SOURCE: Brissenden, Alan. Introduction to The Oxford Shakespeare: As You Like It, edited by Alan Brissenden, pp. 1-86. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.

[In the following excerpt, Brissenden surveys theme and character in As You Like It, concentrating on motifs of love, transformation, and doubling.]

LOVE

Love is associated with Rosalind from the beginning, when she suggests falling in love as a game that might make her merry (1.2.23), and Celia warns that she must be careful to ‘love no man in good earnest’, nor go so far that she cannot escape the situation without losing her honour. But, grieving for her father, Rosalind is in an emotionally receptive state when Orlando arrives to wrestle with Charles, and whereas in the first part of the scene Celia has been the initiator of dialogue, it is Rosalind who takes charge of the conversation when Orlando appears. Before and throughout the wrestling match, she makes the leading comments, and, ignoring her cousin's earlier warning, or rather, helpless against it, she begins to fall in love ‘in good earnest’, finally ensnaring Orlando symbolically within the circle of a necklace. The playfulness and frankness which are among the most attractive aspects of Rosalind's love are quickly apparent; she soon begins to think of Orlando as the father of her child (1.3.11), and when Celia advises her to ‘hem’, or cough, away the irritations in her heart, like a tickle in the chest, she punningly replies, ‘I would try, if I could cry “hem” and have him’ (1.3.19). But these are words of slight intensity compared with the torrent which rushes from her when Celia brings news of Orlando's arrival in the forest (3.2.211-42); when he appears, from being comically aghast at what she can do with her doublet and hose she discovers an excellent use for them as a cover for the baiting of her unawares lover. Within half a dozen lines the sly teasing has turned into a joyous sham mockery of love, lovers, and women. Under this satirical guise, Rosalind extracts from Orlando more declarations of his love for her, in a shorter time, than if he had known who she was.

To continue this wonderfully self-gratifying situation she devises the love cure. While this is Shakespeare's invention, the dialogue introducing it has several links in thought and word with Lodge. When Rosalynde and Alinda first enter the forest and discover Montanus's verse to the disdainful Phoebe, for example, Rosalynde as Ganymede says, ‘You may see … what mad cattle you women be, whose hearts sometimes are made of adamant … and sometime of wax … they delight to be courted, and then they glory to seem coy; and when they are most desired then they freeze with disdain: and this fault is so common to the sex, that you see it painted out in the shepherd's passions, who found his mistress as froward as he was enamoured’ (15^r). After claiming that love is ‘a madness’, Shakespeare's Ganymede describes how ‘he’ cured another lovesick youth:

I set him every day to woo me. At which time would I, being but a moonish youth, grieve, be effeminate, changeable, longing and liking, proud, fantastical, apish, shallow, inconstant, full of tears, full of smiles; for every passion something, and for no passion truly anything, as boys and women are for the most part cattle of this colour …

(3.2.388-94)

Shakespeare takes the idea of a misogynist catalogue from Lodge, adds a sly reference to the fickleness of boys,¹ and moves the whole idea into a further dimension by transferring it to the love cure. Lodge's Ganymede quickly reverts to being Rosalynde, saying to Alinda, ‘put me but into a petticoat, and I will stand in defiance to the uttermost that women are courteous, constant, virtuous and what not’ (15^r); Shakespeare saves this change, transforming it to Rosalind's ecstatic outburst after Orlando has left following the mock marriage in 4.1. In Lodge, it is not till some time later, after Rosader has read out three love sonnets, that Ganymede says, ‘let me see how thou canst woo: I will represent Rosalynde, and thou shalt be as thou art Rosader’ (35^r); there follows a three-page ‘wooing eclogue’ between the two, and the mock marriage. Lodge's heroine merely wants her man to go on confessing his love for her; Shakespeare's wants this too, but she is also testing him, challenging his wit, and, eventually, in a state of high excitement, marrying him, though he is unaware of it (4.1.112-26). Her insistence on his using the present tense—‘I will’ is not good enough: he ‘must say, “I take thee, Rosalind, for wife”’ (4.1.122-3)—indicates the steel-strong resolve beneath the bubbling disguise of the ‘saucy lackey’; but the sensitive woman in love is less completely suppressed than Rosalind thinks. When Orlando says he must leave her for two hours, her ‘Alas, dear love, I cannot lack thee two hours’ (4.1.163) has a suddenness, a brevity and a spontaneity which contrast so markedly with the rest of her speeches in the immediate context that it is clear she is taken off guard, just as later when she faints on hearing from Oliver how Orlando has been wounded by the lioness (4.3.157.1). These chinks in her armour of disguise give a comical aspect to Rosalind's character which invites us to laugh at her, rather than laugh at what she is saying, or laugh with her at what she is doing; they are signals to us that even this most supremely self-aware of Shakespeare's comic heroines can momentarily lose her self-control.

Rosalind embodies Shakespeare's anatomy of love in the play. Falling in love at first sight may be foolish where Phoebe is concerned, but it is perfectly acceptable for the quartet of courtly lovers, and Rosalind is the first to fall. Sentimentalism is matter for mockery, but the ravings of Silvius nevertheless lead to Rosalind's contemplating the arrow in her own heart. She can scold the lovesick shepherd for being made a ‘tame snake’ by love, but she is ready enough to weep when Orlando does not come on time. She is scornful of Orlando's being late and reads him a lesson in how a lover should behave, but she herself has to learn a lesson in patience and discover, arch-manipulator though she is, that time and events, as well as her own emotions, are beyond her control. Rosalind's love also has some of the fleshly sensuality of Touchstone's, seen in her thinking of Orlando as the father of her child, and in her sexual repartee. The consummate glory of love, in Shakespeare always marriage, is Rosalind's final triumph, as, claiming magic powers, she organizes the wedding ceremony which ends the play.

