SOURCE: “Wrestling as Play and Game in As You Like It,” in Studies in English Literature, Vol. 33, No. 2, Spring, 1993, pp. 265-87.

[In the following essay, Marshall explores the way in which wrestling is used as a metaphor for socially constructed emotion.]

As You Like It, long considered among the happiest and most refined of Shakespearean comedies, has lately been seen as shadowed by various social tensions. Critics have traced the difficulties of “fraternal enmity” and hostilities over primogeniture,¹ the bitter implications of a changing agricultural economy,² and the ambiguous resistances that were enacted against an oppressive sex and gender system.³ The shift from an idealizing critical tendency to a focus on dark implications enacts the general movement of responses to Shakespeare's comedies, which have appeared far more serious under the gazes of feminism and new historicism than an earlier aesthetic would have dreamed. Yet because what was traditionally admired about As You Like It was precisely its ability to manage conflict—as C.L. Barber put it, the “power to express conflict and order it in art”⁴—, the critical shift in this case raises specific questions about representation and about the relation of social tensions to the comic realm, which are overlooked if we simply ascribe to an inevitable rotation of tastes and interests this movement from “enchanted world” to “inchoate energies.”⁵ The complexity of “express[ing] conflict” is showcased in the staged wrestling match in I.ii, which functions formally in As You Like It to channel and exorcise physical aggressions, but functions theatrically to unsettle various oppositions between art and life. Situated on the structural boundaries differentiating fight, sport, and theater, the match offers a conspicuous avowal of physical presence and conflict, even as it calls into question our modes for recognizing and understanding them. Building on the work of critics who have inquired into the troubled codes of gender in As You Like It, this essay will address the play's acknowledgement of the textuality of physical presence through its incorporation of wrestling. I will also consider the implications such textuality has for an understanding of performative violence.

The absolute physicality of wrestling, the perfect identification between the wrestler and his body, led Roland Barthes to define it in a classic essay as “not a sport” but “a spectacle.” The “obviousness of the roles,” together with the purity of the gestures (Suffering, Defeat, and Justice are all on display), portray “an ideal understanding of things,” the “image of the perfect intelligibility of reality.”⁶ Despite the historical distance between the forms of wrestling known to Shakespeare in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England and those observable in twentieth-century France, Barthes's perception of the sport's performative truth applies to As You Like It on several levels. Within the fictional world of the play, the match at Duke Frederick's court is at once entertainment and an attempt to order reality in a morally intelligible way: either Charles will preserve his status (and his employer's) as preeminent, or Orlando will demonstrate his heroic ascendancy. And in the theater, an audience delighting with Celia and Rosalind in the triumph of the underdog ordinarily finds Orlando's victory a memorable display of morally ordered plot. Yet because of its intertextuality—the performance embedded in a highly mannered drama—this spectacle is by no means pure: rules necessary to define the game, its players, the play space, and the audience are all brought into question. As a result, although the emphatic physicality of the wrestling match provides the theater audience with an easily comprehensible display of athletic skill and channeled violence, the episode also interrogates the boundaries of its own game and of social codes more generally. Not least among the codes thus questioned are those ordering the complex layers of theatricality separating the bodies of the performing actors from those of the observing audience.

Barthes's essay suggests that despite its obvious physicality, wrestling as a spectacle is astonishingly flat, teasing in its presentation of ordered reality. Obvious roles, pure gestures, strictly physical identities—none of this can offer assurance that the “image of the perfect intelligibility of reality” is reality itself. Discussions of wrestling in Tudor and Stuart social discourse convey a similar distrust, although Shakespeare's contemporaries are suspicious of wrestling less for its teasing simplicity than for its shifting significations. They see wrestling as a form of play uneasily situated on the margin between sport (ordered and rule-bound) and uncontrolled violence. Thus it offers a spectacle that paradoxically requires interpretation; it demands to be “read,” to have judgment rendered as to who plays fairly (wrestles as game) and who transgresses the boundaries of sport (wrestles truly violently). These issues are further complicated by the frequent collapse of the line separating players from audience; in the sixteenth century, as today, a wrestling match could incite violence among its spectators.

The importance of its relation to the audience indicates that wrestling, in itself, is closer to theater than spectacle. Of course the theatrical situation of As You Like It's wrestling match complicates any such distinction mightily. While the presence of wrestlers ordinarily tantalizes with the purported “reality” of violence, the representation of wrestling in the theater underscores the receding quality of any such physical truth. Mimesis deprives the spectacle of exactly that form of validity—physical violence—it would claim for itself. Here we face the redoubled truth of Derrida's insight that “play is the disruption of presence.”⁷ The wrestlers' violence is mediated by the “play” of both sport and spectacle; their bodies are ambiguously present, problematically known. For if violence can be represented or “played,” it can be faked; so too with love, so too with gender. Each of these seemingly simple human truths is shown by As You Like It to be constructed, chosen, presented, and represented. By foregrounding wrestling, As You Like It shows how even the most simple—some would say crude—forms of human interaction are socially codified.

The play's inquiry into the shifting realities of physical presence begins abruptly, with the skirmish that breaks out between Orlando and Oliver in the first moments of As You Like It. An audience is challenged immediately to take sides in the conflict, and since violence signifies differently to these two brothers, our choice carries implications beyond the characterological. Modern productions typically exaggerate Oliver's menacing appearance and unscrupulous behavior, although the text does not make clear who instigates the initial attack: Oliver's “What, boy!” (I.i.52) may announce his attack on Orlando, or it may accompany a threatening gesture.⁸ But with Orlando's reply—“Come, come, elder brother, you are too young in this” (I.i.53-54)—actual violence evidently surfaces, as announced by Oliver's response, “Wilt thou lay hands on me villain?” (I.i.55).⁹ Orlando uses his position of physical dominance to assert his identity: “I am no villain. I am the youngest son of Sir Rowland de Boys” (I.i.56-57). Affirming identity through the patriarchy, Orlando defends his father's name rather than merely his own:

he is thrice a villain that says such a father begot villains. Wert thou not my brother, I would not take this hand from thy throat till this other had pulled out thy tongue for saying so. Thou hast railed on thyself.

(I.i.57-62)¹⁰

References to “this hand” and “this other,” to “thy throat” and “thy tongue,” focus and ground the conflict in an opposition between two individuals, but it is precisely this opposition and separability that the blood bond denies. Oliver has insulted not, or not only, the mutual father, but “railed on [him]self” (I.i.62). “Wert thou not my brother” (emphasis added), Orlando's violence would be unconstrained; as things are, family ties efface enmity's distinctions. Somewhere in the course of demanding “such exercises as may become a gentleman” or “the poor allottery [his] father left” him (I.i. 72-73), Orlando releases Oliver from his grip.

