SOURCE: “The Disguises of Shakespeare's As You Like It,” in Iowa State Journal of Research, Vol. 59, No. 3, February, 1985, pp. 295-305.

[In the following essay, Stanton argues that many of As You Like It's characters disguise their true feelings and nature, a fact which clarifies many of the play's nuances.]

The physical disguise of Rosalind as the male “Ganymede” is one of the most discussed features of Shakespeare's As You Like It.¹ Most commentary, however, either completely neglects or minimally addresses the disguises of Celia as “Aliena” and the Clown as “Touchstone.” More than a simple plot device, the disguises of these three characters provide an external manifestation for their internal tensions. Furthermore, several of the other characters disguise themselves in less dramatic ways in response to the image expected of them by those who hold power over them. The use of forms of disguising throughout the play gives Rosalind's physical disguise a context, and the necessity for disguise is one of the play's themes: a variation on the nature/art tension that pervades As You Like It.

In the household of Oliver and the court of Duke Frederick, the characters who are without political power are unhappy, depressed, frustrated, or angry. Orlando feels that his true identity as the youngest son of Sir Rowland de Boys is obscured by his older brother Oliver's tyranny and unfairness. Similarly, Rosalind must attempt to generate “more mirth” than she is “mistress of,” in order to hide her moroseness over her father's political overthrow. Even the minor characters Charles and Le Beau reveal that their political sympathies are not with Duke Frederick. The court's motley fool (who will become “Touchstone”) must worry about being whipped for offering his criticism of the current regime. Because they cannot feel support for the present rulers, all of these characters must disguise their attitudes somewhat in order to survive. For these characters, “natural” life has become “unnatural,” so they must resort to the art of seeming to be what they are not.

In the case of Orlando, the youth seems to have reached the breaking point of his disguised self-control at the opening of the play. His complaints to Adam show that, rather than actively trying to be what he is not, he had been passively accepting the “disguising” of his true position as Sir Rowland's son imposed upon him through Oliver's treatment of him. His remarks imply that he has endured for some time this condition that hides his genteel self in an enforced disguise of rusticity. At this point, he is not quite sure how to remove the disguise. He also seems to have some difficulty in perceiving exactly who or what he is underneath the disguise; he continually refers to the spirit of his father within him. He can as yet only understand his own identity in terms of his heritage and the qualities in himself that are like those of his deceased father; he has no clear idea of self without the context provided by Sir Rowland.

The means that Orlando settles on as the way to remove the disgraceful disguise given to him from Oliver is to go to court, disguised, in order to challenge Charles, the court wrestler. The point of the disguise is not made clear, and its success is questionable: Charles knows before Orlando even comes to court that this youngest son of Sir Rowland is the wrestler. Although after he has triumphed over Charles, Orlando proudly asserts his identity as Sir Rowland's son, he seems to “mine” his own “gentility” by at first keeping his name a secret. However, the disguise is probably at first merely a device to allow Orlando access to Duke Frederick's court without being turned away at once simply on the basis of his identity as the son of an enemy to the ruler.

Before and during the wrestling match, both Rosalind and Celia are impressed with Orlando, concerned for his safety, and hopeful for his success. Both definitely also find Orlando attractive. But after the match, when Orlando's identity is revealed, Rosalind takes Orlando to be “hers” because of the friendship between their respective fathers. Significantly, immediately before the match, Rosalind says to Orlando, “Pray heaven I be deceived in you!” (I.ii.186).² Her wish is granted. She is deceived in underestimating Orlando's strength, but she is also deceived in thinking Orlando to be only a good-looking, strong, bold young man. As the son of Sir Rowland, her father's beloved friend, Orlando is her political ally, thus more “hers” than Celia's. Rosalind perceives herself and Orlando to have an immediate and strong bond because of their heritages and their true selves that are being repressed.³

The events of the meeting of Rosalind and Orlando at court rehearse the events of their relationship in the forest, except that at court it is Orlando who is disguised; in the forest it is Rosalind. At court, the unidentified Orlando inspires warm feelings in Rosalind, who has a potential rival for his affections in Celia until Orlando's true identity is known. In the forest, Orlando has warm feelings for Rosalind as “Ganymede,” who is loved by Phebe until “Ganymede” 's true identity is revealed. Thus the use of physical disguise by Rosalind is foreshadowed in the less complicated use of “disguise” of political withholding of identity by Orlando.