To reach that end, to be a satisfying, as well as a satisfied, partner of Rosalind, Orlando needs to undergo an education—not the kind that he feels Oliver has deprived him of, for, after his unmannerly intrusion on Duke Senior and the exiled lords in 2.7, he quickly shows them he is ‘inland bred’, that he is gentle by nature as well as by birth. His education is to be, like that of Silvius, Phoebe, Touchstone, Audrey, and Rosalind herself, concerned with love. His desire to carve Rosalind's name on every tree is in fine romantic epic and pastoral style—the carving of their names by Medoro and Angelica in Ariosto's Orlando Furioso remained a well-known subject for artists for two centuries²—but his verses are ridiculed with bawdy parody by Touchstone, his romantic description of his beloved gets a lewd response from Jaques, and Ganymede makes rude puns to him about cuckoldry; he is unaware of the first, his romantic idealism is proof against the second, but he is able to respond to the third, even if he loses the wit-combat. He takes on Ganymede's offer of being cured not because he wants to be cured of his love for Rosalind, but because he ‘would be talking of her’ (4.1.82-3). His romantic attitude is tempered only a little by his banter with Ganymede; his idea of marriage is for its lasting ‘for ever and a day’, and he finds Ganymede's description of wifely behaviour unlikely to apply to Rosalind. Extreme though this description is, it contains genuine warning that reality differs from the romantic ideal. What finally brings Orlando to a realistic view, however, is the maturity he gains through his decision to save Oliver, and then Oliver's falling in love, and imminent marriage. ‘I can no longer live by thinking’, he tells the bawdily jesting Ganymede, who then drops the banter and begins the serious business of arranging the marriages, and rebecoming Rosalind.

That Rosalind and Orlando's love, full of comic complexities, lies between the pastoral extravagances of Silvius and the earthy pragmatism of Touchstone is neatly indicated in 2.4 when the besotted shepherd goes off crying ‘O Phoebe, Phoebe, Phoebe!’; Rosalind is reminded of her love, and Touchstone recalls, with a ribald innuendo, his love for the milkmaid Jane Smile. Silvius and Phoebe are an example of any number of pastoral lovers and disdainful mistresses, like Spenser's Colin Clout and his Rosalind, who ‘deigns not [his] good will, but doth reprove’ (Shepheardes Calender, 1, 63); the artificiality of their relationship is expressed not only through their language, but by the way in which Shakespeare distances them, making them actors in a pageant,³ and Silvius the exemplar of Jaques's lover ‘sighing like furnace’. Rosalind's realistic, rattling speech contrasts roughly with theirs, tumbling over the edge of verse into prose, her scolding a turbulent comic centre to the anguished pleas of Silvius and the balanced casuistries of Phoebe. In 5.2 Rosalind takes part in the litany by which Silvius explains his idea of love—a version still as extreme, idealistic, and romantic as at first—but sensible realism takes over and she dismisses it in annoyance as ‘like the howling of Irish wolves against the moon’ (ll. 104-5) so that she can get on with the main business, the weddings. At the last Silvius has nothing to say, only Phoebe, who surrenders her love for Ganymede in a couplet when Rosalind appears as herself. The hieratic quality which the dialogue has now taken on can accommodate such formal artificiality, but the reality beneath the artificial expression of Silvius and Phoebe during the play is characteristically defined by Jaques when in handing out his bequests at the end he leaves to Silvius ‘a long and well-deservèd bed’: Silvius's pale-faced languishings have the same essential sexual basis as Rosalind's love and Touchstone's desires. The shepherd's sighing upon a midnight pillow, his holy and perfect love, are simply at the opposite end of the same scale as Touchstone's fear of cuckoldry and the fleshly need which drives him ‘to take that that no man else will’ (5.4.58). All the lovers are brought to marriage like ‘couples … coming to the ark’ (5.4.36), as Jaques says, an image which Alexander Leggatt pertinently remarks ‘suggests both animal coupling and the working of a divine plan’.⁴

The suddenness of Celia and Oliver's mutual love has been felt by Swinburne and others to be disconcerting,⁵ and both Charles Johnson in his version of the play, Love in a Forest (1723), and George Sand in her adaptation, Comme il vous plaira (1856), deprive Oliver of happiness; instead they enlarge and transform Jaques's part and reward him with Celia. But their love at first sight is in keeping with the suddenness of Oliver's ‘instantaneous Pauline reversal’, as Marjorie Garber calls it,⁶ on being saved by Orlando, and, as has already been noticed, Celia is in a receptive state when he arrives. A good pair of actors can create an entirely believable and serious love situation which even Rosalind's comical fainting does not undermine.

METAMORPHOSIS

Oliver's repentance is one of the play's later examples of change, of metamorphosis—that concept which is basic to theatre, which fascinated Shakespeare and many of his fellow-dramatists, and which especially informs the ethos of As You Like It. It is obvious in the taking on of disguise by Rosalind and Celia and the sudden conversion of Duke Frederick at the edge of the forest, for instance. But it permeates the play's texture in various ways. When Duke Senior, searching for Jaques in the forest, says, ‘I think he be transformed into a beast, / For I can nowhere find him like a man’ (2.7.1-2), he is introducing a line of imagery continued when Orlando bursts in upon the exiles and Jaques queries, ‘Of what kind should this cock come of?’ (l. 90), and when Orlando, going to find Adam, sees himself as a doe seeking her faun (l. 128). Transformation of people into beasts, plants, and other things of nature was the stuff of Ovid's Metamorphoses, which Shakespeare knew well and drew on frequently. Touchstone refers to Ovid himself in 3.3, making a pun on ‘goats’ and ‘Goths’—and all puns depend on transformation of meaning—while the transformation of humans into beasts through Pythagoras' theory of the transmigration of souls is matter for a witticism by Rosalind (3.2.171). In the wider world of the play, Arden is the place where Nature works its change on those who come there—some, like the exiled Duke and lords, Rosalind, Celia, and Orlando, seeking refuge, others, like Oliver and Duke Frederick, intent on evil.

These changes are not wrought simply by the forest's being the green world that Northrop Frye and C. L. Barber⁷ discuss so eloquently; Rosalind insists on the element of magic. Perhaps, as Garber ingeniously suggests,⁸ the magician Rosalind has conversed with since the age of three is herself, but whether that is the case or not, Hymen, god of marriage, arrives to celebrate the wedding rites, and the text does nothing to suggest that he is anything other than a god: not Amiens, or another lord, or William, or anyone else, dressed up. (If it has to be another character, then Corin would be closest to the source, as Lodge's Coridon dresses up and sings a song.) There is no reason why this should not be an early theophany, a precursor of the appearances of Jupiter in Cymbeline and Diana in Pericles. Like Paulina in The Winter's Tale, Rosalind emphasizes the lawfulness of her actions. Again like Paulina, she restores a daughter to a parent, but where Paulina's ‘magic’ is revealed as a benign deception, since Hermione's ‘statue’ which seems to come to life is in fact Hermione herself, and where even Prospero explains that the characters in his betrothal masque are ‘all spirits’ that melt ‘into air, into thin air’ (Tempest 4.1.149-50), there is no such explanation for Hymen.