While the emotions fueling this skirmish are evidently of long duration, the encounter itself seems spontaneous, unpremeditated. Indecorously coming to blows with his brother, Orlando demonstrates the depth and intensity of his outrage; violence for him is the sign of validity. In his opening lines Orlando has set up the play's central thematic contrast, that between nature (“the something that nature gave me” [I.i.17]) and culture (“call you that keeping for a gentleman of my birth” [I.i.8-9]; “I am not taught to make anything” [I.i.301). The outbreak of violence, a sudden rupturing of cultivated prohibitions on physical resolution of differences, seems to stem from the “nature” side of this antithesis. Oliver's threat to “physic” his brother's “rankness” (I.i.86) may further a sense that Orlando, however sympathetic he is as a character, has restored to violence because he is overgrown and undereducated.

Wrestling, however, was on Oliver's mind before he met his brother and incited him to violence. As soon becomes apparent, Oliver not only knew that Charles the wrestler was on hand (I.i.89-90), but with his elliptical remark “’Twill be a good way. And tomorrow the wrestling is” (I.i.93-94), he reveals prior formation of a plan to sacrifice and dispose of Orlando in a match with Charles. What had seemed a moment earlier the spontaneous expression of Orlando's frustrated pride of place now appears a deliberate attempt by a scheming Oliver to mark Orlando as a wrestler, and thereby to confirm and strengthen the younger brother's resolve (already “secretly” [I.i.122] communicated to Charles) to answer the general challenge issued by the duke's wrestler.¹¹ Orlando's visceral anger has impressed his sincerity on the audience, but the revelation of Oliver's manipulation shows physical violence to be an unreliable gauge of sincerity.

The immediate arrival of Charles, with his talk of wrestling for “credit” and “for prize” (I.i.125, 159), complicates even further any initial impression of physical violence as pure and unmediated. Oliver's attempt to entice Charles with treacherous instruction—“I had as lief thou didst break his neck as his finger” (I.i.144-45)—reiterates the visceral hatred evidenced in his skirmish with Orlando, but Oliver fails to infect Charles with his feeling of outrage. Promising to “give [Orlando] his payment” (I.i.158), Charles betrays with his metaphor his own attitude toward wrestling—it is a game played “for prize.” His mannered speech reveals the gamesome character of this cultivated wrestler:

Your brother is but young and tender, and for your love I would be loath to foil him, as I must for my own honour if he come in. Therefore out of my love to you, I came hither to acquaint you withal, that either you might stay him from his intendment, or brook such disgrace well as he shall run into.

(I.i.127-33)

Although he confidently assumes his own physical ascendancy, Charles is clearly no mere natural; he wrestles for “honour,” anticipating social and financial outcomes from the match.

Orlando uses physical violence in an expressive manner, both when he confronts his brother and when he appears, possibly disguised (see I.i.124), at Duke Senior's wrestling match. Oliver, more sinister in his calculations, sees the formal violence of the wrestling match as open to manipulation. The sport's propensity to dissolve into direct aggression signifies, for him, the opportunity to cloak homicide in gaming clothes (in a metaphorical sense—wrestlers in Shakespeare's time, as today, typically wore the briefest of trunks). Charles, employed as “the Duke's wrestler” (I.i.89), seems to be keenly aware of the nuances of his professional activity, its sliding signification. On the one hand, by seeking permission from Oliver to “foil” his brother, and by receiving direction to harm Orlando, Charles functions as a courtly hit man. On the other, his references to “credit,” “honor,” and “prize,” together with the attitudes expressed by the audience of the match, suggest that Charles's purpose is primarily to provide entertainment. For an audience backing Orlando or for anyone attuned to the rhythms of myth and fairy tale,¹² the match in I.ii. may seem to offer “an ideal understanding of things,” but the presentation early in the play of widely variable attitudes toward wrestling works to erode any firm sense that such an understanding corresponds with reality.

Charles's appearance heralds not only the imminent match, but the sporting attitude glimpsed at Duke Frederick's palace. Despite the machinations of the duke himself, Frederick's palace affords the leisure for games, foolery, and court wrestling. Celia's and Rosalind's genteel practice of “devis[ing] sports” (I.ii.23) contrasts markedly with the “unkept” Orlando's passionate “mutiny against [his] servitude” (I.i.8, 23). Rosalind suggests “sports” by way of following Celia's command to “be merry”; entertainments such as “falling in love” or “mock[ing] the good hussif Fortune from her wheel” (I.ii.22, 24, 30-31) are proposed as a means of passing time, of escaping the burdensome worries Rosalind feels because of her father's banishment. Sport is seen, in a word, as recreation. The ladies, moreover, understand a firm distinction between such gamesome activities and behaving “in good earnest” (I.ii.26); the boundaries marking the safe limits of the game of love must be respected. Their brief exercise in mocking Fortune (I.ii.30-53) demonstrates a prerehearsed quality that suggests the game's familiarity. This is borne out later by Jaques's observation of Touchstone railing “on Lady Fortune in good terms” (II.vii.16) and by his proposing a similar version of the game to Orlando (III.ii.272-74).

The wrestling match is placed within the sporting context by Le Beau's announcement—“Fair Princess, you have lost much good sport” (I.ii.92). But whereas the ladies have proposed games in which they can actively participate, Le Beau announces a spectator sport: “they are coming to perform it” (I.ii.106-107). Le Beau seems to equate the coming of the wrestlers with the arrival of a band of itinerant players, for while “perform” might suggest the skilled execution of a deed, the word's theatrical connotations are also obvious in this context. His fictionalizing narration of “the manner of the wrestling,” so stylized that Celia likens it to “the beginning” of “an old tale” (I.ii.110), further distances the event from the putative reality of court. Indeed, Le Beau's explicit attentions to “the beginning” and “the end” (I.ii.104, 105) of the event serve to frame it, to mark in a narrative fashion the boundaries of the wrestling match.¹³

Articulating boundaries through narrative chronology serves a particularly important function here, since the playing space lacks obvious physical definition. The playing space of the wrestling match, while evidently a closed field that has been previously designated, is decidedly portable. Le Beau tells the ladies that “here where you are they are coming to perform it”; “here is the place appointed for the wrestling” (I.ii.106-107, 134-35). Keir Elam, examining the way the dramatic world creates its own context, remarks how “the absent other place—the scene of the wrestling—becomes … the here and now of the dialogue not because the present speakers, or the audience, are taken to it, but because it is brought, mountain-to-Mohammed- or Birnam Wood-to-Dunsinane-like, to them, in order to be duly subjected to the ladies' commentary.”¹⁴ The playing space is evidently temporary as well as portable—before Le Beau's announcement the ladies did not know and apparently could not tell that they occupied “the place appointed for the wrestling.”

