SOURCE: Priest, Dale G. “Oratio and Negotium: Manipulative Modes in As You Like It.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 28, no. 2 (spring 1988): 273-86.

[In the following essay, Priest concentrates on the three “manipulators” of As You Like It—Jaques, Touchstone, and Rosalind—the last of whom emerges as the most skilled and benevolent negotiator of the play.]

Most of the personae in As You Like It address themselves in characteristic ways to the pastoral world Shakespeare has created in Arden. Each has his own distinct mode of response to that world. Still, a general bipartite pattern can be found in the various voices and strategies, a pattern that helps define two important polarities in the play. First we note the voices of accommodation—such characters as Corin, Orlando, and Duke Senior, who represent a spirit of inclusiveness in the play, and who function generally to promote integration and community. Other voices in the forest appear to be pitted against that spirit—chiefly those of Jaques, Touchstone, and Rosalind, among the persons who have significant dealings in Arden. These characters are manipulative by nature, and they project, or pretend to project, exclusive identities that seem to ridicule or reject the communal ideal. The polarities thereby established in the drama correspond roughly, and respectively, to the romantic and satiric modes of comic design.¹ This essay focuses on the decidedly different aims and methods of the manipulative personae in As You Like It—especially those of Touchstone and Rosalind—to show how and why Shakespeare gives us, in Rosalind, an eiron who uses the strategies of satire in the service of romance. In so doing, the playwright bestows upon her and her negotiative powers an implicit endorsement denied Touchstone and his rhetorical skills.

Of the three manipulators, Jaques receives the feeblest endorsement. That is, his vision is least compatible with the telos of the play—its direction, spirit, and outcome. It is Rosalind who is largely responsible for that outcome, and Jaques will be left out. His scornful aloofness from the world is so practiced and extreme that it becomes an actual identity or fixity. His posturing is so iron-clad that it not only defines but confines him, separates him from the pastime. In the end he is invited to stay, and he does bestow his blessing—if with a touch of cynicism—on the magical pairings. But he cannot abide the community; he prefers the cave. In the effect of his withdrawal from the comic resolution, he shares with Malvolio a kinship of extremes. Malvolio, in Twelfth Night, proves petty and vindictive to the end and is almost totally without detachment. Jaques is irreversibly detached. Both will flee from the community as pharmakos figures, cast out so that the comic spirit may make conclusion. In leaving, they cast some doubt over that conclusion by suggesting its arbitrariness and artifice. Conversely, the festivity and play-making at the end undercut the seriousness of the threat represented by the outsiders.

Critics have often noted that Jaques and Duke Senior do not get along very well.² Only Jaques darkens the scene perceived through the Duke's rosy lenses. This is partly because Jaques's performance—his contrived, or manipulated version of the world—is a discomforting, inverted parody of the Duke's world-view. Jaques's persistent brooding on the “infected world” clashes with the Duke's optimism, to be sure; beyond that, the Duke is threatened by Jaques's posturing. The Duke wants people to be “sincere,” as he believes himself to be. He is most pleased at the report of Jaques's “crying” over the wounded deer (II.i.25-70),³ not realizing that Jaques's practiced melancholy is a far cry from sincerity. The Duke will then seek Jaques out and “cope” him when he is “full of matter.” But when Jaques, admiring Touchstone, says he wants to become a satirist and heal the sick world with his detached, caustic commentary, the Duke is at odds with him again. Jaques has misjudged Touchstone's wry criticism of the passing world (II.vii.12-34), just as the Duke has misjudged Jaques's response to the wounded stag. We shall see that Touchstone, as fool and rhetorician, has the penetrating vision to see through pretense and the wit to express his critical perceptions. He is not, however, a satirist of the kind Jaques appears to admire—a misanthrope who delights in dragging man's dirtiest laundry out into full view.

Jaques, then, is clearly a manipulator of the exclusive and satiric kind. The temptation is great, in fact, to equate Jaques with Ben Jonson.⁴ Jaques is original with Shakespeare, as is Touchstone; they have no parallel in Lodge's Rosalynde. Whether or not the playwright had Jonson in mind when he created Jaques, it is clear that Jaques does not represent the vision recommended by the play. Certainly the Duke does not let Jaques's views go unchallenged:

Most mischievous foul sin, in chiding sin:
For thou thyself hast been a libertine,
As sensual as the brutish sting itself,
And all th' embossed sores, and headed evils,
That thou with license of free foot hast caught,
Wouldst thou disgorge into the general world.