The appearance of Hymen, Rosalind, and Celia, the marriage ritual with its rhymed verse, music and song—all contrast strongly with the comic realism of Touchstone's discourse on the lie which precedes them and the more formal, but still realistic, report of Jaques de Boys which follows. Hymen presides over the grand transformation of single men and women into husbands and wives. There are two transformations to come: one, Frederick's conversion, reported by Jaques de Boys, is within the narrative; the other, outside it, is the admission in the Epilogue that Rosalind has been played by a male actor, who modulates from his character by recalling her claim to have magic powers, saying he will ‘conjure’ the audience. He also uses the last ‘if’ in a play with more ‘if's than any other play by Shakespeare.⁹

The lines beginning ‘If I were a woman I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me’ uniquely draw attention to the fact that the part of Rosalind, like all female roles in the English theatre until 1660, was played by a male. This is the only time that Shakespeare focuses attention so explicitly on this fact, the only time he gives an actor playing a woman lines which proclaim the male beneath the female dress. Significantly, they occur in the Epilogue, that transitional passage which eases the audience back from the imaginary world of the play into everyday existence. Cleopatra's expression of fear that if taken captive to Rome she will see ‘Some squeaking Cleopatra boy [her] greatness / I'th' posture of a whore’ (Antony 5.2.216-17), may have a certain grim ironic humour, but it lacks the explicitness of Rosalind's words in the Epilogue, which direct attention to the whole comedy of sexual ambiguity which has gone before.

Like Julia in The Two Gentleman of Verona, Viola in Twelfth Night and Imogen in Cymbeline, Rosalind takes on male dress for protection. When Celia suggests that disguise is needed to avoid assault on their way to the forest of Arden, Rosalind's response is based on physique—the shorter Celia can stay as a woman, but Rosalind, being ‘more than common tall’, says she will have a ‘gallant curtal-axe’ upon her thigh, a boar-spear in her hand and a ‘swashing and a martial outside’, even if her heart may harbour womanish fears (1.3.113-21); that the need for male protection would possibly be supplied by Touchstone is not considered by Rosalind when she suggests that he accompany them. (In any case, his weapons would at best be words, not swords.)

There is no way of knowing the attitude of the Elizabethan audience, and particularly the men in that audience, to the boy actor playing a girl or woman, or to the more complicated situation of the female page disguise. Robert Kimbrough claims that ‘from the standpoint of legitimate theatre, to maintain that there has ever been a comic device based on the actual sex of the actors is to fly in the face of a generic essential … An actor in role is whatever sex, age, and cultural origin the playwright asserts … We do Shakespeare a disservice not to accept his women as women.’¹⁰ This may do well enough for a Portia or a Jessica, a Juliet or a Cressida. It does less well for a female character who takes on with her male disguise the name of Ganymede, ‘Jove's own page’, even when this is merely using the name in the source, in this case Rosalynde. The relationship of Jupiter and his cupbearer was well enough known for the word ‘ganymede’ to be current for a homosexual youth (OED 2), the word ‘catamite’ is closely derived, through corruption, from the name, and in the opening scene of Marlowe's Dido Queen of Carthage (c.1587), for example, Ganymede is described as ‘that female wanton boy’ (l. 51). Lorenzo's remark that the escaping Jessica will come to him in ‘the lovely garnish of a boy’ (Merchant of Venice 2.6.45) may contain a misprint for ‘lowly’, but alternatively it may be a nod in the direction of a suppressed homosexual element in Antonio's feeling for Bassanio, or even in Lorenzo's for Jessica. But when Viola remains in her boy's clothes at the end of Twelfth Night there is no indication of doubt in Orsino's mind that he wants to see her in her ‘woman's weeds’, so that she will be ‘Orsino's mistress and his fancy's queen’. With Rosalind, the extra complication, the extra layer, is the female role she adds to her male disguise; paradoxically, this is at the same time an additional mask and a reversion to her true role of woman.¹¹ The addition had the potential in the Elizabethan theatre to draw attention not only to the Ganymede persona Rosalind takes on, but to the boy actor three layers beneath. The audience's attention could also be drawn to the boy actor when Rosalind in her description of how she cured the lovesick youth says that, in pretending to be a woman, she was ‘for every passion something, and for no passion truly anything, as boys and women are for the most part cattle of this colour’ (3.2.392-4), a linking which is given painful distortion in a different context when Lear's fool declares, ‘He's mad that trusts in the tameness of a wolf, a horse's health, a boy's love, or a whore's oath’ (The History of King Lear, 13.14-15). Rosalind's lines are developed from a passage in Lodge, already referred to, in which Rosalynde/Ganymede says to Alinda/Aliena, ‘You may see what mad cattle you women be’, but Rosalynde makes no mention of boys. The addition is significant when it is made for a stage adaptation when female parts were played by boys. Later in the play, when Rosalind/Ganymede/Rosalind invites Orlando to woo her, and asks ‘What would you say to me now an I were your very, very Rosalind?’ and he replies ‘I would kiss before I spoke’ (4.1.63-6), if Orlando makes as if to suit action to word and kiss her, the opportunity for comedy is doubly enriched because Ganymede must dodge the kiss and the audience is reminded that beneath the sham Rosalind is a boy, Ganymede, beneath Ganymede the ‘very’ Rosalind of the play, but beneath this last, a ‘very’ boy, the actor. (This leaves aside the question of audience response to an Orlando who thinks it might be interesting to kiss a boy.)

Since the 1960s the subject of Renaissance attitudes to cross-dressing, transvestism, homosexuality, and boy actors has been given increasing attention, along with the reappraisal of historical interpretation and development of literary critical theory.¹² At the same time feminist criticism has illuminated the significance of gender in Shakespeare's plays and likely attitudes of his audiences towards his heroines as women.¹³ The National Theatre's 1967 production discussed below … showed that a modern adult all-male interpretation of the play can be successful, provided that a homosexual element is not blatantly emphasized, as it was in the same production's much-criticized 1974 revival.