In trying to forge Orlando into an unrefined menial, Oliver wishes to make Orlando “disguise” himself as a servant like Adam. Although Orlando rejects the proffered role-model, in his rebellion against Oliver he styles himself in the manner of another character, Charles the wrestler. Some parallels between Charles and Orlando can be noted. Each sees physical strength as his means of making a place for himself in the world. In stressing his physical powers, each diminishes the importance of his other characteristics in the eyes of those who observe him. Charles is often considered to be merely a ruffian by many critics; Rosalind and Celia habitually refer to Orlando as the “wrestler.”

By understanding that Charles is himself also making use of a kind of disguise, we can resolve some of the difficulties seen in his character by several commentators. Although often called by critics an “inarticulate brute,” Charles actually displays considerable nobility of spirit in the concern for Orlando which he expresses to Oliver. Furthermore, Charles' description of Duke Senior's forest life, often read as being merely a crude means for exposition in the play, actually shows that Charles admires Duke Senior and his life of (as Charles supposes) romantic freedom. Rather than being “evidence” of Shakespeare's uncorrected revision, the discrepancy between Charles' behavior with Oliver and his behavior at court should be understood as an indication that, in order to provide for himself, Charles must play a part. Wrestling is an approved form of entertainment at court because it is a metaphor for the political overthrow by force through which Duke Frederick gained his power.⁴ Seeing that Duke Frederick's court offers a place for someone with his kind of talent, Charles exploits his natural ability and artfully disguises his political antipathy. At court, he acts the brute in order to fulfill the expectations of a brutal ruling class. Orlando sees the same opportunity.⁵ He wants to succeed at court in order to free himself from one kind of disguising, but he cannot maintain the disguising of his political sympathy as well as Charles does.

Another minor character at court, Le Beau, also disguises his sympathies in his outward show. During his initial conversation with Rosalind and Celia, Le Beau seems to be merely a longwinded, insensitive fop. However, when he converses with Orlando after the wrestling match, Le Beau gives the youth a succinct and comradely warning, hoping to meet him again “in a better world than this” (I.ii.274). His astute warning to Orlando about Duke Frederick's moods suggests his implicit hope for the tyrant's overthrow. Like Charles, then, Le Beau is playing a part, disguising himself in order to provide a place for himself at court.

If Orlando, Rosalind, Charles, and Le Beau are aware of the need to disguise their attitudes at court, so are the power figures, Oliver and Duke Frederick, extremely sensitive to the strategy of disguise. During and after his conversation with Charles, Oliver reveals to the audience his own use of several levels of disguise. While disguising his true feelings about Orlando, Oliver says that he has tried “by underhand means” (I.i.135) to discourage his brother from wrestling Charles. He lies about Orlando's character, disguising the youth's true good nature in a shroud of supposed villainy. Rather than using “underhand means” to prevent Orlando from wrestling, Oliver underhandedly tries to allow the match to proceed and to provoke Charles into eliminating Orlando for him. In his soliloquy following the conversation, we see not only Oliver's true undisguised attitude, but also that he somehow attributes his own lack of popularity to Orlando.