(II.vii.64-69)

The Duke is upset not only by Jaques's pessimism and his implicit threat to dump garbage, as it were, into the Duke's idyllic world, but also by his hypocrisy. The Duke alerts us to the vulnerability of the chronic unmasker, the cynic who views all conventions as social disguises which must be exposed. Wolfgang Iser notes that Jaques is himself forever alert to “double meaning,” or hypocrisy, but that the double meaning Jaques purports to have seen through “might well rebound on him, for the code he keeps unmasking would also apply to himself. Excepting oneself from an otherwise universal law is indicative of … blindness.”⁵ Ultimately, Jaques's view leads to nothing, as Rosalind later reminds him (IV.i.1-38).

One important difference between Touchstone and Rosalind can be seen during the amusing and touching exchanges immediately after Orlando has been reported in the forest. When Celia tells her cousin that she found Orlando under a tree, “like a dropped acorn,” Rosalind sighs, “It may well be called Jove's tree when it drops forth such fruit” (III.ii.236). Only a few lines earlier, when told that Orlando's poem had been found on a tree, Touchstone quips, “Truly, the tree yields bad fruit” (III.ii.116). The “fruit” in both cases is Orlando, or his poetry (in effect, the two are indistinguishable). The uses of the metaphor, however, are radically different. The contrast is not to be found in any great difference in wit or intelligence. Both Rosalind and Touchstone are very much alike in their powers of discrimination. But Touchstone's remark is pure wit; it is founded in thought only. Rosalind then takes the figure and infuses it with life. Her remark is spoken with thought and feeling reunited. She had earlier made it clear that Orlando's verse is truly “bad fruit” (III.ii.164-77), but she can use such a metaphor to express emotion as well—the fruit of genuine affection. Certainly Touchstone is not without feeling. There is clearly an authentic loyalty between him and the girls: “He'll go along o'er the wide world with me” Celia says just as they prepare to leave the court (I.iii.132). At the end of the play, he will press in among the “country copulatives” and marry Audrey, the country wench.⁶ He has some reservations and an obvious measure of detachment about this (III.iii.90-94); still, he refers to his bride as “an ill-favored thing, sir, but mine own” (V.iv.58). Nevertheless, Touchstone's profession, and his primary function in the play, is that of the wise fool; his livelihood is essentially the detachment of his wit. He is the leveler, the designated critic who goes about puncturing pretense and testing this golden world for “fool's gold.” He can parody Silvius's romantic agony with the story of his own passion for Jane Smile and how he would kiss the “cow's dugs that her pretty chopt hands had milked” (II.iv.46-56). He can also ridicule Orlando's stylized love poetry as “the very false gallop of verses” and compose his own priceless piece in response (III.ii.100-12).

Touchstone is a master of the ancient art of oratio—the purposeful use of mannered prose—and so illustrates a pervasive Renaissance interest in this use of a manipulative rhetoric employed to disarm or otherwise persuade an audience. The use of such discourse has its roots in Cicero,⁷ and Socrates before him, and finds its Renaissance culmination in the Encomium Moriae (1509). Erasmus creates a persona who uses oratio masterfully to transvalue the meaning of the word “folly,” who herself is folly transvalued as a source of wisdom, and who manipulates her audience with irony and word-play. Such is the folly and rhetorical skill Touchstone inherits in As You Like It⁸—even if, for the most part, he uses oratio for its own sake and without the sense of purpose which animates Rosalind. Still, Shakespeare has created in Touchstone a “master stylist and wit [whose] verbal adaptability gives him his astonishing range” (Young, p. 52). He confronts old Corin, for instance, with rhetorical proof that Corin and all his pastoral kind are damned for never having used good, courtly manners (III.ii.32-85). Later, he browbeats the poor bumpkin William with “figures in rhetoric” to show that William's wit is not as “pretty” as he thinks it is—showing him up, in effect, in front of Audrey (V.i.10-57). Then comes Touchstone's pièce de resistance, the extended discourse on the “degrees of the lie” (V.iv.43-103). Here he holds forth on the rules that govern quarreling about alleged lies and concludes that all malice can finally be avoided by a judicious use of the subjunctive: “Your If is the only peacemaker; much virtue in If” (V.iv.103). Shakespeare's comedies often recommend the use of manipulative, hypothetical modes as the best way to deal with real experience. But Touchstone's discourse as instructive model is weakened by the detachment of the oratio and by the removal of the performance from the world of actual human experience.⁹ Rosalind will provide us a better model; her manipulative skills are generated by passion and directed by human needs. So the fool emerges as a somewhat distorted image of Rosalind.¹⁰ He shares her powers of discrimination, but not her balanced personality. He is heavy on thought and light on feeling. Still I must think that Shakespeare took great delight in bringing Touchstone to life.