DOUBLENESS

In so far as theatre can exist only when there is at the minimum an actor and an audience, even an audience of one, and that an actor is a person who assumes a role, doubleness is an essential of theatre. In As You Like It doubleness informs many aspects of the play itself. In Rosalind it is taken to an extreme with a double layer of masks. Celia's disguise as Aliena is the other most obvious example, but nothing more is made of it—it remains a simple disguise. But as an informing idea, doubleness is introduced at the play's beginning, with two brothers in conflict: Orlando bitter at the way in which his elder brother Oliver has not discharged the will of their late father Sir Rowland de Boys and given him an education fitting a gentleman, Oliver plotting to have Orlando killed, acknowledging to himself that he does not know why he hates him, while suggesting that it could be plain envy. Like other pairs in the play, Oliver and Orlando are in some respects reverse images of each other. Oliver is envious, murderous, deceitful, a brother ‘the most unnatural / That lived amongst men’ (4.3.123-4), Orlando, by Oliver's own admission, ‘gentle; never schooled, and yet learned; full of noble device; of all sorts enchantingly beloved’ (1.1.155-7). Where Oliver is devious and calculating, Orlando is hotheaded and passionate—it is he who lays hands on his elder brother, and who rushes in with drawn sword on the exiled Duke Senior and his lords. His sudden falling in love with Rosalind is not a particularly distinguishing characteristic in this play, as it happens to so many others: to Rosalind, to Phoebe, who self-justifyingly quotes Marlowe's ‘“Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?”’ (3.5.83), to Celia and to Oliver, though only after his conversion to goodness which results from Orlando's saving him from certain death.

That encounter, which occurs off-stage and is described by Oliver himself, signals the joining of the opposite images which the brothers have represented throughout the play, even though they are not on stage together between 1.1 and 5.1. For all his excellences, Orlando needs to change as well as Oliver. Coming upon his brother asleep in the forest, the impending prey of a snake which glides away at his approach and of a hungry lioness, Orlando makes a decision, as Prospero does, that ‘The rarer action is / In virtue than in vengeance’ (Tempest 5.1.27-8); ‘nature, stronger than his just occasion’ (4.3.130), leads him to kill the lioness. This change in Orlando, the new ability to conquer a passion (in this case his justifiable anger at Oliver), brings about the change in Oliver which allows him to fall in love with Celia and to be deserving of her love.

These two sons of Sir Rowland de Boys are matched by the ducal brothers, the tyrannical, moody Frederick and the cordial, philosophical Duke Senior. Just as Oliver cannot easily find a reason for hating Orlando, so no reasons are given for Frederick's banishing his brother. The violence of Oliver's house, which the old servant Adam describes as ‘but a butchery’ (2.3.28), is paralleled by the physical violence of the court, where breaking of ribs is sport for ladies to watch, honour is of little account, and the Duke is given to unpredictable rages. Duke Senior's geniality, which helps inspire loyalty in his lords, is a mellower version of the gentle nobility which makes Orlando ‘of all sorts enchantingly beloved’ (1.1.156-7); his flash of anger at Jaques (2.7.64-9) is a mature, controlled expression of the same emotion that incites Orlando to attack Oliver in the first scene of the play. Duke Senior has gained (or perhaps completed) an education in the forest, where adversity has schooled him to read nature, to turn the chilly winds of winter into moral tutors, and to enjoy the lack of responsibility which forest life brings and the time it allows for contemplation and disputation. Orlando's entry into Arden signals the beginning of his education; expecting to have to use force to gain food, he learns that gentleness is sufficient; when he takes up Ganymede's offer to be cured of lovesickness, he unknowingly sets himself on an educative course which sharpens his mind, brings him self-awareness, and makes him a worthy partner for Rosalind. Orlando's journey is laid out before us for our enjoyment; Duke Senior has already made his; Oliver's education is sudden and complete, occurring off-stage, the circumstances told by Oliver himself in a context which mingles humour and seriousness; Duke Frederick's repentance is as precipitate as his earlier changes of mood, and placed at a further remove through being reported in the last scene of the play by Jaques de Boys. Johnson lamented that ‘By hastening the end of this work Shakespeare suppressed the dialogue between the usurper and the hermit, and lost an opportunity of exhibiting a moral lesson in which he might have found matter worthy of his pen’ (Joseph Moser helpfully made good the omission in 1809¹⁴); the inclusion of such a scene, however, would have led to the play's ending being slowed, the festivity towards which, as Northrop Frye tells us, comedy moves from irrational law would have been dimmed and the graded presentation of the educative processes described above would have been lost. As well, there was probably the practical reason that Duke Frederick's part was doubled; on the modern stage it is sometimes doubled by the actor playing Duke Senior, which makes, at the very least, for a good family resemblance.

Touchstone and Jaques, two of the characters Shakespeare introduced, form another pair. Touchstone may be a courtier who has trod a measure, flattered a lady and undone three tailors, but he is anything but ‘the daintiest fool of the comedies’, as S. E. Winbolt described him in 1895.¹⁵ He is a sensualist, a master of bawdy, whose earthy sensibilities provide a contrast to the romanticism of the other lovers in the play, whom he slyly calls ‘the rest of the country copulatives’ (5.4.54-5), reducing them to the same level as the ill-favoured but honest Audrey and himself. Touchstone is a new kind of character in Shakespeare. He is not a serving-man clown, like Lance in The Two Gentlemen of Verona or Lancelot Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice, but a witty court jester. He is the first of Shakespeare's wise fools who are allowed to say what they like, who are intended to tell home truths, to cut people down to size, but who at the same time are liable for a whipping if they go too far. Where Lance has 222 lines to speak and Lancelot 178, Touchstone has 299—among Shakespeare's clowns only Feste in Twelfth Night has more, with 318.¹⁶ There has been strong argument that the role of Touchstone was shaped for, and perhaps by, the actor Robert Armin, who joined the Chamberlain's Men some time after their chief clown, William Kempe, left the company early in 1599. It is not, however, established fact that Armin even played Feste. The coincidence of the name ‘Touchstone’ with Armin's training as a goldsmith and the name of the clown Tutch, in his own play Two Maids of More-clack (1598?), is attractively suggestive, but it is not known precisely when he joined the company, any more than it is known precisely when As You Like It was completed.¹⁷

