his lips when he put it into his mouth; meaning thereby that grapes were made to eat and lips to open” (V.i.31-34). Perhaps more Aristotelian than Socratic, this simple example of teleological design illustrates what nature is. It is an instance of humanly achievable knowledge, the acquisition of which makes of one somewhat less a fool than before. Two more questions for William: Do you love this maid? Yes: that is, he desires to eat the grape. Are you “learned”? (V.i.35). No. Self-describedly wise but ignorant, then. That being so, William, learn this: pour a full cup of water into a glass and the cup will be empty, no longer holding the water. I now possess Audrey and you do not. And, not to put too fine a point on the matter, now go, or I will kill you. Audrey joins in urging him to go, joining the long line of women who cause nice guys to finish last. On a decidedly less noble level, Touchstone loves his own, as Rosalind loves her own. They understand that love is exclusive, not cosmopolitan. Now he’s as ready to marry as a man like himself will ever be.
Owing his life to the brother he set out to kill, Oliver has transformed their relationship from suspicion to intimacy. To Orlando’s astonishment at the sudden love between Oliver and ‘Aliena,’ Oliver simply asks for his approval of their marriage—effectively treating Orlando as an older, or at least equal brother. He will give their father’s land and revenue to Orlando, set up his household in the forest, and “die a shepherd” with his presumed shepherdess-bride (V.ii.12). ‘Ganymede’ arrives to assure Orlando that the couple really did experience love ‘at first sight,’ that experience of time compressed. On hearing this, and having learned to trust ‘Ganymede’s’ prudent wit, Orlando agrees to the marriage, wasting no time himself: “They shall be married tomorrow; and I will bid the Duke to the nuptial.” (V.ii.40-41). He only feels “heart-heaviness” because he won’t be marrying Rosalind (V.ii.44). When ‘Ganymede’ volunteers to substitute for her, he refuses; “I can no longer live by thinking” (V.ii.48). If the fool thinks he is wise, as the saying goes, then the playacting lover may well prefer to give up thinking, give up his pretend-beloved, his beloved-in-thought-alone. Only the real person will do. If he has seen through Rosalind’s disguise, he wants her to stop playing and reveal herself, in action.
In another sense, to give up thinking is to give up philosophizing, or the attempt to philosophize. Neither Orlando nor Rosalind is a philosopher. They are, however, candidates for the activities of marriage, for the household rule animated not by the love of wisdom but the love of their own, love of home, family, country. Where would nature be, without them? Or cities?
Rosalind, who never loses sight of reality and is nobody’s fool, now knows the truth of what she tells him: “You are a gentleman of good conceit” (V.ii.51)—that is, of good thought—and I “can do strange things” (V.ii.56-57). Concocting yet another noble lie, she tells him that since the age of three she’s “convers’d with a magician, most profound in his art and yet not damnable” (V.ii.57-59)—a practitioner of ‘white magic’—and so tomorrow ‘he’ will use the power ‘he’ has learned to bring him Rosalind herself, “without any danger” (V.i.63-64). You can then marry her, “if you will” (V.i.68), even as your brother marries ‘Aliena.’
The next couple to arrive are Silvius and his still-recalcitrant Phebe. No philosopher, either, Silvius offers a sound definition of love derived from his experience, and therefore according not to thought abstracting from particulars but according to an analysis of love’s sixteen components. They are: sighs and tears, faith and service, fantasy, passion and wishes, adoration, duty and observance, humbleness, patience, and impatience, purity, trial, and obedience. Adoration and duty are the central components of love, and because love’s components are sound, loving is not blamable (no matter what his beloved says).
While not blaming misdirected love, Rosalind does intend to put the several loves here on the right tracks. To Silvius, she promises to “help you if I can”; to Phebe, she says “I would love you if I could” and “I will marry you if ever I marry woman, and I’ll be married tomorrow”; to Orlando, she promises that “I will satisfy you if ever I satisfied man, and you shall be married tomorrow” (V.ii.104-08). Reason enables her to be true and false, without self-contradiction, thanks to her mastery of the capacity of words for ambiguity and even paradox or seeming contradiction. That mastery is her true art, a magic both illusory in its capacity for telling plausible noble lies and its power to redirect human thoughts, passions, and actions toward constituting a good regime.