Rosalind is the negotiator in As You Like It, and that goes beyond the familiar definition denoting someone who deals with others in order to get things done or arrive at agreement. Rosalind does that, too. Like any effective negotiator, she has a goal, an awareness of conflicting claims on her attention, and a gift for tentativeness in policy and action. But the term is especially appropriate for Rosalind because of the etymology. The root of “negotiate” is otium, a classical term that variously denotes the pastoral ideal: leisure, contentment, the good life, and so on.¹¹ It also includes—especially for the Renaissance—the ideal of fulfilled, romantic love. Otium is advertised in the Duke's translation of Arden into a “golden world”; it is explicit in Amiens's music—especially the famous song about life under the greenwood tree (II.v.1-8, 38-45). Negotium, conversely, is “non-leisure” or business, a Ciceronian ideal antithetical to the Horatian otium.¹² In regard to Rosalind's aggressive business in Arden, the term is obviously appropriate to her. It also fits because her public business in Arden is to appear to be opposed to, or critical of, the very values she pursues—those associated with otium and the pastoral ideal. The true enemies of otium are ambition (shunned by the pastoral poet) and the aspiring mind. The enemies of the pastoral ideal in As You Like It are Oliver and Duke Frederick—overreachers of sorts, whose will to power and lordship over others provides the tension, the opposition that activates the drama. Their attitudes and activities are real and assertive; their imperative drive recalls the metaphysics of the tragic mode. If otium is the opposite of willful ambition, it is no less real in As You Like It. If not imperative, it is still engaging. As the goal that directs and impels dramatic activity, or as an actual state variously realized in the play, otium provides a core of reality, an ideal in relation to which the negotiator may act or proceed in various ways.

To illustrate we may recall Petruchio's “peace, love, and quiet life”—an ideal to lend meaning and direction to the supposings of that arch-negotiator of The Taming of the Shrew (V.ii.108). Such an ideal or goal clearly animates Rosalind as well, and it is more serious and perceivable than Petruchio's; we see it in her “fathoms-deep” love for Orlando. In As You Like It, the most specific representation of otium, in the literary sense, is Corin. Corin is a shepherd in a pastoral play, and to that extent he is a prop in a conventional mode. Still, he is older and wiser than the stylized Silvius, and there is an authenticity in his perception of himself and his place in the world: “Sir, I am a true laborer: I earn that I eat, get that I wear, owe no man hate, envy no man's happiness, glad of other men's good, content with my harm, and the greatest of my pride is to see my ewes graze and my lambs suck” (III.ii.73-77). This is an engaging statement—the simple profession of a man in whom the pastoral ideal is alive and well. Corin is not a character with much dimension, but he is honest and gracious. When Rosalind and her party arrive hungry and weary in Arden, Corin will do what he can to help them (II.iv.75-100). So, Touchstone has no actual quarrel with him; he acknowledges that the old shepherd is a “natural philosopher.” Yet precisely because Touchstone recognizes in Corin an ideal—an unpretentious exemplar—he cannot resist exercising on the rustic his highly-developed skills as negotiator. I have suggested that the ensuing exercise is purely rhetorical; Touchstone's professionalism at this sort of thing is a key, again, to the difference between him and Rosalind. The fool's negotiations (certainly until he meets Audrey) are pure skill; they lack the motive and cue that move his mistress. Jaques also has potential as a negotiator, as he shows in his “ducdame” version of Amiens's song about pastoral idealism (II.v.50-57). The equivocal vision is wasted, however, because of Jaques's self-involvement and his excessive commitment to his own performance.