On his first entrance Rosalind and Celia both refer to Touchstone as a ‘natural’, that is a person of little intellect, a born fool—it is immediately clear that the opposite is true, as they well know—and he may have worn for this scene at court the long coat of the idiot. …¹⁸ In the forest he wears motley, the parti-coloured costume of the professional fool, but whether it is a long coat or a short tunic is not certain. … Touchstone is a commentator, not least on the morals of the world he inhabits; his first joke reflects on the lack of honour in Frederick's court, and his question to Le Beau a little later again shrewdly comments on court values. He mocks Silvius, Rosalind, and the very idea of romantic love with a bawdy reminiscence (2.4.43-51); he satirizes Orlando and the Petrarchan tradition with a shockingly lewd parody which insults both love poetry and Rosalind herself (who, however, disposes of him with smut wittier than his own (3.2.113-16)), and he is a conscious performer, even getting (5.4.84-5), in Vickers's felicitous phrase, ‘the only encore in Shakespeare’ (p. 219). He relishes words, and argument, though his sophistication is no true match for the simple good sense of Corin in their debate over the relative qualities of court and country life. But Touchstone is genuinely concerned with and for people; we have Celia's word that he is devoted to her, and, despite his remarks on being married by means of an improper ceremony so that he will be able more easily to leave his wife, and Jaques's smart comment that Touchstone and Audrey's marriage will last only a couple of months, it is Hymen's prophecy to which we should listen: ‘You and you are sure together / As the winter to foul weather’ (5.4.130-1). Rough though they may be, winter and foul weather are inseparable. In this, his last comment about other people, Jaques is wrong again, as so often he is, whereas Touchstone is usually right in his remarks about the world and the people in it.

Like Orlando and Oliver, Duke Frederick and Duke Senior, Touchstone and Jaques are, as it were, of the same family, but opposites. Jaques is neither a natural nor a licensed fool, but as the licensed fool mocks under the mask of the simpleton, Jaques comments satirically under the cloak (or should it be ‘the hat’?) of the melancholic. Aristotle, according to Robert Burton in his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), considered ‘Melancholy men of all others [the] most witty’, subject to ‘a kind of enthusiasmus … which stirreth them up to be excellent philosophers, poets, prophets &c.’¹⁹ Just as Touchstone's ‘cover’ is described before we meet him, so Jaques's assumed role is depicted, and at much greater length (2.1.25-43). Amiens and the First Lord espy him stretched out beneath an oak, beside a stream, in precisely the pose of Edward, 1st Lord Herbert of Cherbury, painted by Isaac Oliver about 1610-14. … The tree in the left foreground of this picture is an oak, and the Earl's resting his head on his hand in the conventional posture of the melancholy philosopher represents his intellectual pursuits, just as the shield and his armour, being hung up in the background, indicate his knightly concerns. Roy Strong relates this to Nicholas Hilliard's miniature of the 9th Earl of Northumberland as a melancholy philosopher, painted c.1590-5, in which the Earl, dressed in black, his shirt and doublet unfastened, a book beside him and his hat and gloves cast by, reclines with his head on his hand beneath a tree.²⁰ Northumberland, known as ‘the wizard earl’, was interested in philosophy, alchemy, and scientific experiment. The sylvan solitude sought by the melancholic is also a quality of pastoral, however, and the reclining posture is found in illustrations of pastoral prose and verse.

Jaques's weeping over the sobbing deer, which became a subject for nineteenth-century artists including Blake … and Constable, would have been regarded as eccentric; Duke Senior himself is troubled by the fact that the deer are not safe from the huntsmen's arrows in their own forest confines, but not seriously enough to interfere with hunting them for food, and the Lord's account leads him to find Jaques to get some entertainment by teasing him in disputation, a sport Jaques is familiar with, and only too anxious to avoid. Where the Duke has just been extolling the advantages to be got from the adversities of exile, Jaques has been ‘invectively’ decrying the forest life, claiming that the exiles are themselves usurpers, tyrants, and even worse, in the forest world which both he and the Duke liken to a city state.

This negativity characterizes Jaques throughout the play, but he fails to persuade anybody to his point of view. In his parody of Amiens's cheerful song he calls everyone else ‘gross fools’ without challenge, but the pessimism of his platitudinous speech on the seven ages of man is exploded by Orlando's entry with Adam in his arms. When he derides Orlando's love-carvings on trees he is dismissed with unsuspected wit by the lover, and his egotistical description of his own particular kind of melancholy is given short, patriotic shrift by Rosalind. His two positive actions both relate to Touchstone, whose marriage to Audrey by the hedge-priest Sir Oliver Martext he prevents, and whom he introduces into the exiled court, as if realizing that he himself is no longer able to act as the court wit when there is a professional fool in the forest. His delight in discovering Touchstone produces unwonted merriment in Jaques, who begs the Duke for a suit of motley to wear so that he too will be licensed to speak his mind and so ‘Cleanse the foul body of th'infected world’ (2.7.60). The Duke's burst of anger at his presuming to castigate others when he has been a sinner himself produces the standard response of the satirist: that he attacks vice in general, not particular people, that those who have done wrong will benefit from his attack, and those who have not will be unharmed. Jaques's defence rather runs out of puff, however, and Shakespeare is clearly satirizing the satiric vogue of the late 1590s which, taken up so zealously by such writers as Nashe, Hall, Jonson, and Marston, led to the bishops' bonfire in June 1599. … Attempts have been made to identify Jaques as a satiric portrait, particularly of John Marston, owing to the scatological aspect of Jaques's thought and speech, and Jonson, to whom Shakespeare was supposed to have administered a purge, but just as he satirizes the fashionable pose of melancholy, in life, literature, and art, so Shakespeare satirizes the satiric mode rather than any individual. He may, however, lay teasing invitations for the audience to make such identifications: Duke Senior's entreaty, ‘Stay, Jaques, stay’, for example, is exactly Maximilian's line (5.7.99) to the steward Melun disguised as a beggar, Jaques de Prie, in Jonson's comedy The Case is Altered, acted probably in 1598; but apart from the names, there is nothing in common between the two characters.

