[In the following essay, Gelven sees the minor character Silvius as an embodiment of true love in As You Like It, who serves as a foil to the deceitful lovers of Shakespeare's romantic comedy.]

He is the purest lover in the forest. It is a magical place, this forest of Arden, where the very thickets are barbed with lovers; yet this poor shepherd with the golden tongue outloves them all. At his first entrance (II, 2) he shows us his scars:

No, Corin, being old thou canst not guess;
Though in thy youth thou wast as true a lover
As ever sighed upon a midnight pillow:
But if thy love were ever like to mine,—
As sure I think did never man love so,—
How many actions most ridiculous
Hast thou been drawn to by thy fantasy?
Into a thousand that I have forgotten.
O, thou didst then ne'er love so heartily:
If thou remember'st not the slightest folly
That ever love did make thee run into,
Thou hast not loved: …

There are our words: ridiculous, folly, sighing on a midnight pillow. We know he is stricken. More remarkable is his recognition that he is foolish and ridiculous; he bears these ascriptions as if they were honorable wounds, or awarded medals serving as badges in the office of lover. And for whom does he pine? A most unworthy Phebe, whom Rosalind warns: “Sell when you can: you are not for all markets” (III, 4). In the same passage, addressing Silvius, she asks

You foolish shepherd, wherefore do you follow her,
Like foggy south, puffing with wind and rain?
You are a thousand times a properer man
Than she a woman. 'Tis such fools as you
That make the world full of ill-favour'd children:
'Tis not her glass, but you that flatters her.

Silvius makes no attempt to correct this harsh appraisal, knowing it is true; he senses that Phebe is already falling in love with the supposed boy, Ganymede, and can do nothing about it save howl in hopeless anguish, yet willing even then to serve his beloved by helping her woo his putative rival. This base fawning seems almost perverse, as if he were taking joy in being treated as a slave. Yet it is to him that even the courtiers turn to learn what it means to love. Compare the noble Orlando's silly rhymes to Rosalind with the painful, wrenching truth in Silvius's account of love when his beloved bids him: “Good shepherd, tell this youth what 'tis to love.” He responds immediately: “It is to be all made of sighs and tears. … It is to be all made of faith and service;— … It is to be all made of wishes; / All adoration, duty and obedience, / all humbleness, all patience and impatience, / All purity, all trial, all observance;—And so am I for Phebe.”

In this we hear no expectation of success, no eager hope for requited passion, no ecstasy of rapture; rather, we hear only the simple facts of his sad, doting, submission. Yet, its effect on the audience is irresistible. Silvius and Phebe are the only pair entirely native to Arden; Audrey is from the forest but is wooed by the courtier's fool, Touchstone; all the other lovers are from the court. Perhaps this suggests that the simple eloquence of the locals is less entangled with art, deceit, and cunning, and therefore all the more direct. This befits Silvius's unexpected, final success: Phebe is never won over by his pitiful wooing; she yields to him solely as the result of a tricky bargain woven by the artful Rosalind. Such is the simple way country bumpkins are married, tricked into contracts they cannot escape.

What has this to do with comedy? Even if Silvius is the purest lover, he is not the central figure or even the central wooer; Orlando and Rosalind are the dramatically dominant pair; and their love is mutual; and interestingly it had been ignited prior to the shift of scenes to Arden. Silvius is not as funny as Touchstone; if we laugh as Silvius at all it is only because of his lover's plight. Indeed, his eloquence distracts from our readiness to laugh; the profundity of his love-folly is too denuding; the boy is simply too wounded to evoke much mirth. The bawdy Touchstone, feeling less, is far more available as a touchstone to laughter. Yet, without Silvius the forest would not be as magical, nor the play as we like it, nor love so revealed, nor the comedy so comic. What makes comedy comic, if Silvius can be an essential figure in this comic play? Some answers to this question are palpable and have already been noted: the purity of his devotion stands out, as does his simple eloquence. But there are other answers that are not so obvious and need the drama as a whole to be revealed. It is the play that shows Silvius, as lover, to be a truly comic hero.