Rules defining the audience are crucial in marking any game or playing space. While Le Beau is too “full of news” (I.ii.86) to acknowledge propriety, Touchstone raises an objection to the ladies' presence: “It is the first time that ever I heard breaking of ribs was sport for ladies” (I.ii.127-29). The clown must, by profession, pay keen attention to social conventions. Moreover, Touchstone is characteristically alert to physical discomfort, and implicitly objects to the violence of the “sport”; after hearing Le Beau's account of the three challengers left “with little hope of life,” he asks with mock innocence, “But what is the sport monsieur, that the ladies have lost?” (I.ii.118, 124-25). While the normal audience for wrestling is evidently male, this rule would appear to be one that may be broken with impunity, at least by ladies of such important social position, since Duke Frederick acknowledges the presence of Celia and Rosalind “crept hither to see the wrestling” and implicitly grants the “leave” (I.ii.144-45, 146) to watch that Rosalind requests. Rosalind's desire to break the code—and her urging Celia to join her—sets in motion the pattern of transgressing gender boundaries that later provides much of the play's interest. But as audience to the wrestling match, both ladies respect its frame. Rosalind's prayerful reference to Hercules and Celia's wish to be “invisible” or to have a “thunderbolt” in her eye (I.ii.198, 199, 202) attest to the real impermeability of the boundary separating them from the wrestlers: only a superhuman agent could break through to aid Orlando.

Orlando's participation in the match—his very presence at Frederick's court—is also transgressive, but in other ways. Although nobly born, Orlando confesses himself “rustically” kept “at home”; he claims to be less skilled even than his brother's horses, who are “taught their manage” (I.i.7, 12). Le Beau's approving reference to the “three proper young men” (I.ii.111) who have been vanquished, together with the court setting and Charles's speech and general bearing, create a hint of elitism about the match. Clearly it is conceived as a disciplined and entertaining sport—not a skirmish between village thugs. As “the Duke's wrestler” (I.i.89), Charles occupies a position somewhere between an entertainer and a defensive champion. Orlando, however, carries with him into the match the same aura of sincerity that characterized his earlier bout with Oliver. The event signifies for him a “trial” (I.ii.176) in which he might prove himself, and despite attempts by Duke Frederick, Celia, and Rosalind to dissuade him, “he will not be entreated” (I.ii.149-50).

One can begin to sense before the match ever begins that the court party may be protesting too much about the prowess of its champion—that Charles's reputation may properly exist in the same realm as the self-announcing fiction of Le Beau's “old tale.” In the theater this will depend on Charles's portrayal. What seems clear, at any rate, is that while Charles wrestles according to custom and in a performative way, Orlando wrestles to prove his identity and self-worth. Orlando, moreover, displaces onto Charles the aggression he has partially controlled in the earlier bout with Oliver. Defining the match differently may in fact result in separate sets of rules for Charles and Orlando, although there is no indication that the match is construed as unfair.

Success at wrestling, as Sir Thomas Elyot noted in 1531, need not necessarily depend on brute strength. Elyot wrote: “it hath ben sene that the waiker persone, by the sleight of wrastlyng, hath ouerthrowen the strenger, almost or he coulde fasten on the other any violent stroke.”¹⁵ Orlando evidently uses some such “sleight” in his encounter with Charles, but the Folio stage directions instruct simply “Wrestle” and a few lines later “Shout” (I.ii.200sd, 203sd), when Charles is thrown. The Duke then intervenes and inquires about Charles, who “cannot speak” (I.ii.208) and is, at the Duke's command, borne away. No more is heard of Charles—a change from Rosalynde, in which Lodge specifies both how the Norman champion “yielded nature her due” and how “the death of this champion” gains greater admiration for Rosader (the figure corresponding to Orlando).¹⁶

While it silences Charles, Orlando's victory wins for him the opportunity to announce himself publicly. Having previously been kept “rustically at home” (I.i.7) and “not taught to make anything” (I.i.30), Orlando's announcement of his name and his father's marks a passage into society and a concurrent entry into Duke Frederick's avowed enmity (I.ii.213-19). Clearly Orlando's descent from Sir Rowland de Boys validates Rosalind's budding attraction (I.ii.224-28). These responses signal the immediate access of social forms in the process of interpreting or responding to the wrestling match. Even if it were possible for Orlando and Charles to wrestle “man to man,” without intrusions from past, present, and future influences, the match can be understood only through the varied lenses produced by the spectators' desires and expectations. Moreover, the wrestling bout is transmuted into metaphor directly upon its completion. At I.ii.239-45, Orlando and Rosalind “fall in love in wrestling terms”¹⁷ and the trope continues in the next scene when Celia urges Rosalind to “wrestle with thy affections” (I.iii.20). According to Raymond B. Waddington, the lovers' adoption of the wrestling metaphor “establish[es] the precedent of reading stage actions emblematically.”¹⁸ Audience as well as critics read stage actions in this way. The ease with which wrestling becomes an emblem shows how violence and conflict flow into the tissue of language.

For an early seventeenth-century audience, wrestling's associative meanings would not have been limited to the emblematic. The shifting attitudes toward wrestling in the first act of As You Like It correspond to a similar valency in contemporary references to the sport. Conduct manuals for young gentlemen of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries frequently include wrestling in their recommendations for physical activities. Castiglione “deem[ed] it highly important” for the ideal courtier “to know how to wrestle, because this frequently accompanies the use of weapons on foot.”¹⁹ Wrestling was also granted a particular English pedigree by Holinshed's account of how the giant Gogmagog was subdued at Dover.²⁰ Though it was in the first order a militaristic skill, English writers of the period emphasize how the gentlemanly practice of wrestling can promote strength and provide recreation. Nevertheless, their reiterated stipulations on practicing the sport indicate its potential danger. Sir Thomas Elyot, for instance, implicitly acknowledges the violence of the activity when he specifies that it be undertaken “with one that is equall in strengthe, or some what under, and that the place be softe, that in fallinge theyr bodies be nat brused.”²¹ In The Castel of Health (1541) as in The Boke Named the Governor (1531), Elyot mentions the development capabilities of wrestling; he recommends such exercise “only for yonge men, which be inclined, or be apte to the warres.”²² King James, however, is somewhat freer in his recommendations. In Basilikon Doron (1598), although he disallows “all rough and violent exercises, as the footeball,” he includes wrestling in his list of “exercises of the bodie most commendable to be vsed by a young Prince.”²³ James Cleland (1611) and Henry Osborne (1656) also reiterate the potential usefulness of being skilled in wrestling, but Henry Peacham (1622) condemns wrestling, along with “throwing,” as “exercises not so well beseeming nobility, but rather soldiers in a camp or a prince's guard.”²⁴ Robert Burton (1621) also acknowledges the lowliness of wrestling when he lists it among “the common recreations of the country folks,” although Burton offers a general endorsement of exercises that might preserve the health of a gentry class he sees as dangerously idle.²⁵

Orlando might be understood as one whose physical vitality and skill in single combat have been won at the price of social acceptability. Orlando views wrestling as something more than a form of exercise; it offers him, in the confrontation with his brother, a means of expressing anger and, in the match, a chance of winning renown. Conscious that his habits are less than gentlemanly, Orlando complains to his brother:

My father charged you in his will to give me good education: you have trained me like a peasant, obscuring and hiding from me all gentleman-like qualities.