Hazlitt considered Jaques ‘the only purely contemplative character in Shakespeare … his only passion is thought’, he wrote.²¹ This is not entirely true. Jaques has ambitions to change the world, which his skewed vision sees as being full of fools and filth, to be sneered and railed at. The only person whose company he enjoys is Touchstone, who he believes confirms him in his belief, but whom he misreads. Jaques's speech on the seven ages of man, with Hamlet's ‘To be or not to be’ the most famous in Shakespeare, is a restatement in good set negative terms of a topos known to every educated person. It was wildly misinterpreted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was, for example, parodied as an afterpiece given by the actor playing Touchstone, set to music and performed as a character song, made the subject of paintings, engravings, and postcards, and even depicted on ladies' fans.²² Parts became sentimentalized beyond recognition, particularly in illustrations. The infant, for instance, rather than ‘mewling and puking in the nurse's arms’ was shown gurgling and smiling on the nurse's lap. … The play, however, sets against the cynicism of the speech not sentimentalism but practical caring love, as Orlando brings in his old servant Adam to the food and friendship of Duke Senior and his lords.

Jaques is ‘compact of jars’, discordant: his being ‘merry hearing of a song’ is extraordinary. Melancholy and harmony do not agree. Marston's play The Malcontent (c.1600) even begins with ‘a sound of loud discordant music being heard’, signalling the ruling humour of its chief character, Malevole. The melancholic is out of tune with society, and Jaques has no place in the play's concluding dance which symbolizes the concord of marriage and the continuation of the race.

Touchstone, on the other hand, is sensitive to discord; he tells the pages that he finds their singing of ‘It was a lover and his lass’ ‘very untunable’, which they perhaps deliberately mishear so that they can claim they ‘kept time’ (5.3.40-3). Touchstone's liking for harmony is just part of his general sociableness. He may have had four quarrels, but he was ever only ‘like to have fought one’, and his explanation of how the combat was avoided is not only a joke against manuals of swordplay but, in its description of the seven degrees of the lie, it glances impishly at Jaques's sardonic description of the seven ages of man.

Where Jaques avoids the Duke because he is too ‘disputable’, Touchstone enjoys debate, especially if he considers he is winning, as he thinks he is in his discussion with Corin on court and country life. And where Jaques likes to think himself cerebral, Touchstone is the self-acknowledged physical sensualist who recognizes desire as a handicap, one of the ‘dulcet diseases’. But it can be cured, although the cure is marriage. ‘Wedlock would be nibbling’, he tells Jaques (3.3.74). When asked by the Countess in All's Well That Ends Well why he wants to marry, Lavatch the clown explains, ‘My poor body, madam, requires it. I am driven on by the flesh’ (1.3.28-9). Not much more could be expected of Touchstone and Lavatch, however, for fools were not troubled with passion, they were considered to be simply lecherous, and fickle.²³

Lavatch proves to be so when he goes to court and discovers beauties different from those of his Isbel at Roussillon, and Jaques draws on the same commonly held belief when he prophesies so short a life for Touchstone's marriage. Touchstone may make jokes about whores, and invent a scurrilous parody impugning Rosalind's purity, but he is properly moral when it comes to the satisfaction of his own flesh; productions of the play which depict or even suggest pre-marital copulation between Touchstone and Audrey, as John Dexter's National Theatre production of 1979 did, are in defiance of the text.

It is implied that Jaques's licentiousness had its full rein while he was on his travels, which Rosalind assumes included Venice, for Elizabethans a place as infamous for its courtesans and their lubricity as it was famous for its art, wealth, and legal institutions, which Shakespeare exploited in The Merchant of Venice. Jaques's sexual experience has been of the city, and associated with disease, according to Duke Senior; Touchstone's adventuring is of the natural countryside, associated with Jane Smile the milkmaid and Audrey the goatherd. Paradoxically, Jaques despises the court, preferring to stay in the forest rather than returning with the other exiles (who thereby confirm his cynical view: Duke Senior who praised the forest life for what it taught him, the Lord who said he would not change such a life, and the other lords, are presumably all eager enough to return to court when the opportunity arrives). Touchstone has never made a secret of his preference. A fool at court, he is ‘more fool’ still to come to Arden, and while his comparisons of court and country to Corin may seem even-handed, there can be little doubt that he finds country life, ‘in respect it is not in the court, … tedious’ (3.2.18).

While Jaques and Touchstone differ in so many ways, they are also alike. Both criticize society, both ridicule romantic love, putting themselves outside it. Jaques derides it from his assumed intellectual loftiness, Touchstone from the lower regions of the flesh. Both are related to bad smells. Idiots—natural fools—were infamous for incontinence, and lack of restraint generally; Rosalind makes Touchstone the butt of a joke about this at 1.2.98. As already noted, Jaques's name is a pun on a current word for a lavatory, but as well, the disease of melancholy was closely related to evil odours: it was believed to cause unpleasant gases to build up in the body, leading to bad breath and farting; a recommended remedy was purging of the bowels. Gerard's Herball, for instance, advises that ‘Pennyroyal … taken with honey and aloes, purgeth by stool melancholy humours.’²⁴ A century later, Tom D'Urfey's Pills to Purge Melancholy (1719) offered a more pleasant cure, a book of songs, the title referring to the belief that music lightened the spirits of the afflicted.

The pun in Jaques's name was not unusual but it is more obvious than the puns in Touchstone's, whose name contains a sexual allusion, in so far as ‘stone’ = ‘testicle’; more speculatively, the name may also allude to a well-known tavern fool, John Stone, as well as, perhaps, to the clown Tutch in Robert Armin's Two Maids of More-clack,²⁵ but the larger, more generally implied meaning is of ‘touchstone’ as a substance against which precious metals are tested, and this sense applies throughout the play. Orlando's verses, for example, are shown up as ridiculously extravagant when Touchstone extemporizes a bawdy parody; Jaques's pessimistic wit and his place as entertaining gall to the exiled court are diminished in the face of Touchstone's fresher humour; and the idealistic romanticism of the three other pairs of lovers is reduced to a more realistic level by Touchstone's reminder that fleshly desires are significant in the satisfaction of love.