In Duke Frederick, we see another man who is obsessed with the disguising of attitudes. Because he himself had been disguising his negative feelings about Rosalind for so long, he assumes that she is disguising her treason. Again, because he, like Oliver, fails to perceive that naturalness and uncomplicated goodness make for popularity, he suspects those who seem to be natural and good to be putting on a disguise to cover their subversive aims. His excuse for banishing Rosalind is that she disguises Celia's brightness and virtue in the people's eyes, because their attention is distracted by pity for Rosalind. His real reason, made explicit in Shakespeare's source, Lodge's Rosalynde, is that he is worried that Rosalind will marry and that her husband will try to reclaim the power in her name. This reason is implied in As You Like It, because Duke Frederick is not provoked to act against Rosalind until after the son of his enemy has appeared and has caught Rosalind's eye. Duke Frederick, then, not only induces the need for disguising in his subjects, but he also disguises his own attitudes and reasons for his actions. The obsession of both Duke Frederick and Oliver with disguised attitudes sets the tone for the court scenes and creates a context for the physical disguises that result when disguised attitudes are no longer sufficient.

The necessity for the assumption of physical disguise by Rosalind and Celia is a direct result of Duke Frederick's banishment of Rosalind on the grounds that she disguises her political motives. He saw Rosalind as being disguised when she was not. By assuming a disguise, in one sense she then embodies his conception of her. She chooses, however, to become “Ganymede,” the beloved page of Jove. Ganymede's loyalty and love toward his master could not be questioned. By “becoming” “Ganymede,” Rosalind demonstrates that she is a loyal and loving subject. The disguise allows her to be what she is naturally, with the layer of disguise projected upon her by Duke Frederick removed. However, by “becoming” a man, she-he could claim the dukedom. In V.iv.28-29, Orlando reveals that when he first saw “Ganymede,” he thought that “he” was a brother to Rosalind. As her own “husband” or “brother,” Rosalind could become the “traitor” that Duke Frederick suspects her to be: one who could reclaim what her father had lost.

Similarly, Celia's choice of a disguise allows her too to become more fully what she is by nature. At court, she is forced to disguise her alienation from the behavior and attitudes of her father, Duke Frederick. By translating her name from “Celia,” which means “heaven,” to “Aliena,” “the estranged one,” she demonstrates her change from her lofty position of power to her chosen position in banishment from “his Grace,” her father. In “poor and mean attire” and with an umber-besmirched face, Celia shows her voluntary assumption of poverty and her self-conscious besmirching of herself as daughter. She prefers to be alienated, poor, and colored by disgrace in her father's eyes than to seem to be like him.

By recognizing that the disguising of attitudes leads to physical disguise that releases a character's true identity, we can then understand why the Clown seems to change so much from court to country. The change in the Fool's behavior has been unjustly attributed to Shakespeare's supposed haste in composition, his supposed faulty revision, and even to the fact that Will Kempe left Shakespeare's company at about the time that As You Like It was composed. Shakespeare, it is sometimes suggested, had to alter the role to suit the talents of Kempe's replacement, Robert Armin, and the Bard then simply forgot to change the “low” comedy of the Clown at court (composed for Kempe) to match the “high” comedy of Touchstone in the forest.⁶

Critics concerned with these arguments usually forget that the Clown is never referred to by name at court and that introducing his first appearance in the forest (II.iv.1) is the stage direction “Enter Rosalind for Ganymede, Celia for Aliena, and Clown, alias Touchstone.” “Touchstone,” then, is a newly created identity, just as “Ganymede” and “Aliena” are. The Clown should be granted the liberty to express himself more freely in the forest than in the court which is granted by commentators to Rosalind and Celia.

Although the Clown does not seem to use much, if any, physical disguise (Jaques refers to him as a “motley fool” in II.vii.13), Touchstone is in some respects best equipped for a life of deception. At court, he is sometimes on the brink of being whipped for revealing satirical attitudes toward Duke Frederick's rule; however, we learn after he has departed that the Clown had usually managed to make himself agreeable to the usurper (II.ii.8-9). Also, his speech at court in I.ii.69-70, 72-77 points the way toward the subtleties of disguise that Rosalind will achieve as “Ganymede.” After he is asked by Rosalind to “unmuzzle” his “wisdom” or show his undisguised logic, the Clown tells Rosalind and Celia to stroke their chins and swear by their beards that he is a knave. When they do, swearing by what they do not have, the Clown reveals to them that they have just learned the secret of how to lie successfully: “if you swear by what is not, you are not forsworn” (ll. 73-74). Although Rosalind will not assume a beard as part of her disguise, she will incorporate the Clown's lesson into it. Whatever she swears to as “Ganymede,” even if it is an expression of her most undisguised feelings as Rosalind, she is always protected against being “forsworn” as a disguised maidenly Rosalind by making her statements on the basis of what she is not, a man.