(I.i.66-70)

Orlando, one might say (or at least he might say), wrestles “like a peasant.” Contemporary references acknowledge clear class distinctions in the matter and manner of wrestling. While authors of conduct manuals generally allow wrestling for the cultivation of individual skills and capacities among the gentry, other writers make clear the dangers associated with lower-class practice of the sport.

The chronicler John Stow (1603), for instance, was attuned to the social disturbances wrestling occasionally unleashed. Stow's account of the casual activities of London youths, who “in the Holy dayes in Sommer … exercised themselves, in leaping, dauncing, shooting, wrestling, casting of the stone or ball, etc.” is closely conflated with references to civic disturbances occurring at the annual matches at Clerkenwell.²⁶ Stow reports that in a match in 1222 between Londoners and wrestlers from Westminster, the “Citizens … had the mastrie of the men in the suburbs”²⁷ although he does not specify, as other sources do, that a number of people were severely wounded or killed in the ensuing riots, which continued for several days.²⁸ Stow also reports that at the annual matches in 1453 a “tumult [was] made agaynst the Maior,”²⁹ and though he again provides no further details, simply noting the “tumult” 150 years after its occurrence is enough to suggest its magnitude.

Something of the danger associated with wrestling is also suggested by the description German traveler Paul Hentzner supplies of the annual St. Bartholomew's Day match, as it was practiced during Elizabeth's time.

[I]t is usual for the mayor, attended by the twelve principal aldermen, to walk in a neighbouring field, dressed in his scarlet gown, and about his neck a golden chain, to which is hung a golden fleece, and besides, that particular ornament, which distinguishes the most noble order of the garter … upon their arrival at a place appointed for that purpose, where a tent is pitched, the mob begin to wrestle before them, two at a time; the conquerors receive rewards from the magistrates.³⁰

Clearly Hentzner was impressed by the ceremonial quality of “this show,” not least because a member of his company had “his pocket picked of his purse” while he was intently watching the spectacle.³¹ In Hentzner's account, as implicitly in Stow's, the placement of these matches outside the city demonstrates their liminal quality. However validated by ritual occurrence and the official presence of mayor and aldermen, the wrestling matches were potentially dangerous events, where the violence designated for “a place appointed for that purpose” threatened to spill over into lawless behavior among the assembled crowd.

Wrestling's feigned aggression could incite actual violence, for the “play” of wrestling occurred on the border with reality. For young gentlemen, wrestling was allowed because it prepared one for future duties as courtier or soldier; the practice required regulation, however, because of its structural proximity to such destructive combat. The chroniclers were more concerned that the spectacle of wrestling could provoke violence among its audience. Perhaps because of this spectacular quality, Richard Carew understood wrestling in theatrical terms. Describing in 1602 the wrestling of boys in Cornwall, Carew attributes to both the participants and the audience a self-conscious theatricality.

For performing this play, the beholders cast themselves in a ring, which they call, Making a place: into the empty middle space whereof, the two champion wrestlers step forth, stripped into their dublets and hosen, and untrussed, that they may so the better commaund the use of their lymmes, and first shaking hands in token of friendship, they fall presently to the effects of anger: for each striveth how to take hold of other, with his best advantage, and to beare his adverse party downe.³²

The delineation of “a place” is crucial, since play is defined through its difference from the ordinary order of things. As Johann Huizinga points out, “limitation as to space” is especially “striking”: “All play moves and has its being within a playground marked off beforehand either materially or ideally, deliberately or as a matter of course.”³³ Marking the playground by arranging themselves in a circle, the Cornish youths simultaneously become an audience for the performance. Adopting “the effects of anger,” the champions function as performers. So too at Duke Frederick's court, the wrestling match depends upon the willing participation of champion and challenger, but also on the attention of the court party: this sport requires an audience. Yet oddly enough, the theatricality that would seem to belie wrestling's validity—not its proximity to unregulated violence—is what enables Oliver to proceed with his plot against Orlando's life. At Frederick's court, in other words, wrestling might inflict real damage not in spite of but because of its vulnerability to being faked; it is not securely fixed in either a mimetic or a ludic realm. Carew's description of “making a place” perfectly exemplifies the simultaneity of Renaissance concepts of game and play, and shows how “play” comprehended both ludic and mimetic activities.³⁴ Wrestling, at once sport and spectacle, functioned analogously to theatrical plays conceived and presented in this bivalent manner. The breakdown of this largely inclusive notion of play in modern American culture is evidenced by typical complaints about the falseness of professional wrestling and a corresponding distrust of nonillusionistic theater.

In the case of As You Like It, the wrestling match is not merely analogous to but embedded within a theatrical framework. In performance, the various codes revealed by discourse analysis are at least partially subsumed by the patent fact of physical presence. Here, the firmest distinction between the “game” or “spectacle” of the wrestling match and the “drama” of the surrounding action will also be the most obvious one: wrestling is an affair of bodies and not words. Le Beau's announcement of Charles's defeat—“He cannot speak” (I.ii.208)—illustrates perfectly the established priority of deed over word, the capacity of pure spectacle or of violence (and in wrestling the two are coterminous) to destroy language.³⁵ The ludic interval, because it presents violent physical action of a sort that is anterior to language, would seem to possess greater “reality” than the surrounding text of As You Like It. The wrestling match proclaims its truth, as Barthes would have it, by the “emptying out of interiority to the benefit of its exterior signs,” the “exhaustion of the content by the form.” Suffering, Defeat, and Justice are perfectly realized: “the wrestler's gesture needs no anecdote, no decor, in short no transference in order to appear true.”³⁶

But in the theater, if not before the wrestling ring, we suspect that appearance is almost paradigmatically not truth. For while any wrestling match depends upon and insists upon the reality of physical presence, the audience of As You Like It can scarcely avoid noticing the theatricality of the staged match, which, no matter how naturalistic its presentation, has been choreographed, rule-bound, and carefully rehearsed, to avoid the very injuries it claims to announce. It also matters that the wrestling match has been triply staged—by the theatrical company, by Orlando and Charles, and by Oliver. The effect recalls the “closure of representation” Derrida associates with Artaud's theater of cruelty: in the theatrical “labor of total representation … the affirmation of life lets itself be doubled and emptied by negation.”³⁷ Purporting to distill the threatened aggression, frustration, and violence of the play into pure form, to manifest conflict and, through its expression, to allow its release, the wrestling match instead offers only more theater.³⁸ Promising the clear and emphatic spectacle of physical violence, it betrays its own conventionalized origins.