These punning names are aspects of the play's doubleness of language, which begins with Orlando's cry, ‘I am no villein’, when Oliver calls him a ‘villain’ (1.1.52-3); the play on words is intensified in the old spelling form ‘villaine’, which is used for both words in the Folio. But much of the wordplay is bawdy, and given mainly to Touchstone, Jaques, and Rosalind. What amuses Jaques so much about Touchstone's moralizing on time, for example, is I suspect not so much the philosophic content as the bawdy implications of the language (2.7.12-43). Punning, like so much else, develops in the forest of Arden, Rosalind's page disguise liberating her into a male freedom of speech, though Shakespeare prepares the ground by making her first pun on Touchstone's smell (1.2.98), and then giving her a delightful little wordplay on ‘father’ and ‘child’ (1.3.11—of which prudery deprived her for more than a century).

The more that is learned about the meanings of words the clearer it becomes that Elizabethans found bawdy punning publicly acceptable and entertaining in a way lost by the nineteenth century but rediscovered in the twentieth.²⁶ That there were limits even for Elizabethans, however, is indicated by a passage in Love's Labour's Lost (4.1.110-48) in which Rosaline, Boyet, Maria, and Costard exchange doubles entendres based on hunting and cuckoldry (a common coupling that turns up again in the hunting chorus in 4.2 of As You Like It), and archery and intercourse. Maria protests to Costard, ‘Come, come, you talk greasily, your lips grow foul’ (l. 136); but Costard and Boyet continue for another two lines. Similarly, the brilliant extended exchange between Romeo and Mercutio (Romeo 2.3.35-92) is not halted by Benvolio's ‘Stop there, stop there’ (l. 86), rather it leads on to further verbal dexterities. A key word in that passage is ‘wit’ in its sense of ‘sexual organ’ …, a meaning central to an exchange between Rosalind and Orlando in 4.1 (154-61), which comes after the ‘mock’ marriage, and which plays with the conventional belief in the inevitability of cuckoldry. When this fear provokes Touchstone's concern in 3.3 he decides to find ‘the forehead of a married man more honourable than the bare brow of a bachelor’ (ll. 54-5), just as Benedick declares ‘There is no staff more reverend than one tipped with horn’ (Much Ado, 5.4.122-3). The Rosalind-Orlando banter is, in small, of the same kind as the exchange between the three gentlemen of Verona, and Rosalind's punning on ‘wit’ in this way is possible probably because she is in male disguise. This is Rosalind increasing the intensity of the double role she plays, making the most of the two genders she is presenting to Orlando.

Rosalind differs from all the other cross-dressed heroines of Shakespeare in the way she uses her disguise to educate her lover, and to secure him as a husband, by pretending to be what she is, a woman. This allows her both the freedom to speak and act as a man of the period, and the privileges of speaking and acting as a woman—‘Do you not know I am a woman? When I think, I must speak,’ she says when Celia protests at her interruptions (3.2.241-2). This loquacity is matter for a witticism by Anthony Trollope in The Eustace Diamonds (1872): ‘Let a girl be upset with you in a railway train, and she will talk like a Rosalind’, and it is a characteristic which caused Peggy Ashcroft, rehearsing the part in 1957, to write to George Rylands, ‘Rosalind is a wonderful girl but I wish she didn't talk quite so much.’²⁷

Rosalind's womanliness was the quality that in the nineteenth century particularly attracted audiences and was emphasized by English actresses between about 1840 and 1920. … The most famous, Helen Faucit, who acted the role first in 1839 and for the last time in 1879, blushed, trembled, wept, sparkled, and brought a great sense of playfulness to the part; but she had difficulty with the Epilogue, which she found ‘repugnant’ because it meant addressing the audience not as Rosalind or Ganymede, but as herself; she believed in the total submergence of the actor in the character. Like all those then playing Rosalind, she omitted passages which would have been thought offensive by the audience. Any suggestion of what was considered coarseness was usually removed or altered, sometimes by textual editors as well as by actors and directors. As early as 1714, for instance, Rowe emended Rosalind's wishful thinking about Orlando as her ‘child's father’ (1.3.11) to a self-centred thought about her ‘father's child’—a change not endorsed by Theobald but enthusiastically supported by Coleridge and many others; and an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century Rosalind usually decided to wear a gallant curtal-axe upon her ‘side’, as ‘thigh’ (1.3.116) was considered indelicate. She did not make a joke about Touchstone losing his ‘old smell’ (1.2.98) and Celia hardly ever charged her with wanting to learn Orlando's whereabouts so that she could put a man in her belly (3.2.197). She sometimes bantered with Orlando about a wife taking her wit to a neighbour's bed, however, because the sexual meaning of ‘wit’ (4.1.155) had been lost and so the word did not threaten the perceived femininity of the role. The rediscovery of meanings and the reinstatement of lines in more liberally-minded times has led to further exploitation of the gender ambiguity in the role, giving it a depth and intricacy denied by, for example, W. Robertson Davies who, in Shakespeare's Boy Actors (1939), advised that the modern actress should consider a Shakespearian heroine from the boy actor's point of view; ‘it will emerge’, he wrote, ‘as a simple and direct conception … she will be spared the necessity to deal with complexities which are not inherent in the part.’²⁸ Particularly in the case of Rosalind, complexities in fact arise especially because the part was written for a boy to act, and doubleness is redoubled.

Notes

1. Among the classical sources for the boy as capricious object of male desire is Virgil's second Eclogue, which was the basis for Richard Barnfield's ‘The Affectionate Shepherd. Containing the Complaint of Daphnis for the Love of Ganymede’ (1594). Its eroticism apparently led to gossip about Barnfield, who protested in his second book, Cynthia (1595), ‘Some there were, that did interpret The Affectionate Shepherd, otherwise than (in truth) I meant, touching the subject thereof, to wit, the love of a shepherd to a boy; a fault, the which I will not excuse, because I never made’ (A. H. Bullen, ed., Some Longer Elizabethan Poems (1903), p. 190).

2. See Rensselaer W. Lee, Names on Trees, Ariosto into Art (Princeton, 1977), Chs. 4-8 (passim).

3. Peter Stein emphasized this aspect still further in his 1977 Berlin production by presenting the scene (3.5) as a play within the play (Schaubühne am Halleschen Ufer company).

