As You Like It (Vol. 34) | Margaret Boerner Beckman (essay date 1978)
Margaret Boerner Beckman (essay date 1978)
SOURCE: "The Figure of Rosalind in As You Like It," in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 1, Winter, 1978, pp. 44-51.
[In the following essay, Beckman describes Rosalind as a figure who personifies the reconciliation of opposites in As You Like It.]
Toward the end of As You Like It, just before she resolves the plot, the disguised Rosalind tells Orlando:
Believe then, if you please, that I can do strange things: I have, since I was three years old, conversed with a magician, most profound in his art and yet not damnable. If you do love Rosalind … it is not impossible to me, if it appear not inconvenient to you, to set her before your eyes tomorrow human as she is, and without any danger.1
Even if the play strains the bounds of probability, no magic has been worked in it before this scene. It therefore seems strange that...
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