Herbert Blau names “theater's most compelling power” to be “the precipitating moment when … it identifies or reveals or betrays itself as theater. At that moment, we become aware of the role of the audience in the enfabled pursuit of an absence.”³⁹ So here, the supposed purity of physical interaction collapses in the face of an awareness of its theatricality. The wrestling match functions as a marker for what is otherwise largely absent from the comic world of As You Like It—an acknowledgement of the body's intractability. But though the match foregrounds the matter of the body, it effectively camouflages physicality in the codes of sport and spectacle, thus necessarily foreclosing any approach to the body proper.

Writ small in the relation of the spectacular wrestling match to the dramatic text in which it is embedded is the age-old debate about Shakespearean plays as performance or text. Those who, like Coleridge, consider Shakespeare's words too pure for the stage would want to limit the significance of the wrestling match to its plotted outcome and its metaphorical capacities. They would consider the match pure performance, “spectacular” in the pejorative sense. In the other court, those more viscerally involved with theater may find the match a compelling focus of the play's initial action, the clearest and most memorable display of Orlando's heroic stance, as well as a stunning preview of the structuring of those games and contests that figure so centrally in the play's development. The lines of this particular debate appear to be clearly drawn, yet as W. B. Worthen points out, it is all too easy to ignore “the institutional practices already inscribed in the theatre, in gesture and intonation, in the body and its behaviors, the ‘textualizing’ formalities that render theatre significant.”⁴⁰ So powerful is this theatrical rhetoric that any performance of the wrestling match can more accurately be said to reveal a production's adherence to traditional conceptions of conflict and physical presence than to display the body itself. Theatrical presentation of wrestling in As You Like It reiterates rather than resolves the tension between body and text, performance and script; it reveals their mutual and ongoing dependency. As Barthes puts it, expanding the notion of play so that it might include even a highly rhetoricized wrestling match, “the signifier's infinitude does not refer back to some idea of the ineffable (of an unnamable signified) but to the idea of play.”⁴¹ In the absence of “the ineffable” or an absolute truth of the body, the construction of “play” becomes deadly serious, as various responses to the match indicate. Orlando and Charles are caught in the tension between wrestling as sport and wrestling as demonstrative violence. The onstage audience, for whom the match is also an entertainment, enters a triple bond of signifiers: wrestling as sport, as violence, as spectacle. For the theater audience, each of these layers of interpretation is further refracted: wrestling appears as mimetic sport, mimetic violence, mimetic spectacle. The customary temptation has been to resolve the play of meaning set into motion by the wrestling match through reference to the comic frame of As You Like It, which supposedly guarantees the simpler meanings of sport and spectacle while banishing the more complex resonances of play and mimetic violence. But would Shakespeare have risked staging an event so ambiguously significant as wrestling without exploiting its potential to question the boundaries of coded violence?

The theatrical presentation of wrestling requires an audience to consider when, how, and why violence becomes real. A similar point about the performability of violence is reiterated late in the play by Touchstone's witty excursus on dueling “by the book” (V.iv.89). As Agnes Latham remarks of the contemporary manuals on dueling etiquette that Touchstone parodies, it can “seem ridiculous to teach people how to kill one another politely.”⁴² Yet the changing styles people employ in killing one another affirm the constructed quality of expressions of human aggression and suggest the importance of attending to the ways a spectacle of violence is framed and understood. For violence is always a spectacle, performed for an audience, even if that audience plays the simultaneous role of victim.

Of course we expect actors to be self-conscious in their theatricality; we may even expect the same of wrestlers (as Carew did in 1602). Most will assume, however, that violent activity in certain spheres (rampages, for instance) is unmediated, essentially beyond culture. Such an assumption grants a self-authenticating privilege to actions in those zones, a privilege expressive of a dualistic world view in which bodies are considered more real than ideas. Yet, as the discourse on wrestling testifies, what people do with their physical selves is subtly and extensively codified. As a result of this codification, it is difficult to think of a form of violence that lacks at least a potentially performative element; someone must see, suffer, lament, or deride the act—and the perpetrator, at some level, must know it. If the theatrical performance of As You Like It's wrestling match erases the distinction between real and fake wrestling, it should also make us question such distinctions more widely.

In As You Like It, wrestling necessitates a constantly shifting focus, since it functions variously as mimetic violence, as game, as spectacle, and, eventually, as metaphor. The changeable rules marking playspace, audience, and participants—the constant transformations undergone by a form supposedly so simple and unaccommodated—suggest the arbitrariness of social convention, and they connect the wrestling match with the play's other interrogations of human illusion, its inquiries into pastoral, melancholy, romantic love, and gender. The match offers an emphatic instance of the way physical existence is construed according to forms and conventions which may be, like the boundary marking the wrestlers' ring, largely invisible.

For instance, the classically pastoral debate between Corin and Touchstone on the relative merits of country and court manners leads Harold Jenkins to the universalizing perception that “in city or country, all ways of life are at bottom the same.”⁴³ But this is to privilege one side of the debate, which in fact ends inconclusively. Corin's sensibly relativistic awareness of how “Those that are good manners at the court are as ridiculous in the country as the behaviour of the country is most mockable at the court” (III.ii.44-47) accurately predicts Touchstone's response. The court fool mocks the country man by denying the bases of separate customs in the two realms. Throughout their skirmish of wits, however, Corin insists on the priority of material existence—“he that wants money, means, and content is without three good friends” (III.ii.24-25); “the greatest of my pride is to see my ewes graze and my lambs suck” (III.ii.74-75). Corin's attention is riveted to the ways “the sheep matter,” as Ralph Berry succinctly puts it.⁴⁴ Touchstone only pretends, in a mock-salacious manner (“That is another simple sin in you, to bring the ewes and rams together” [III.ii.76-77]), to share this concern with the body and physical reality.⁴⁵ Corin, the self-described “true labourer” (III.ii.71), can scarcely compete with Touchstone's “too courtly” (III.ii.68) wit, and recognizing this, wishes to end the debate several speeches before the entry of Ganymede finally affords him respite. This encounter, like the one inside the wrestling ring, follows a prescribed form, has an apparent victor, and delights its (theatrical) audience; it seems, moreover, just as little able to reveal anything qualifying as a stable truth about human existence, since Corin sides firmly with his sheep and Touchstone with his wit.