In Arden, physical disguise is also assumed by Duke Senior and his followers and by Orlando. The stage direction for II.i (the first forest scene) tells us that we meet “Duke Senior, Amiens, and two or three Lords, like Foresters.” In II.vii another stage direction reveals that Duke Senior and his Lords enter “like outlaws.” Of course, “foresters” and “outlaws” could perhaps have been used almost interchangeably, but as a stage direction only once specifies the disguises of Rosalind, Celia, and the Clown, it is possible that the Duke and party are dressed differently in the two scenes. When dressed as foresters, the Duke and his followers fit Charles' previous description of them as being like Robin Hood and his men. The audience has its conception of how the group should look realized. However, as they are dressed as “outlaws” in II.vii, the scene in which Orlando encounters them, their appearance justifies his supposition that he is in an “uncouth” forest in which “all things” are “savage.” As the people he comes upon are dressed like outlaws, Orlando acts like an outlaw himself. In III.ii.43 Celia will describe Orlando, as she has just seen him, as being “furnished like a hunter.” By this time, some of the audience's romantic illusions about Duke Senior's party will have been discarded. Presumably, being now part of the Duke's group, Orlando will be dressed as they are. The group is seen to be neither primarily innocent, jolly “Robin Hood” followers, nor villainous outlaws. They can, however, definitely be characterized as hunters—not only after deer, but also after ways to accommodate themselves to their exiled condition. Orlando will also be hunting for the fulfillment of his love, as noted in Rosalind's symbolic interpretation of his costume: “O ominous! He comes to kill my heart” (III.ii.244). The array of the Duke and his group, then, ultimately represents them according to their role in nature. Orlando, specifically, as a hunter, has now assumed an outward semblance that reflects his inner identity better than had the “disguise” forced upon him by Oliver.

Although Orlando takes up the role of lover in the forest, “Ganymede” tells him in II.ii that he is not properly dressed for the part. He is “rather point-device in [his] accouterments” (l. 375.) According to “Ganymede” 's description of the lover, the “hose should be ungartered … bonnet unbanded … sleeve unbuttoned … shoe untied, and everything … demonstrating a careless desolation” (ll. 371-74). Of course, Rosalind plays a role while she describes a role. As “Ganymede,” she satirizes the traditional presentation of a lover; as Rosalind, she tells Orlando that his looks more suggest his loving himself “than seeming the lover of any other” (ll. 375-76), in order to call forth protestations of love from him. Orlando's excessiveness in love is revealed in his poetry, not in his costume. He need not “disguise” himself as a lover, because he is a lover. Ironically, he instead neatly wears the costume of the hunter, while he is unwittingly being hunted by the disguised Rosalind. Beneath her “Ganymede” disguise, Rosalind is evidently pleased that Orlando is not so foolish as to pose as a lover by means of his disguise, while she grants herself the liberty to exploit her own attire in order to test the depth of Orlando's love.

Although commentators often speculate on the reasons for Rosalind's maintenance of her disguise after she is in the forest and has met Orlando, the explanation is quite simple. When she meets Orlando, she has only been in the forest a short time and has not yet found her father. She may consider that she is still in danger—if not from the forest's residents, then from being found by Duke Frederick's men. When she first hears of Orlando's presence in the forest, she is confused about what to do about her disguise: “What shall I do with my doublet and hose?” (III.ii.217-18). As Orlando appears before she can answer this question, she is thus instantly inspired to “speak to him like a saucy lackey, and under that habit play the knave with him” (ll. 291-92). Early in their encounter, she gives Orlando a definite clue that she actually is a woman, by telling him that she dwells “here in the skirts of the forest, like fringe upon a petticoat” (ll. 331-32). She seems to be willing to give up her disguise if Orlando can see through it. As he does not, she then makes full use of it in her complicated role-playing that is to follow.