Missing from this meeting, Touchstone and Audrey are still in the forest, where she tells him that she has preferred him to rustic William because she wants to become “a woman of the world,” a poor shepherdess no longer (V.iii.4). They too intend to marry tomorrow, so it won’t be long before she will learn if better social standing will be the consequence of the marriage she plans. Two pages from Duke Senior’s household come by and sing the happy couple a love song celebrating spring as the time for love. Predictably, Touchstone complains about their artistry, or lack of it, but one page insists, “We kept time, we lost not our time” (V.iii.35-36). As in comedy and love, in music timing is everything, as it is in nature itself. Music plays over time, unfolding in time, and it depends on timing both in the harmonies it consists of and in the performers who play it. Music, like comedy and love, requires right rule.
The next day, right-ruling Duke Senior, his friend and ally Lord Amiens, Jaques, Orlando, Oliver, and ‘Aliena’ await ‘Ganymede.’ ‘He’ arrives, Silvius and Phebe in tow, commending patience, preeminently the virtue tested by time. The Duke agrees to give his daughter Rosalind in marriage to Orlando, if Rosalind does appear. ‘Ganymede’ extracts from Phebe a promise to marry Silvius if Phebe refuses to marry ‘him,’ ‘Ganymede,’ a promise she makes easily because she makes it unsuspectingly. And Silvius as easily consents to marry Phebe, “if she will” (V.iv.17). ‘Ganymede’ and ‘Aliena’ depart, replaced by Touchstone and Audrey; the jester amuses the Duke, delivering a comic account of the ways of courtly quarrelling and a satire on courtly chivalry based on a typology of lies. Having been deceived by lying courtly courtesies, the Duke takes the point. Touchstone, he observes to Jaques, “uses his folly like a stalking-horse, and under the presentation of that he shoots his wit” (V.iv.100-01). Exotericism has its virtues, a truth Rosalind will demonstrate, upon her return.
Undisguised, Rosalind and Celia return with Hymen, the god of marriage. Hymen hymns, “Then there is mirth in heaven, / When earthly things made even / Atone together” (V.iv.102-04). Atone: Might this be Rosalind’s discreet apology, put in the mouth of a god, for her benign ruses? In comedy, justice and repentance harmonize on earth, as they do in Heaven. Rosalind recovers her father, gains a husband, and loses an unwanted lover who, now knowing the reality, bids “my love adieu” (V.iv.115). Hymen hymns again: “Whiles a wedlock-hymn we sing, / Feed yourselves with questioning, / That reason wonder may diminish, / How thus we met, and these things finish.” (V.iv.131-34). This isn’t the theoretical reason of philosophy but the practical reason of right ruling. Hymen sings on: “‘Tis Hymen peoples every town, / High wedlock then be honored. / Honor, high honor, and renown, / To Hymen, god of every town!” (V.iv.137-40). Marriage is the foundation of the family, family the foundation of the town. Hymen is a god of the civil religion everywhere, a civil religion which is nonetheless as universal as nature itself in its generative power. Having learned from nature, these now fully civilized men and women will bring what they’ve learned into a civil society that they will now establish. Duke Senior had founded a band of brothers, but by nature brothers cannot generate a lasting political community. That takes a settlement which includes women, on the right terms, the terms of human nature, which exhibits reasoned speech in conditions of shared justice and mercy.
This happy ending ignores one massive threat. The rulers of the new polis have made no provision for foreign policy. Internally sound, it is externally at hazard from the regime of the usurper-tyrant whose evil rule all present have escaped. But there is still one more person to make his appearance. We recall that there are two Jaques—one the melancholy traveler, the other the second son of Sir Rowland de Boys. Jaques de Boys now enters, with news from the court of Duke Frederick. “Hearing how every day / Men of great worth resorted to this forest,” Frederick had mounted a military expedition of “mighty power” to attack the exiles (V.iv.148-50). Poised to enter the forest, he met “with an old religious man”—the only such a one we’ve met is the Vicar Martext—who “converted” him “both from his enterprise and from the world” (V.iv.153-55). Frederick has ceded the crown back to Duke Senior, restored all lands to those he dispossessed, and entered a monastery—spiritual exile from the Kingdom of Man.