Custom and expectation, the play affirms, shape perception. As Duke Senior, who has been given sufficient cause to be unhappy, remarks, “old custom” makes life in exile “more sweet” (II.i.2) than life at court. Jaques too, though unvariable in his own approach to life, acknowledges the multiplicity of ways in which the world may be construed. His prideful description of his melancholy as “mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels” (IV.i.15-18), makes what seems an unremarkable point to a modern audience, who typically are rather keenly aware of the diverse influences contributing to mood or personality. Yet by labeling his manner “melancholy,” Jaques distinguishes it and himself from the merely natural, the unnoticed. His determining characteristics have been “compounded.”

Jaques's disgust with Orlando's courtship techniques (III.ii.248-89) and his intolerance for the mutual presence of Rosalind and Orlando (IV.i.29-30) demonstrate the incompatibility between his constructionist view of human identity and the innocent idea of romantic love. The love-play between Orlando and Ganymede pretending to be Rosalind has often been seen to turn on an audience's awareness of the “real” Rosalind lurking beneath two layers of assumed personas. Players as well as critics differentiate between speeches attributable to Ganymede's assumed Rosalind and to Rosalind herself.⁴⁶ Following this line of reasoning, Ganymede's faint at IV.iii.157 serves as a token of Rosalind's feminine nature,⁴⁷ the betrayal of the male persona by the “reality” of a female consciousness (and in most modern productions, a female body). But Orlando's own swoon (IV.iii.148) calls such a reading into question. Of course Ganymede's faint delivers greater theatrical impact, since it actually occurs on stage while Oliver only reports that Orlando fainted, presumably from loss of blood. Still, the typical response, which fixes on Ganymede's faint as revelatory (of gender) but overlooks Orlando's identical physiological action, reascribes swooning as a feminine behavior. The swoon renders Ganymede's unconscious body the site of an audience's wish to normalize sexual relations in the play. However much they may delight in Rosalind's transvestite performance, audiences inclined toward a happily heterosexual conclusion to the Orlando-Rosalind-Ganymede affair are relieved to see Rosalind's “feminine” nature assert itself in the swoon. But of course in the Elizabethan theater, a reading of the unconscious body of Rosalind/Ganymede as female would be mistaken. Elizabethan casting practices make sex differences a poor base for constructing identity.⁴⁸ While the unstable gendering of Rosalind/Ganymede is sometimes supposed to be controlled and regularized by the swoon, this episode offers another example of the body's truth being anything but simple. Instead, the player's artificially unconscious body provides a text that audiences read according to preestablished themes.

Late in the play, Orlando exclaims “I can live no longer by thinking” (V.ii.50). In a mimetic sense he is “venting the constrained libido of Elizabethan youth,”⁴⁹ but in theatrical terms he is breaking the courtship game with Ganymede. The irony here, as Joseph Westlund points out, is that Orlando “can ‘live by thinking’ … he can imagine Ganymede to be ‘Rosalind.’”⁵⁰ And of course the audience has been engaged in just such an imaginative act all along; “just as Orlando pretends that Ganymede is Rosalind, so do the spectators pretend that another boy, the actor, is Rosalind.”⁵¹ So while Orlando may “los[e] interest in make-believe” upon hearing how “his brother and Celia are betrothed without fussing about such preliminaries as courtship,”⁵² the audience is aware of the proximity between the planned nuptials of Oliver and Celia, and the mock-marriage of Ganymede and Orlando in IV.i.⁵³ Attending to the theatrical dynamic suggests that both events are “merely” playing. Like the wrestling match, the wooing game between Orlando and Ganymede serves as a model for the way human interactions are constructed. Rather than suggesting differences between a real and a pretend Rosalind, or between real and pretend violence, these paradigms show even spontaneous behaviors to be amalgams of learned activities, living “by thinking,” or more generally still, merely playing.⁵⁴

Commentaries on As You Like It have often involved some set of clearly defined contrasts—between court and country, or reality and illusion, or nature and nurture. Yet with its illustration of the difficulty—or even the impossibility—of confronting a fundamental physical reality, the play dissolves these distinctions. Current attention has centered on the challenge issued to the audience's ordering sensibility by the ambiguous gender of Rosalind/Ganymede. As a number of commentators have suggested, Rosalind's epilogue may enable a seamless transition between theatrical illusion and post-performance reality, but it does so by appropriating and unsettling the ordained constructions of gender and desire. Appearing simultaneously as actor and as Rosalind, speaking from both male and female personae, Rosalind in this final appearance superimposes play and reality, rendering them indivisible.⁵⁵ My point is that the wrestling match offers the play's earliest and most spectacular challenge to the modes of bodily interaction presupposed by mimetic theater. Further, the match shows the potential threat of social codes: some forms of violence (here one might include patriarchy, primogeniture, and privatization of property) can become so well coded as to be invisible. By exposing the theatricality of physical conflict, the match explodes the myth of a place in society where one could avoid living “by thinking,” where one could ever escape the texts through which people appear to one another and mediate their relations. Just as Orlando's alternative to the wish thus stated is unclear, the audience is denied recourse to a world outside the theater where the boundaries between reality and illusion will be any more consistently drawn.

As You Like It redoubles the sort of ambiguity Castiglione fears from a prince masquerading in his own role: “If he were to perform in play what he must really do when the need arises, he would deprive what is real of its due authority and it might appear that the reality were mere play.”⁵⁶ When Rosalind, disguised as Ganymede, masquerades her own role with Orlando, the flexible, contiguous, and collapsible boundaries of play and reality are displayed. Celia's reluctance to “say the words” (IV.i.121) of the wedding ceremony indicates her awareness of the danger that the love-play will (to reverse Castiglione's terms) lose its authenticity as pure masquerade and become “mere” reality. For without a clear opposite in play or fiction, reality becomes a more dubious proposition. As Louis Montrose remarks, troping on Jaques's famous theatrical dictum, “To say that all the men and women are merely players is to say that they are wholly, entirely players—‘without admixture or qualification.’”⁵⁷