4. Shakespeare's Comedy of Love (1974), p. 214.

5. A Study of Shakespeare (1880), p. 152.

6. ‘The Education of Orlando’, in Comedy from Shakespeare to Sheridan, eds. A. R. Braunmuller and J. C. Bulman (Newark, 1986), p. 109.

7. Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective (1965); C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (Princeton, 1959).

8. Garber, p. 111.

9. See Maura Slattery Kuhn, ‘Much Virtue in If’, SQ [Shakespeare Quarterly], 28 (1977), p. 44.

10. Robert Kimbrough, ‘Androgyny Seen Through Shakespeare's Disguise’, SQ, 33 (1982), p. 17.

11. These ambiguities of gender are explored and exploited in Théophile Gautier's Mademoiselle de Maupin, which had for a subtitle ‘A Double Love’ when it was first published in 1835. The novel culminates in a performance of As You Like It with the heroine/hero, Madeleine/Théodore playing Rosalind/Ganymede. Relationships between the novel and the play are discussed by Rosemary Lloyd, ‘Rereading Mademoiselle de Maupin’, Orbis Litterarum, 41 (1986), 19-32, and ‘Speculum Amantis, Speculum Artis: The Seduction of Mademoiselle de Maupin’, Nineteenth Century French Studies, 15 (1986-7), 77-86.

12. See, for example, Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (1982); Steve Brown, ‘The Boyhood of Shakespeare's Heroines: Notes on Gender Ambiguity in the Sixteenth Century’, SEL [Studies in English Literature], 30 (1990), 243-63; Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations (Berkeley, 1988); Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Toward a Recognition of Androgyny (New York, 1973); Michael Jamieson, ‘Shakespeare's Celibate Stage’ in Papers, Mainly Shakespearian, ed. George Ian Duthie (Edinburgh, 1964), pp. 21-39; Stephen Orgel, ‘Nobody's Perfect: Or Why Did the English Stage Take Boys for Women?’, The South Atlantic Quarterly, 88 (1989), 7-29; P. H. Parry, ‘The Boyhood of Shakespeare's Heroines’, Shakespeare Survey 42 (1990), 99-109; James M. Saslow, Ganymede in the Renaissance (New Haven, 1986).

13. For example, Linda Bamber, Comic Women, Tragic Men: A Study of Gender and Genre in Shakespeare (Stanford, 1982); Juliet Dusinberre, Shakespeare and the Nature of Women (1975); Peter Erickson, Patriarchal Structures in Shakespearian Drama (Berkeley, 1985); Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters (Brighton, 1983); Madelon Sprengnether, ‘The Boy Actor and Femininity in Antony and Cleopatra’, in Norman N. Holland et al., eds., Shakespeare's Personality (Berkeley, 1989), pp. 191-205; Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz et al., eds., The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare (Urbana, 1980).

14. [Samuel] Johnson, [Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. H. R. Woudhuysen (Harmondsworth, 1989)], p. 180; Joseph Moser, ‘Additional Scene to Shakespeare's As You Like It’, European Magazine, 55 (1809), 345-52.

15. As You Like It, London [1895], p. xx.

16. The figures are from the tables in [Marvin] Spevack, [A Complete and Systematic Concordance to the Works of Shakespeare, (Hildesheim, 1968-80)], vol. i.

17. Discussion to 1976 is summarized in [Richard] Knowles, [As You Like It, A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare (New York, 1977)], pp. 373-7.

18. Sniping at his enemy, Gabriel Harvey, Thomas Nashe writes, ‘fools, ye know, always for the most part (especially if they be natural fools) are suited in long coats; whereupon I set up my rest to shape his garments of the same size, that I might be sure to sit on his skirts’ (Nashe, iii. 17) [The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R. B. McKerrow (1904-10) … With supplementary notes … by F. P. Wilson (Oxford, 1958)]. The fool's long-skirted suit and the meaning of ‘motley’, particularly in relation to a portrait of the fool Tom Skelton, are discussed by E. W. Ives in ‘Tom Skelton—A Seventeenth-Century Jester’ (Shakespeare Survey 13 (1960), pp. 90-105). Versions of the portrait are held by the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, and at Muncaster Castle, Ravenglass, Cumbria. …

19. [Robert] Burton, i. 401 (Pt. I. Sec. 3. Mem. 1. Subs. 3) [The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Holbrook Jackson, Everyman (1932)].

20. Roy Strong, Artists of the Tudor Court (1983), pp. 158-9, and ‘The Elizabethan Malady: Melancholy in Elizabethan and Jacobean Portraiture’, Apollo, 79 (1964), 264-9.

21. Characters of Shakespeare's Plays (1817; repr. 1962), pp. 240-1.

22. The parody (‘an Irregular, Poetic, Prosaic, Serio comic Paraphrase’) is on a playbill for the Theatre Royal, York, 14 May 1789 (Birmingham Shakespeare Library, Playbills, As You Like It, vol. 2, p. 157); the character song is on a playbill for 25 April 1864, and the fan illustration in an advertisement for 1 January 1796, listed in F. Madan, Catalogue of Shakespeariana (1927), pp. 218, 241 respectively (Bodleian Library, John Johnson Coll., Sh. Box F). There are numerous paintings and engravings, some comprising complete books.

23. Burton, quoting Erasmus, says ‘they are neither troubled in conscience, nor macerated with cares’ (i. 172 (Pt. I. Sec. 1. Mem. 3. Subs. 3)). In Richard Brome's The Queen's Exchange, the fool Jeffrey expects to have ‘at least half / A score of my wholesome country lasses with child’ (Dramatic Works, 3 vols. (1873), iii. 530).

24. Enlarged edn., 1633; repr. 1636, p. 672.

25. [David] Wiles, [Shakespeare’s Clown (Cambridge, 1987)], p. 146.

26. The pioneering work in this area by Eric Partridge with Shakespeare's Bawdy (1947) has been further developed by E. A. M. Colman in The Dramatic Use of Bawdy in Shakespeare (1974) and Frankie Rubinstein with A Dictionary of Shakespeare's Sexual Puns and Their Significance (2nd edn., 1989).

27. The Eustace Diamonds', 2 vols. ([1872]; repr. 1950), ii. 2; Michael Billington, Peggy Ashcroft (1988), p. 170.

28. p. 199.