As has been shown, then, Rosalind's physical disguise is echoed by the disguises of Celia and the Clown, and the disguises have their roots in the disguisings of the true self in the unnatural world of the court. The tyranny of Duke Frederick and Oliver resulted in a masking of the natural personalities of Rosalind, Celia, the Clown, Orlando, and even Charles and Le Beau. The tyrants, however, are not in their power free to express themselves naturally but must also resort to the disguising of their motives. The shift in attire in the Duke Senior group in the forest reveals the characters' seeking after the best outward demonstration of their internal reality, as does Rosalind's disguise as “Ganymede.” Orlando undergoes several stages of disguise in his transformations, from being an aristocrat disguised as a menial, to being disguised at court as a wrestler, to being a lover “disguised” as a neatly attired hunter. But it is of course Rosalind who exploits the potentials of disguise most fully. What was undertaken as a necessary response to the false identity imposed upon her became the perfect vehicle for testing and teaching Orlando. While disguised as “Ganymede,” Rosalind then poses as “Rosalind,” in order to pose further as one who will “cure” Orlando of his lovesickness, and this last pose actually masks her truer identity as one who desires the youth's love above anything. She thus constructs layers of disguises, with some reflecting her “true” self more than others, but with all indicating some of her own characteristics. Through this layering, Shakespeare seems to be indicating the levels of real and disguised feelings that an intelligent woman may have toward her lover. She can simultaneously mock his excessiveness and cherish it. She can “identify” with him through her own “masculine” tendencies (and thus gain a larger perspective of the relationship), while at the same time indulging in her “feminine” feelings of passion. The poses of Rosalind, then, can be seen as being enhanced versions of the poses that many intelligent women take in love, with the manifestations here given outward form through disguise.

The disguises of Rosalind, however, also emanate out into the furthest reaches of identity and creativity. By creating “Ganymede,” Rosalind provides herself with a homosexual rival for Orlando's affections, as well as providing Silvius with a homosexual rival for Phebe. Rosalind recreates herself as an actor with parts to play in several pageants, splits herself into a variety of characters. Through her disguises she becomes an artist whose mind shapes several identities. She must then step aside and let her work deliver her meaning, which is why she delegates power to Hymen in the masque that reveals her “true,” if diminished, identity.

The masque of Hymen has often been misunderstood, criticized as a superfluous, gratuitous intrusion into the play. Actually, it is integral to the consummation of the play's statement on the relationship between nature and art.⁷ The masque simultaneously represents the play's “moment of truth” and its height of artifice. Music, poetry, song, and the unrealistic presence of Hymen compensate for the removal of the artifices of Rosalind and Celia, who become again their “natural” selves through art. In her last moments as “Ganymede,” Rosalind promises “to make all this matter even” and again “To make these doubts all even” (V.iv.18, 25). However, it is Hymen who makes things “even” by presenting Rosalind and Celia as their real selves; he adds that it is he “must make conclusion / Of these most strange events” (ll. 109, 126-27). By this act he seems to usurp Rosalind's role. He is a “new” character; we are not told whether he is Corin or some other character in disguise, which he may well be. The characters and the audience are to suspend disbelief and accept him as the God of Marriage. Yet the characters are less amazed by his presence than by the simple truth of Rosalind's and Celia's identities. Hymen's recapitulation of Rosalind's statements indicate that he is the last identity created by Rosalind. She began by recreating herself as “Ganymede,” the page to a god, and she concludes by creating a god, or at least by making him, or an illusion of him, appear. She gives up artifice after she has finally created a work of art that is larger than herself but that shows her to be a person taking her place in society with others, subject to the laws of nature. The masque epitomizes what the play has suggested throughout: that human beings need art in order to realize their natures fully. It is through art that we are struck by the wonder of nature.