When Orlando, rewarded by Rosalind after the match with a token, finds himself unable to speak, he calls himself “a quintain, a mere lifeless block” (I.ii.241). Whereas Orlando's prowess at wrestling deprived Charles of speech, his own verbal ability is “overthrown” (I.ii.244) by Rosalind's attentions. The reference to a “lifeless block” seems facile, perhaps sensationalistic, but it nevertheless suggests how distant an idea of human essence is from this play. Without power to speak, Orlando would be lifeless.⁵⁸ Ironically, however, at the very moment Orlando professes himself mute and therefore “lifeless,” Rosalind imagines or pretends that “He calls us back” (I.ii.242). Responding to a call not uttered, Rosalind invents an interchange with Orlando that is anything but straightforward communication; like Carew's wrestlers, she is “making a place.” So throughout As You Like It, speech and the elaborate social coding it performs are revealed to be often false and frequently precarious. Yet since no alternative presents itself to living “by thinking,” the play seems to reject any notion of escaping a linguistically ordered world for one somehow more pure. Rather than subverting the fiction's formal order, the presence of the wrestling match in As You Like It demonstrates how social codes are continually being made, broken, and remade. The wrestling match advertises a glimpse of “unaccommodated man,” but shows instead, in the constant framing and reframing of its spectacle of violence, the ongoing process we call culture.⁵⁹

Notes

1. “Fraternal enmity” is one focus of Joel Fineman's “Fratricide and Cuckoldry: Shakespeare's Doubles,” The Psychoanalytic Review 64 (Fall 1977), rprt. in Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, ed. Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 70-109, 75. Louis Adrian Montrose examines family polities in “‘The Place of a Brother’ in As You Like It: Social Process and Comic Form,” SQ 32, 1 (Spring 1981): 28-54.

2. Richard Wilson, “‘Like the old Robin Hood’: As You Like It and the Enclosure Riots,” SQ 43, 1 (Spring 1992): 1-19.

3. Catherine Belsey, “Disrupting Sexual Difference: Meaning and Gender in the Comedies,” in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis (New York: Methuen, 1985), pp. 166-90; Barbara J. Bono, “Mixed Gender, Mixed Genre in Shakespeare's As You Like It,” in Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History, and Interpretation, ed. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Harvard English Studies 14 (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard Univ. Press, 1986), pp. 189-212; Jean Howard, “Crossdressing, The Theatre, and Gender Struggle in Early Modern England,” SQ 39, 4 (Winter 1988): 418-40; and Phyllis Rackin, “Androgyny, Mimesis, and the Marriage of the Boy Heroine on the English Renaissance Stage,” PMLA 102, 1 (January 1987): 29-41.

4. C.L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1959), p. 238. Similarly, Harold Jenkins notes how Arden's “illusions” are tested in the play “against reality,” although ultimately “ideals, though always on the point of dissolving, are for ever recreating themselves” in the play (“As You Like It,” ShS 8 [1955]: 40-51, 51). Anne Barton also stresses As You Like It's balance: although aware of “reminders of mortality flicker[ing] everywhere,” she believes it retains “classical equilibrium” (“As You Like It and Twelfth Night: Shakespeare's Sense of an Ending,” Shakespearean Comedy, Stratford-upon-Avon-Studies 14 [London: Edward Arnold, 1972], pp. 160-80, 166).

5. “Enchanted world” is Jenkins's phrase (p. 51). Bono refers to “inchoate energies” (p. 206).

6. Roland Barthes, “The World of Wrestling,” Mythologies, 1957, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux-Noonday, 1972), pp. 15-25, 15, 17, 25.

7. Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 278-93, 292.

8. There is no stage direction in the First Folio text. The stage directions inserted by editors indicate uncertainty about reading Oliver's act of aggression: Agnes Latham puts “striking him” in the New Arden edition (London: Methuen, 1975). Alfred Harbage has “strikes him” in the Pelican (William Shakespeare: The Complete Works [New York: Viking, 1969]); but Samuel Johnson's more sedate direction is “menacing with his hand” (qtd. in Latham, p. 5). I have used Latham's edition for quotations from As You Like It.

9. Johnson's stage direction here is “collaring him.” Grant White's is “Takes him by the throat.” Latham makes the action even bolder and more formally consistent: “putting a wrestler's grip on him” (p. 5).

10. As Montrose points out, “Orlando's assertions of filial piety are actually self-assertions, directed against his father's eldest son.” Though Oliver, as eldest son, is legal heir to the father's estates and authority, Orlando claims “spiritual inheritance” that obligates him to defend his father's name (“Brother,” pp. 36, 37).

11. Oliver falsely tells Charles just the opposite, that he has “laboured to dissuade” Orlando from wrestling (I.i.138).

12. See Jenkins, p. 41.

13. For discussion of artistic framing techniques, see Susan Stewart, Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1979), p. 23.

14. Keir Elam, Shakespeare's Universe of Discourse: Language-Games in the Comedies (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984), p. 75.

15. Sir Thomas Elyot, The Boke Named the Governour, ed. Ernest Rhys (London: J. M. Dent and Co., 1907), 1:74.

16. Thomas Lodge, Lodge's “Rosalynde” Being the Original of Shakespeare's “As You Like It,” ed. W. W. Greg (London: Chatto, 1907), p. 20.

17. D. J. Palmer, “As You Like It and the Idea of the Play,” CritQ 13, 3 (Autumn 1971): 234-45, 239.

18. Raymond B. Waddington, “Moralizing the Spectacle: Dramatic Emblems in As You Like It,” SQ 33, 2 (Summer 1982): 155-63, 158.

19. Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, 1528, trans. Charles S. Singleton (New York: Doubleday-Anchor, 1959), Bk. 1, Sect. 21 (p. 37).

20. Raphael Holinshed, The Firste Volume of the Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande (London: 1577), p. 15.

21. Elyot, Governour, p. 73.

22. Sir Thomas Elyot, The Castel of Helth, 1541 (New York: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, n.d.), p. 46.

23. James I, King of Great Britain, Basilikon Doron, 1599, in The Political Works of James I, introd. Charles Howard McIlwain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1918), pp. 3-52, 48.

24. James Cleland, The Institution of a Young Noble Man, 1611 (New York: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1948), p. 220; Francis Osborne, Advice to a Son, 1656, ed. Edward Abbott Parry (London: 1896), p. 23; Henry Peacham, The Complete Gentleman, 1622, in The Complete Gentleman, The Truth of Our Times, and The Art of Living in London, ed. Virgil B. Heltzel, Folger Documents of Tudor and Stuart Civilization (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1962), p. 137.

25. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621, ed. Holbrook Jackson, 3 vols. in 1 (New York: Random-Vintage, 1977), Pt. 2, Sec. 2, Memb. 4 (2:74, 2:70-71).

26. John Stow, A Survay of London (London: 1603), p. 95.

27. Stow, p. 95.

28. See Christina Hole, English Sports and Pastimes (London: B. T. Batsford, 1949), p. 30; Teresa McLean, The English at Play in the Middle Ages (Windsor Forest, Berks.: Kensal Press, [1983?]), pp. 9-10.