The balanced vision of Rosalind recommends her as the true negotiator of As You Like It. She acts “as if” to conceal purpose and feeling for tactical reasons; she also acts “as if” in order to infuse humanity into a world stifled by convention and to a great extent devoid of real life. The most obvious and most delightful instance of Rosalind's negotiations in Arden is her practice on Orlando (III.ii.315-456; IV.i.38-204). The scenario is familiar enough. Rosalind, as Ganymede, will help Orlando cure his lovesickness for Rosalind by pretending that she is Rosalind and by having him woo her. She will then portray the fickleness of woman so convincingly that he will see his folly and wish to have nothing more to do with the madness called love. Now this play-within-a-play business is mostly subterfuge. Almost everything about it is manipulated, contrary-to-fact. Rosalind is not really Ganymede, nor is Ganymede really Rosalind in the scenario. It is likewise clear that the real Rosalind does not wish to scoff at love or to purge Orlando's love for her, nor does Orlando really want his sanity restored: “I would not be cur'd, youth” (III.ii.425), he says when Rosalind promises guaranteed medicine. All is hypothetical.

At the same time, an audience is in touch with an underlying tissue of reality in Rosalind's genuine affection. The emotional component of the scenario is disguised, inaccessible to Orlando. But for us, the disguise actually serves to highlight the emotion through dramatic irony: our understanding of Rosalind runs deeper than Orlando's. We have already witnessed a private confession of Rosalind's feelings (III.ii.236), and we hear another one after Orlando departs following his second session with his “counselor”: “My affection hath an unknown bottom, like the bay of Portugal” (IV.i.207). In the playlet itself we are alert to hidden confessions that draw us in. When Orlando wishes he could make Ganymede believe how much he loves his Rosalind, we have a telling response. Ganymede answers, but the real Rosalind speaks through the mask: “Me believe it? You may as soon make her that you love believe it, which I warrant she is apter to do than to confess she does” (III.ii.387-89). Poised in its response to this interplay of the real and the hypothetical, an audience is encouraged to infer meaning.

What is the meaning or value of Rosalind's negotiation here? I believe that Rosalind is using these manipulative tactics for three reasons. First, she simply finds it gratifying to do so. Framing her feelings in a theatrical mode gives her the double joy of both primary and vicarious experience. In another context, she calls this “feeding her love” (III.iv.58). In the company of Orlando, she can stand outside herself, as it were, and savor his professions of love with the satisfaction one can only get from overhearing someone say nice things about him to another person. The device prolongs and intensifies her pleasure in the same way that anticipation enhances a long-awaited, happy event. Second, the negotiation is designed to educate Orlando. He can be a sensible enough fellow, as he demonstrates in fending off Jaques's barbs when Monsieur Melancholy tries to belittle him and his love songs (III.ii.253-94). With regard to his feelings for Rosalind, however, Orlando's good sense is replaced by convention and stylized behavior. He lacks the element of detachment that gives Rosalind a happier and more clear-eyed understanding of her own emotions. Rosalind tries to teach him a bit of detachment by forcing him to dramatize himself in the playlet she construes. The attempt is similar to Petruchio's efforts to educate Kate in The Taming of the Shrew, in that both mentors use manipulative “supposes” to enlighten a subject who is mired in unreflecting behavior: Kate is excessively “real” and Orlando is too artificial. Rosalind's efforts are less “noisy” than Petruchio's, and the results are less dramatic. Four times Orlando forgets that he is supposed to be playing a part (III.ii.433; IV.i.110, 157, 197); and his response to Rosalind's lesson that “Men have died … but not for love” shows he has a bit more to learn: “I would not have my right Rosalind of this mind, for I protest her frown might kill me” (IV.i.109-10).¹³ But the third and most important reason for Rosalind's use of a manipulative, hypothetical mode here is that it gives her power and control over her own feelings; it allows Rosalind to direct her experience as a playwright would his script. Rosalind's real goal is a happy integration of her real experience—marriage with Orlando. In her play world as well we see her directing the hypothetical activity in a way that culminates in the mock wedding between Orlando and his “Rosalind.” There, at one of the most delightful moments in the play, we catch a glimpse of the happy girl behind the contrived role. Anticipating the formal question from the “priest” (Celia), Rosalind impulsively says, “I might ask you for your commission, but I do take thee, Orlando, for my husband. There's a girl goes before the priest, and certainly a woman's thought runs before her actions” (IV.i.138-41). Dramatizing herself as the impulsive girl allows her to be the impulsive girl and still remain in control of the scenario.