It escapes no thoughtful reader that the most successful comedies are romantic. In art, love and laughter seem to belong together. From Aristophanes to Mozart's operas to the froth of Broadway, we laugh at lovers' folly. But not all attempts to wed the comic to the erotic are successful, and few, if any, reach the pinnacle of Shakespeare's; but even within his, the five great ones stand out: Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, Twelfth Night, The Tempest, and this one; and this one stands out even among the great five. Midsummer is probably the funniest, Much Ado the wittiest, Twelfth Night the most artful, Tempest the most magical; but this one, of all, seems to fuse love with comedy almost to perfection. One obvious point stands out: in the other four the linkage between the comic and the erotic is emphasized by the decisive separation of the clowns from the lovers. The Dogberry constabulary is distinct from Beatrice and Bendick; Bottom and his crew are set apart from the lovers in the forest near Athens; Trinculo and Stefano are quite distinct from Miranda and Ferdinand; the roguish knights Andrew and Toby are on a difference plane than Orsino and Viola. This is not to say the lovers themselves are not funny on their own; they are. But the contrast between the nonloving clowns and the loving couples obviously enhances these plays. In As You Like It, however, this technique is not used; and its non-use has a remarkable affect. For if the clowns and lovers are not distinct, the tendency to synthesize lover as clown and clown as lover waxes until it becomes a palpable pathos.

How do we identify this pathos? Consider these fragments as clues. We note how kindly the old man, Adam, seems, and how dearly Orlando treats him; or how gentle the old shepherd, Colin, is, even in his contests of wit with Touchstone; above all, we note how noble the exiled duke appears, making adversity sweet. When Orlando rudely interrupts his dinner of fruit and game, the Duke scolds him, perhaps already sensing the true bearing of the brash youth. The term that comes to mind is gracious. Silvius is surrounded by gracious characters, and this grace reveals and echoes that inherent in the shepherd's prostrate loving. The depth of this grace needs reflection. Adam's loyalty is remarkable: his entire life savings is readily handed over to the beloved son of his departed master, asking only that he be allowed to continue his service to the youth. His great fear is that he would die his master's debtor. This is not mere generosity wedded to loyalty—which would be rare enough: it is a bestowal based on an unselfish love; Adam's purity of devotion adumbrates Silvius's; his lonely, little soliloquy, after giving Orlando his gold, is one of the very few rhymed fragments in the whole play, setting it off as if it were a precious thing, as indeed it is. Precious as it is, though, it is matched by an equal loyalty and tenderness on Orlando's part; for the care and solicitude the boy pours out on his old servant, weakened with fatigue, hunger, and despair, are radiant. Thus, from the courtier's group seeking safety in Arden we find already in abundance the almost saint-like and generous sacrificing that bubbles up gladly from the inner depths of the soul making the characters gracious. For in each of these cases the bestowal is warmly given, rooted in a glad heart, both young and old, forest born or courtly. In no other play are so many of the characters possessed of this spiritual beauty. To understand this play one must grasp the care Shakespeare has taken in filling the stage with those possessed of grace; once we understand the centrality of the gracious we then can grasp the unique and pivotal role that Silvius has. His aching, loving, unselfish folly is the paradigm of grace, for like Adam, he gives solely from the joy of giving, “… and not for mead.”

The duke manifests this grace in a manner befitting noble blood. It is not only his envied spirit in greeting adversity sweetly—though that too is echoed in Silvius's devotion—but in his magnificent greeting of Orlando. It is splendid because it reveals that the gracious is not merely passive, but ennobles by mentoring. When Orlando enters with a drawn sword, the duke remonstrates: “Art thou thus boldened, man, by thy distress: / or else a rude despiser of good manners, / That in civility thou seems't so empty” (II, 7). When Orlando blushes at the truth of this, the duke presses on: “What would you have? Your gentleness shall force / More than your force move us to gentleness.” He then welcomes the youth to share his dinner, causing Orlando to reply: “Speak you so gently? Pardon me, I pray you: / I thought that all things had been savage here; …” He then speaks famously of the pathos of gentility, ending: “Let gentleness my strong enforcement be: / In the which hope I blush and hide my sword.” Such scenes as this add a singular quality to the play found in no other; it gives Arden a magical ambiance, and ennobles the work far beyond what one might expect from a comedy. How can such grace and nobility be joined with the necessary ingredients for comedy: the foolish and the ridiculous? Even the villains in this piece are redeemed by the sacramentality of the forest. If Orlando is gracious to Adam, he is near-divinely noble in his forgiveness of his brother. Yet, we are not entirely surprised by the brothers' reunion; the play has prepared us for it. If Silvius can continue to endure his cruel enslavement, Orlando can forgive Oliver.