The complexities involved in disguise seem to the “made even,” or resolved, in the masque, but still another layer of the problem of the relationship between disguise and truth or art and nature is uncovered in the epilogue.⁸ In it Rosalind reveals that “she” actually is a male. The audience members who had enjoyed the dramatic irony of characters' thinking “Ganymede” a boy now see the play as having pulled an ironic trick upon them. Of course, contemporary audiences “knew” that boys played female's parts, but the epilogue forces the audience to acknowledge the truth behind the convention, the “disguise.” But even this revelation is not allowed to be final, as Rosalind in this last speech is really both sexes. She denies being a woman, but by her curtsey at the end, she again seems to be one. She further makes both a heterosexual and a homosexual advance to the audience in offering to kiss some of the men if she were a woman, which she is and is not by being Rosalind. She can only be male and female, character and actor, through art and its disguises. By stripping off her last layer of disguise, Rosalind shows her ultimate identity as the spirit of art, which must use human nature—the artist, the actor, and the audience—as its medium and its subject. Just as nature and art merge in the disguises of the characters of As You Like It, so does the art represented by Rosalind merge with the “nature” of the audience members in her offer of sexual interplay with them.

Notes

1. See F. H. Mares, “Viola and Other Transvestist Heroines in Shakespeare's Comedies,” in Stratford Papers, 1965-1967, edited by B. A. W. Jackson (Hamilton: McMaster Univ. Library Press, 1969), pp. 96-109; Kent van den Berg, “Theatrical Fiction and the Reality of Love in As You Like It,” PMLA, 90 (1975), 885-93; Margaret Boerner Beckman, “The Figure of Rosalind in As You Like It,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 29 (1978), 44-51; Nancy K. Hayles, “Sexual Disguise in As You Like It and Twelfth Night,” Shakespeare Survey, 32 (1979), 63-72; and Shirley F. Staton, “Female Transvestism in Renaissance Comedy; ‘A Natural Perspective, That Is and Is Not,’” Iowa State Journal of Research, 56 (1981), 79-89.

2. All quotations from As You Like It are from the Signet Classic Edition, edited by Albert Gilman (New York: New American Library, 1963).

3. For speculation on the relationship between Duke Senior and Sir Rowland, see David G. Byrd, “Shakespeare's Familiaritie Between Sir Rowland and Duke Senior in As You Like It,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 26 (1976) 205-06.

4. Ralph Berry interprets the wrestling match to be a strikingly appropriate figure for covert power struggles in the play. See his “No Exit from Arden,” Modern Language Review, 66 (1971), 11-20.

5. For information on the traditional choices open to Orlando as the youngest son, see John W. Draper, “Orlando, the Younger Brother,” Philological Quarterly, 13 (1934), 72-77.

6. See, for example, T. W. Baldwin, “Shakespeare's Jester: The Dates of Much Ado and As You Like It,” Modern Language Notes, 39 (1924), 447-55; and Charles S. Felver, “Robert Armin, Shakespeare's Source for Touchstone,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 7 (1956), 135-37.

7. For other views on the meaning of the masque of Hymen, see Sylvan Barnet, “‘Strange Events’: Improbability in As You Like It,” Shakespeare Survey, 4 (1968), 119-31; Marilyn L. Williamson, “The Masque of Hymen in As You Like It,” Comparative Drama, 2 (1968), 248-58; David A. Griffin, “Deus Ex Machina in As You Like It,” American Notes and Queries, 9 (1970), 23-24; and Alan Brissenden, “The Dance in As You Like It and Twelfth Night,” Cahiers Elizabéthains, 13 (April 1978), 25-34.

8. For other analyses of the epiloque, see Alvin Thaler, “Shakespeare and the Unhappy Happy Ending,” PMLA, 42 (1927), 736-61; and R. Chris Hassel, “Shakespeare's Comic Epilogues: Invitations to Festive Communion,” Shakespeare-Jahrbuch, 8 (1970), 160-69.