Probably the most interesting and most misunderstood of Rosalind's negotiations is her intervention in the Silvius-Phebe affair (III.v.1-80). Having overheard Phebe's icy rejection of Silvius's protestations of love, Rosalind jumps in to act her part (as Ganymede) in the scenario. Ralph Berry sees Rosalind's intrusion as an example of her will to master or to dominate certain others whom she finds disturbing in the play. Seeing herself in Phebe's antiromantic attitude, Rosalind is subtly threatened, the interpretation goes, and she is compelled to browbeat the shepherdess with one-upmanship.¹⁴ Most of the evidence, however, seems to point to Rosalind's sense of purposeful play. When Corin, at the end of the preceding scene, invites her and Celia to come witness the encounter between the “lovers,” Rosalind makes a telling remark:

          O, come, let us remove,
The sight of lovers feedeth those in love.
Bring us to this sight and you shall say
I'll prove a busy actor in their play.

(III.iv.57-60)

The lines are a fine instance of Shakespeare's simultaneous effects. Rosalind's confession of her own love is “real,” while her allusion to theatrics reminds us that her action will be of a hypothetical nature. We are signaled that Rosalind will use a contrary-to-fact pose both to conceal and assert her own reality in a negotiation with another aspect of Arden.

Rosalind's lecture to Silvius and Phebe, then, is not real in the sense of the overbearing assertion of Rosalynde in Lodge's story. Shakespeare's Rosalind says,

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 makes the world full of ill-favored children.
'Tis not her glass, but you, that flatters her,
And out of you she sees herself more proper
Than any of her lineaments can show her.
But, mistress, know yourself, down on your knees,
And thank heaven, fasting, for a good man's love;
For I must tell you friendly in your ear,
Sell when you can, you are not for all markets.
Cry the man mercy, love him, take his offer.

(III.v.49-61)

Rosalind's simultaneous detachment and involvement in this affair is another departure from his source made by Shakespeare, in keeping with his heroine's manipulative tactics. In Lodge, Rosalynde is “incensed,” unable “to brook the cruelty of Phebe.”¹⁵ In Shakespeare's play, Rosalind is a player, incorporating both artifice and feeling in her negotiative art. Her objective is to infuse both sense and sensibility into the affair of Silvius and Phebe; in short, she will try to educate them while feeding her own love through theatrical participation in the love game. Rosalind seeks to impose a sense of balance upon the extremes of convention and hard reality represented in this scene, and she does this by reminding both parties of the relativity of time and beauty.

Silvius is a cardboard cut-out of the pastoral lover who fancies that the one “good life” lies somewhere behind Phebe's scornful eyes. Still he reminds Rosalind of her own affection for Orlando, as she had confessed in her earlier response to the slighted shepherd: “Alas, poor shepherd, searching of thy wound, / I have by hard adventure found mine own” (II.iv.44-45). She can “feed” her own love by helping Silvius see things more clearly, which is what she wants to do for Orlando as well. This educational process requires detachment, as well as empathy, in both cases. It requires the kind of manipulative power Feste uses on Orsino when the clown adapts his songs both to accommodate and to satirize the Duke in Twelfth Night. All three of the gentlemen—Orsino, Silvius, and Orlando—are essentially narrative. That is to say their identities are stories, stylized presentations fashioned from Ovid, Petrarch, pastoral complaint, and the manuals of courtly love. In As You Like It Rosalind not only knows this about Silvius and Orlando, but she understands them on an emotional level as well. This advantage gives her power, which she chooses to use apparently at their expense, but ultimately on their behalf. She will improvise upon their narratives with a narrative of her own.¹⁶ Hers will take the form of stern counsel which, for Silvius, is designed to help him confront his own mindless behavior and to help him see the source and relative nature of female beauty.

Phebe represents a different extreme, but her single-minded antiromanticism is equally vain and without life. Rosalynde's rebuke of Phebe in Lodge's story is noteworthy in this regard: “Take heed, fair nymph, that in despising love you be not overreach'd with love, and in shaking off all, shape yourself to your own shadow, and so with Narcissus prove passionate yet unpitied” (p. 781). For Shakespeare, too, Phebe is a negative “overreacher,” an enemy of otium in her willfulness. Her literalist response to Silvius's complaint that she kills him with her eyes would appear similar to Rosalind's own answer, as Ganymede, to Orlando's protest that he will die if Rosalind rejects him (IV.i.106-107). Phebe says sharply, “Lie not, to say mine eyes are murtherers! / Now show the wound mine eye hath made in thee / … I am sure there is no force in eyes / That can do hurt” (III.v.19-27). The harshness of Phebe's rebuff of Silvius sets her apart from the conventional coy mistress. She is not leading him on by pretending to be disinterested; she is trying to get rid of him. Rosalind's response to Orlando, that men do not die for love, is a tactic—part of her enterprise to cure him by counsel. The “truth” of her argument does not reflect her real concerns. The ostensibly cold fact about death for love belies her actual interest in keeping Orlando's love for her very much alive. Phebe, however, is serious in a straightforward way. She is engrossed in a rigid attitude that leaves room for no love but narcissism. Phebe also needs curing. The affliction is the opposite of Orlando's, but the medicine is fundamentally the same—a good dose of relativism. Single-mindedness is the enemy of contentment. Here, as elsewhere in Shakespearean comedy, the message is reinforced by the audience's awareness of the relative nature of role and identity. Phebe has a firmer identity than Rosalind, but Phebe is the unhappy one. Rosalind uses her role as access to joy.