In the comedies, however, it is always the women and not the men who are central. Rosalind, even more than Orlando, is the commanding officer of this dramatic regiment. Yet her character, fittingly, is far more complex, even disturbing. That Silvius should see in her a rival is ironically the worst and the finest anguish for him. Were she, as Ganymede, to respond to Phebe's offering of herself, Silvius would suffer ultimate defeat, for he is no match for her. Indeed, no one in the whole play is a match for her. Yet, of all the embarrassing follies, few are as denuding as confusing the gender of one's perceived rival in love. To be defeated not by another man, but by a woman, in his suit of the unlovely Phebe, seems to mark the shepherd as inept beyond all self-acceptance. The two who love Rosalind, Phebe and Orlando, are also beguiled, but that is part of love's confusion, and hence forgivable; to be tricked in such a fundamental way by one's rival is unendurable. But nothing is unendurable to Silvius: that is his greatest folly and his greatest strength. That Rosalind turns out to be his finest benefactor, tricking Phebe into marrying him, is comic irony at its highest.

But what of Rosalind herself? If there can be a tragic flaw there can also be a comic flaw. She is dangerous. When Celia bids her to be merry (I, 2), she responds by asking: “what think you of falling in love?” Celia is quick to warn: “Marry, I pr'ythee, do, to make sport withal: but love no man in good earnest …” It is the most dangerous and most foolish thing suggested: we should never play with love, nor make sport with a power so awesome it can destroy us. But Rosalind is playful, perilously playful; it is part of her feminine essence. How are we to understand the great mystery of her deceit of Orlando? She is accoutered as a boy for safety's sake; but once she meets her beloved in the forest, she could have revealed herself to him; instead she continues to play at playing herself. Why? To tease Orlando? To test his love? Or is it a bit of caution in the midst of her risky playing? Or is it just pure, unadulterated fun, a singularly feminine kind of fun at Orlando's expense, conjoining danger, caution, teasing, playing, wooing, deception for its own sake, mastery of the woman over the man, folly, and no little self-deceit? Or is it her version of Orlando's confusion: “what passion hangs these weights upon my tongue?” If Phebe's direct rejection of Silvius is cruel, is not this dangerous playing with true love also cruel? Yet, in sequestration with Celia she confesses the same comic anguish over her being in love that we see in Silvius. No matter how dubious we may be about her conduct, however, she still glows, and it is this glow that seems irrepressible, wonderful, seductive, and magical. It seems, then, a more likely reading to judge the ground of her antics as a reflection of her own love-confusion than mere cunning. It fits the warmth of the play. But more importantly, it also fits its irony; for she, as the great conniver and strategist, somehow reveals herself as the most vulnerable. Her swooning at the bloody napkin is not merely another event; it reminds us of how risky and unstable her position is. We begin to realize it is not the characters in the play that make the comedy; it is comedy that enables the characters to be who they are.

The nature of this revealing itself is mirrored in Rosalind's disguise. Here is a girl pretending to be a boy, who, when she finds Orlando, pretends to be the girl she really is. If we bear in mind that in Shakespeare's day, young boys played the roles of the women, we have a boy playing a girl playing a boy playing a girl. The real, in this antic, is made available by the deceit; and that is the essence of playing: it is not, as Hamlet says, holding the mirror up to nature but holding nature up to the mirror. It is only in playful deception that we learn the truth. But to say this without the twin realization that playing is dangerous is to demote a profound truth to a banal rubric. Rosalind, as Ganymede pretending to be Rosalind, becomes a deceit that undeceives, a truthful lie, the playful as serious, the real as appearance and the appearance as real. It is only because of the all-pervading grace of the play that deception can be a means to truth. We say: Rosalind as Ganymede pretends to be herself; but in saying this we hurry past it without letting its truth matter. We must ask this profoundly: how can we pretend to be ourselves? We can pretend to be ourselves only if we are already in the mode of deceptive pretense. In pretending to be ourselves, is the self untrue? Certainly pretending to be oneself is not the same as being oneself. Does this mean that in playing who we are we distort our reality? Or is it the other way around: only by being able to pretend we are who we are can we discover what it means to be who we are? If this sounds ominous in its mendacity, a guileful trickery with words, let us first let the suggestion breathe, like fine wine poured in a glass. Suppose only by pretending to be who we are can we be who we are. If this is true, we must further presuppose that our very nature is to be self-deceiving; and the only way to escape from self-deceiving would be a counter-deceiving that ironically turns us back to our newly emerging reality. Rosalind, as Ganymede pretending to be Rosalind, alone can learn and disclose herself to herself.