These are welcome, well-timed wedding gifts, indeed. Oliver and Celia will return to live on his restored estate. The Duke will return to his rightful throne. His son-in-law Orlando will return as heir to the “potent dukedom” (V.iv.163), with wise Rosalind at his side to tender counsel. All of Duke Senior’s friends and allies will “share the good of our returned fortune, / According to the measure of their states,” that is, according to justice (V.iv.168-69). Before returning to our newly-restored “dignity,” the duke happily commands, forget its restoration for the moment and “fall into our rustic revelry” with music and dance,, human harmonies consonant with those of the nature around them, and now in them (V.iv.170-71). Music is the imitation of the natural harmonies, speaking to the soul, dance the action of the body in accord with music. [3]
The melancholy Jaques will imitate Frederick’s self-exile; like him, he has no wife, no place within the harmonies of civil society. Love harmonizes, but it also excludes those who neither love nor are loved. Duke Senior invites him to remain, but Jaques prefers to retire to the Duke’s soon-to-be-abandoned cave. He has gone from libertine to world traveler to melancholic and now to isolato. For him, however, none of his metamorphoses has changed him into a person who can participate in a civil society animated by natural sentiments, the principal of which is an entwining of agapic and erotic love, especially love of one’s own. Jaques is an egoist who doesn’t even love himself. His cave isn’t even the Platonic-Socratic cave of human convention. It is a cave not beneath but outside the cave, warmed neither by the love of God, as a monastery might be, or love of neighbor, as a civil society might be. It is the cave of misanthropy, the end of apolitical epicureanism. Shakespeare has delivered each soul to its rightful place.
The plot of the play so concluded, Rosalind steps forward to speak to the audience in a kind of play outside the play. “It is not the fashion to see the lady in the epilogue” (Epilogue 1). Having consistently shown how to navigate between such convention and nature, she will not falter now. “If it be true that good wine needs no bush, ’tis true that a good play needs no epilogue”; since a “bush” was the vine tavern owners would hang to advertise the wine they had on offer, she means that a good play, like a good wine, needs no advertising; it will win customers by ‘word of mouth,’ as they liked it. The only other “bush” mentioned in As You Like It is the one the serpent retreated to and the lion hid underneath. Bushes may conceal the bad as easily as they may publicize the good. Predatory animals seek cover to do evil; human beings with rightly-ordered, harmonized souls seek the good without being drawn to it with ballyhoo. They do need to be told about it.
Rosalind will not beg the audience to like the play. Rather, “My way is to conjure you” (Epilogue 10), the way of the magician of words, of speech and reason, under whose beneficial spell you may be. She conjures them with her words one last time, asking both men and women to like the play. Perhaps her spell, her lessons about love, marriage, fidelity in family and country, will remain with this real-world audience after they they leave the theater of thought Shakespeare has made, even as his characters will return to civil society re-grounded in nature.
As you like it: Indeed, how do you like it, and what is it? How will you know yourself well enough to become a loyal brother, a good friend, a faithful citizen, a true lover, husband, wife? To know yourself you will need an education, and absent the sound, liberal, gentlemanly and gentlewomanly education of rulers, you may need to learn what is humanly natural from nature itself and from what is kindly artificial—noble lies taught by a benevolent plotter or playwright, blending well-timed speeches and actions with artful costume designs, well-ordered music, song, and dance, all of them protecting good souls and redirecting bad ones toward nature, toward human nature in its capacity for reason, love, and right reverence.
Notes
- Harold C. Goddard observes that a touchstone is a type of black sandstone that tests the purity of gold and silver, when a merchant rubs the precious metal on it. The small streak of metal on the stone can then be analyzed. “Not precious itself, it reveals preciousness”—or, it might be added, the lack of it—in “what touches it.” (Goddard: The Meaning of Shakespeare. 2 volumes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967 [1951]). I.290. Goddard, who finds great fault in Touchstone, doesn’t sufficiently reflect on the fact that a bit of precious metal rubs off on the Touchstone; this may be what Duke Senior sees in, or at least on, him.
- Scholars have suggested that “Corin” is short for “Corinthians,” and here are reminded of Paul’s observation that God has chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise.
- C. L. Barber writes, “As You Like It seems to me the most perfect expression Shakespeare or anyone else achieved of a poise which was possible because a traditional way of living connected different kinds of experience with each other,” a “humorous recognition… of the limits of nature’s moment.” (C. L. Barber: Shakespeare’s Festive Comedies. Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1963 [1959]), 238. Except that nature isn’t only a moment, even if living ‘out in nature,’ in the forest, is. Rather, members of the renewed political society will take nature’s lessons back to the potent dukedom.
Recent Comments