Rosalind's real feelings, then, are not the whole issue in the scene, since she is negotiating from behind the Ganymede mask. Her conclusion—“Down on your knees, / And thank heaven, fasting, for a good man's love”—is neither angry assertion nor sincere advice. For Rosalind to advise abject submission would not square with her own experience. The statement, rather, is an optative conclusion, the logical upshot of her argument. It is a tactic designed to jolt Phebe into alternate ways of seeing, to allow for the possibility of real affection. I am reminded, in Ganymede's advice, of Kate's lecture to the women at the end of The Shrew. I have compared Rosalind to Petruchio; Kate, after her conversion, likewise becomes an aggressive negotiator like them. Rosalind's motives are not Kate's; the former is “feeding her love,” while the latter is winning a bet. But the manipulative postures are similar, and Rosalind can no more be held precisely accountable for her advice than can Katherina. Both speak “as if” they mean what they say. The result of the negotiations, in Rosalind's case, turns out to be an instance of comic irony. Phebe both misses the point and takes Ganymede's advice too literally. She surrenders to love surely enough, but she falls for Ganymede, not Silvius. Here is another of those reversals by which Shakespeare calls our attention to the fluidity of theatrical experience. Phebe, suddenly in love with Ganymede, has been cured of her intransigence; she is not really an enemy of love after all. Nor, an audience feels sure, will she “really” be in love with Ganymede for long, for it is clear that Rosalind is in firm control of this play world.

Rosalind's steadfast affection, together with her magical powers as playwright-negotiator, will result, finally, in all “earthly things made even.” The magic word in this transformation—as in the play as a whole—is “if,” the great peacemaker. Using the hypothetical to forge real happiness for all concerned, Rosalind asks Phebe, “You say you'll marry me, if I be willing? … But if you do refuse to marry me, / You'll give yourself to this most faithful shepherd?” Phebe agrees. And then to Silvius, “You say that you'll have Phebe, if she will?” Silvius agrees with enthusiasm (V.iv.11-17). The union of Phebe and Silvius, and the happiness of Orlando and Rosalind herself, await only the magic moment when Rosalind's “as if” identity becomes her real one. As she leaves to prepare herself for her bridegroom, Rosalind summarizes the conditional promises: “[To Phebe]: I will marry you, if ever I marry woman, and I'll be married tomorrow. [To Orlando]: I will satisfy you if ever I satisfied man, and you shall be married tomorrow. [To Silvius]: I will content you, if what please you contents you, and you shall be married tomorrow” (V.ii.113-18). Here is a set of assertions which the audience recognizes as true and not true at the same time. The promises both will and will not be fulfilled, depending upon the level of reality we choose as a reference point—whom we choose to identify with the first person voice of the promises. Ultimately, the voice is Shakespeare's, promising a magic we can believe in. The ending of As You Like It is both contrary-to-fact and alive with joy by virtue of Shakespeare's art. Rosalind, the playwright's “conjurer,” uses her power to crystallize genuine emotion out of a highly contrived scenario. After she reveals herself to the company, there follows a remarkable exchange orchestrated around “if” (V.iv.118-24). Six times in seven lines, “if” becomes real happiness for Duke Senior and the lovers. Then Hymen enters to “make conclusion / of these most strange events,” to join eight pairs of hands “if truth holds true contents.” It does in As You Like It, because here, as elsewhere in Shakespeare's comedy, “if” and “truth” are one. And in the end, all are content, thanks largely to a heroine whose benign manipulations clearly have Shakespeare's blessing.