Is this a mere formula: lying about lying is to tell the truth? The suggestion is that such formulaic reading is itself distortive: only if love—indeed love in a world of grace—is at the basis can Rosalind pretend to be Rosalind in a way that lets us (and her) see who Rosalind is in truth. And this is why Silvius is so important: for his pure, uncunning, unplaying, and direct devotion, lurking in the background, reminds us, always: the love in the forest is true love. But it is also why the sheer graciousness of most of the cast creates a spirit of such warm endorsement that we allow ourselves to learn fundamental truth by falsely pretending to be truthfully ourselves.

The little interior dramas that Rosalind and Orlando play, pretending that she is really who she is, are treasures. She “pretends” to shift her moods, being at one time coquettish, another yielding, another aloof, noting in her male guise that such is the fickle nature of women. It is only when they “pretend” to marry that both lovers begin to feel uneasy; this cuts too near the truth. What are we to make of this? Is it all mere “sport”? Or is she learning of her own feminine guile? Or is there any pretense at all? Perhaps her pretended moods are her real moods? Is she not, at the very least, mocking her own love? If so, the irony is, the more she mocks her loving, the more she loves. Silvius knowingly marks his love as both foolish and ridiculous, and in doing so loves absolutely; Rosalind mocks herself, and loves Orlando more. Is love, then, shameless? Or is it a triumph over mockery, even self-mockery; contrasting these lovers with the Russian who beat his horse: he became a victim of mockery, they celebrate it. And what of Orlando? He protests, “I would not be cured youth,” when given the therapeutic reason for their gaming; yet, he participates in the very cure that advances rather than retards the disease. He later admits to the Duke that Ganymede reminds him of Rosalind; are we to take this as a hint that he already suspects, however vaguely, what may be the almost impossible secret? These questions tease us as we watch the play, and being teased we enjoy it all the more. In this we imitate Orlando: we allow Shakespeare to tease us as he allows her to tease him. It is “play.” But just as lying about lying here reveals truth, so playing about playing reveals the serious. This may be the most serious of all serious things: learning to accept joyfully, warmfully, graciously, the dark, tearful abandonment in the harsh, cold, bitter city of folly.

If it is joy, though, we must ask if it is not a cruel deceit. If As You Like It, as an artwork, makes us briefly believe in joy again, then is it not an evil distraction? What right do we, denizens of the vast parking lot, have, to find joy in an illusory forest? Is it escapism? A narcotic against the clanging madness of the now-urban reality? A bit of Pollyanna to soothe our nerves? There is an escapist in the play, who rejects the merriment of the final act and seeks refuge in a monastery: Jacques. His mockery is genuine, not playful. Few scenes in all drama equal the irony of his final age of man, “sans teeth, sans taste, sans everything,” providing the cue for Orlando to enter fondly carrying the old Adam. It is a simple, subtle counterpoint that is irresistible: old age on the strong back of the loving youth, contrasted by old age as mocked by scornful cynicism. Jacques has a melancholy of his own, yet even he is embraced by the warm grace of the play; he too is a comic necessity; but he provides the alternative: perhaps the entire scene of all this nuptial grace can be denounced. Rosalind's epilogue shows us we need not, and that is enough.

Reflection on this particular play as the paradigm of comedy suggests that love itself is folly, and folly is what makes us laugh. But folly itself can be warmly endorsed if it is rooted in an atmosphere of grace; and it is this graciousness that allows us to laugh at ourselves. Playing is revealed as serious: like Rosalind we can play at being ourselves, and this alone allows us to laugh with the comic lovers, not at them; and in laughing with the gentle we laugh at our own folly. There is danger here, which heightens our delight, but the risk is worth it. Indeed, not to risk is an even greater danger. As these truths deepen, however, we realize that overt laughter itself actually begins to fade as the necessary condition, for we may not laugh that much in seeing this play; it is not simply foolishness, but being foolish nobly and graciously that evokes the curious comic response, which is more akin to a rich, warm, intimate glow that comes from being able to embrace our folly; perhaps it is a smile that lasts much longer than the loud guffaws provoked by raw clowns. Or perhaps it is a species of internal laughter, all the more potent for being unexpressed. The actual label is less important than the truth revealed in the phenomenon. The comic revelation of our own truth is shown here, however, as a species of asking rather than answering. Are we foolish because we love; or are we lovers because we first are fools? If playing is always a deceit, how can deceit provide us with truth? Above all, we now must ask: what is folly? It certainly seems to have taken on a loftier status than simply doing something stupid or making a mistake because of mere ignorance. Yet, even to suggest that folly is loftier than stupidity or ignorance seems genuinely wicked and counterintuitive: to elevate folly is to cheat us of the very reason we must seek to avoid it. Is not the opposite of folly wisdom? Have we come to this outrage: it is wise to be foolish? Is it even wise to be fond of the foolish? At the very least there is a serious paradox here that cannot be dismissed merely by saying we enjoy comedies. Glib inversions of meaning are pernicious: property is theft; we must destroy in order to save; hate is really love; truth is untruth, decency is weakness. These slogans terrify because they are wanton; they are traps that ensnare the unwary, and must accordingly be exposed as dangerously wrong. To say it may be wise to be foolish must remain highly suspect; we cannot endorse it simply because it mocks our reason, or offends common sense. Yet, it remains a paradox and not a self-refuting contradiction. There is truth in affirming that the wise are foolish; but only if great care is taken to understand it. The playful has become serious indeed.