29. Stow, p. 95.

30. Paul Hentzner, Travels in England, 1588, trans. Horace, Earl of Orford [sic], Strawberry Hill edn. (London: 1797), p. 25.

31. Hentzner, pp. 25, 26.

32. Richard Carew, The Survey of Cornwall (London: 1602), 75^v-76^r.

33. J[ohann] Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture, 1944, trans. R. F. C. Hull (London: Routledge, 1949), p. 10; cited in Stewart, p. 171.

34. See Louis Adrian Montrose, “The Purpose of Playing: Reflections on a Shakespearean Anthropology,” Helios n.s. 7, 2 (Winter 1980): 51-74; and Douglas L. Peterson, “Lyly, Greene, and Shakespeare and the Recreations of Princes,” ShakS 20 (1988): 67-88.

35. On the conflict between physical pain and language, see Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 3-11, 54, 172.

36. Roland Barthes, “The World of Wrestling,” pp. 18, 19.

37. Jacques Derrida, “The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 232-50, 234.

38. Staging of the wrestling match will inevitably reflect current theatrical and recreational styles. In an “improved” production at Drury Lane in 1723, Charles Johnson chose to replace the match with “a duel with rapiers, which he considered more appropriate to the dignity and social status of Orlando” (Oscar James Campbell, ed., The Reader's Encyclopedia of Shakespeare [New York: Crowell, 1966], pp. 43-44). Horace Howard Furness remarked in 1890 that “our stage Orlandos and Charleses are generally such feeble adepts in [wrestling], that this match, as it is usually seen, is far from thrilling” (As You Like It, ed. Horace Howard Furness, New Variorum Edition, 1890 [New York: American Scholar, 1965], p. 40 n. John Doebler's claim in 1973 that the “stage image of the wrestling match is always a memorable part of the current theater experience of the play” can be supported by the growth in recent years in America of wrestling's popularity as a mostly lower-class spectacle (John Doebler, “Orlando: Athlete of Virtue,” ShS 26 [1973]: 111-17, 111).

39. Herbert Blau, The Audience (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1990), p. 197.

40. W. B. Worthen, “Deeper Meanings and Theatrical Technique: The Rhetoric of Performance Criticism,” SQ 40, 4 (Winter 1989): 441-55, 452.

41. Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text,” in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed. Josué V. Harari (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1979), pp. 73-81, 76.

42. Latham, pp. 125-26 n.

43. Jenkins, p. 48.

44. Ralph Berry, Shakespeare and Social Class (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1988), p. 62.

45. Jenkins believes Touchstone is present in Arden “to remind us of the indispensable flesh” (p. 48). While I also see Touchstone as concerned with creature comforts, his “preoccupation with the physical” (Jenkins, p. 48) seems to me frequently feigned, and fundamentally different from Corin's concern with material survival. See Berry, pp. 61-67 on Corin's general sense that “real estate is always real” (p. 63) and its contrast to the idealizing perceptions of the court refugees.

46. See, for example, Carol Rutter et al., Clamorous Voices: Shakespeare's Women Today, ed. Faith Evans (London: Women's Press, 1988), pp. 106-14; Joseph Westlund, Shakespeare's Reparative Comedies: A Psychoanalytic View of the Middle Plays (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 83; D. J. Palmer, “Art and Nature in As You Like It,” PQ 49, 1 (January 1970): 30-40, 38.

47. Palmer, “Art,” p. 34; Rutter, p. 117.

48. For a classic discussion of the “erotic androgyny” created by the boy actor playing a female character who masquerades as a boy, see Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare, 2nd edn. (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1989), pp. 9-36, esp. 19. Juliet Stevenson nicely summarizes the skeptical view of the illusions of gender in the play when she observes that within As You Like It resides “a much more dangerous” and “subversive play, one that challenges notions of gender, that asks questions about the boundaries and qualities of our ‘male’ and ‘female’ natures” (Rutter, p. 97).

49. Montrose, “Brother,” p. 39.

50. Westlund, p. 82.

51. Kent Talbot van den Berg, “Theatrical Fiction and the Reality of Love in As You Like It,” PMLA 90, 5 (October 1975): 885-93, 887.

52. Palmer, “Idea,” p. 243.

53. Valerie Traub, who sees the “‘mock’ marriage [as] … a deconstruction of the ritual by which two are made one” remarks that “as the distance between Rosalind and Ganymede collapses, distinctions between homoerotic and heterosexual collapse as well” (“Desire and the Differences It Makes,” in The Matter of Difference: Materialist Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Valerie Wayne [Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991], pp. 81-114, 104, 103).

54. Palmer's sense of “the idea of play” in As You Like It comes close to my own, in that he sees “equivocal relations between fiction and reality, game and earnest, folly and wisdom” (“Idea,” p. 235). But in lamenting “Touchstone's inability to do anything except in play” (“Idea,” p. 244) and in remarks about play's recreative purposes, he suggests a fundamental opposition between play and reality. Van den Berg affirms this distinction even more emphatically, concluding that “fiction and reality, like true lovers, preserve their separate identities so that they can mutually enhance each other” (p. 892). Montrose, in “The Purpose of Playing,” develops a general view of the London playhouse as affording “a material realization of the theatrum mundi metaphor” (p. 71).

55. For a fundamentally different view of the epilogue, one which finds in it a late distinction between reality and illusion, see Fineman:

    when … in the epilogue the actor who plays Rosalind shows himself a boy, he accomplishes with the nakedness of his masculinity a final unmasking, pointing thereby to the play's last disguise and to the conditional that is the premise of the play itself.

    (p. 92)

    However Fineman may imagine that the actor “shows himself a boy,” masculinity (and femininity) have been shown in the course of the play to be anything but naked—gender is “put on” by the actor.

56. Castiglione, Bk. 2, Sec. 11 (p. 103), cited in Thomas M. Greene, “Il Cortegiano and the Choice of a Game,” in Castiglione: The Ideal and the Real in Renaissance Culture, ed. Robert W. Hanning and David Rosand (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1983), pp. 1-15, 6.

57. Montrose, “Purpose,” p. 51. Montrose quotes the phrase “without admixture or qualification” from the OED.

58. Cf. the exchange at IV.i.8-9: “Jaques. Why, 'tis good to be sad and say nothing. / Ros. Why then 'tis good to be a post.”

59. This essay originated in a seminar led by Douglas Peterson at the Shakespeare Association of America meeting in Philadelphia, April 1990. My work was supported by a Faculty Development Endowment grant from Rhodes College. I would like to acknowledge the helpful comments and advice of Bruce Boehrer, Jennifer Brady, Robert Entzminger, Joan Hartwig, Naomi Liebler, and several anonymous readers.