One obvious way to defuse the seeming misology in saying the wise are foolish is to reflect on our curious suspension. We are, in fact, finite both in the extent of our comprehension and in the duration of our lives. It would be foolish and not wise to deny this. Accordingly we say that essential for human wisdom is the realization that we do not know everything, and realizing it we must come to grips with it. It does no good simply to moan and complain because we are so limited; nor does it do any good to deceive ourselves into pretending we really do know all that is important and worth knowing, or that technology and science will eventually answer all questions. Thus, we say, it is wise to admit we are unwise. This account seems banal on its surface: indeed, as stated it is banal. However, when we seriously reflect on our suspension between knowing everything and knowing nothing, a curious thing may happen. The truth of that suspension itself becomes unexpectedly rich in its meaning. We seem to exult in this self-discovery, realizing that being in the middle is somehow wondrous or thrilling. Such realization need not happen, of course; some may find our suspension a cause of anger, self-despising, or even blatant misology. But these negative reactions seem somehow noncompelling, perhaps even misguided. Can we, should we, exult in our finitude? The play As You Like It shows us we can; and in showing us we can exult, we learn the new kind of wisdom that endorses our folly. This is no longer a mere abstract reflection on the impoverishment of our epistemic exchequer; it is a concrete, palpable realization of what it means to be able to be foolish without disdaining or hating the folly within us. This realization is the key. How do we, in confronting our imperfection, avoid self-hatred and self-mockery? The laughter at the hapless Russian beating his horse disdains our folly; the response to Shakespeare's play endorses it. If human wisdom be the goal of philosophy, the understanding of how comedy saves us from the misology of hating our finitude must emerge as one of our most compelling tasks. What may at first seem a small subdivision of the least respectable of all philosophical endeavors, aesthetics, becomes instead a critical, ontological necessity. We must learn how it is wise to be foolish; and only great comedy provides the erudition. We no longer ask simply how, why, or what it means to laugh; we now realize that we ask about our reality as foolish and wise; and if Shakespeare's comedies are a resource, we find being wise and foolish at once is enabled only by lovers being fools.

We cannot forget that these discoveries are accomplished by reflecting on an actual, performed play. If the drama enables us to think about our suspension, the very craft of the playwright must be noted. The success of this play has been identified provisionally as grace. If it is the gracious that gives to this particular comedy the envied status of a paradigm, the question then becomes: is grace necessary for comedy, at least for comedy as a resource for truth? Most of Shakespeare's comedies possess the gracious to some extent. This may be due to the dramatist's own gentle nature, attested to by his contemporaries; or it may be due to the profound influence of Christianity's emerging emphasis on forgiveness; it may be due as well to the rising spirit of the Renaissance, or to Elizabeth's charismatic rule. It may also be due to the simple maturing of the art form itself. The possible influences are almost endless; perhaps they all play a role. Regardless of the social causes, there is a spirit in all of Shakespeare's comedies that is easily identified as gracious. But, if grace is part of the craft by which this particular wright accomplishes success, is it not false generality to suggest grace may be essential for comedy? Furthermore, one might argue it is not love as enabling grace that is central, but lust. Perhaps what is foolish is simply the silly things one gender does to mate with the opposite gender. If this is the case, it is not grace-enabling love that makes the comedy, but the silliness of putatively rational beings yielding to their carnality. Shakespeare's addition of kindly grace to the play would, if this were true, make it more charming, “nicer” perhaps, but not a paradigm of the comic.

To test whether grace and love may be nonessential, replaced perhaps by lust, it is perhaps fitting to change the venue of the search.