Notes

1. This useful generalization about comedy emerges out of Northrop Frye's comments on myth and archetype in Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957), p. 177. For a discussion of the function of inclusive and exclusive personalities in romantic and satiric comedy, see Mark Bracher, “Contrary Notions of Identity in As You Like It,” SEL [Studies in English Literature] 24 (1984):225-27.

2. See, for instance, A. D. Nuttall, “Two Unassimilable Men,” in M. Bradbury and D. Palmer, eds., Shakespearean Comedy, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 14 (1972):210.

3. All quotations of Shakespeare's plays are from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton, 1974).

4. John Dover Wilson finds, for him, a more likely caricature of Jonson in Nym of Henry V and The Merry Wives of Windsor. See Shakespeare's Happy Comedies (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1962), p. 153.

5. Wolfgang Iser, “The Dramatization of Double Meaning in Shakespeare's As You Like It,” Theatre Journal 35 (1983):314.

6. Some critics choose to stress this aspect of Touchstone's personality and function. Harold Jenkins calls our attention to the fool's role as burlesque parodist by stressing the “material fool” in Touchstone—the realist, the “timekeeper,” and even the “lusty, animal man.” See “As You Like It,” ShS [Shakespeare Survey] 8 (1955):48-49.

7. This is the definition I will use in my argument. There are numerous meanings and connotations associated with this versatile word. See P. G. W. Glare, ed., Oxford Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), pp. 1262-63. On the power of oratio, Cicero says, “But so potent is that Eloquence (oratio) rightly styled by an excellent maker, … that she can not only support the sinking and bend the upstanding, but, like a good and brave commander, can even make prisoner a resisting antagonist.” From De Oratore II.44.187 ff., in Loeb Classical Library, trans. E. W. Sutton (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1959), p. 333. This “making prisoner” is essentially what Touchstone does with his “antagonists” in Arden. David Young notes that in writing Touchstone into the play, “Shakespeare was inspired by his success with Falstaff and by his new clown, Robert Armin.” See The Heart's Forest: A Study of Shakespeare's Pastoral Plays (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1972), p. 52.

8. On the “wise fool” motif as it appears in classical literature, in Erasmus, and in Shakespeare, see Robert H. Goldsmith, Wise Fools in Shakespeare (East Lansing: Michigan State Univ. Press, 1963), pp. 11-14. On Touchstone as wise fool, see pp. 47-51.

9. According to C. L. Barber, Touchstone's verbal forays against Corin and William are not the work of a satirist mocking the real world, but a mocking of pastoral innocence. “Shakespeare's point of view,” he says, “was not medieval. But his clown and fool comedy is a response, a counter-movement, to artistic idealization, as medieval burlesque was a response to the ingrained idealism of the culture.” See Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and its Relation to Social Custom (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1959), p. 229.

10. Critical views of Touchstone vary considerably. On the more positive side, Bracher argues that Touchstone's folly “leads to a greater relatedness among selves”; his irony produces humility, which opens the door to tolerance and love (pp. 233-34). Chris Hassel, arguing from an even more sharply defined theological perspective, has a different view. He admits that Touchstone frequently alludes to Erasmian statements concerning the wisdom of folly, but he contends that Touchstone is naive, lacking in humility. Therefore he is not the wise fool that Feste is in Twelfth Night. See Faith and Folly in Shakespeare's Romantic Comedies (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1980), p. 110.

11. Hallett Smith, Elizabethan Poetry: A Study in Convention, Meaning, and Expression (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1952), p. 2.

12. The tension between these two classical standards is felt throughout the literature of the Renaissance and especially in humanistic thought. See Isabel Rivers, Classical and Christian Ideas in English Renaissance Poetry: A Student's Guide (London and Boston: G. Allen and Unwin, 1979), pp. 137-38.

13. Rosalind does make some headway with Orlando, however. The contrived love game frustrates him and, if nothing else, tires him of artifice. “I can live no longer by thinking,” he at last confesses. In Rosalind's reply, we sense that make-believe is about to become an image of real love: “I will weary you then no longer with idle talking” (V.ii.50-51). Kent van den Berg notes, “If Rosalind's deception of Orlando acts out his own self-deception, it also helps him to overcome it. The activity of pretending that Ganymede is Rosalind encourages in Orlando an awareness that the actual Rosalind is more real than the rarefied mistress of his Petrarchan fantasies.” See “Theatrical Fiction and the Reality of Love in As You Like It,” PMLA [Publications of the Modern Language Association] 90 (1975):891.

14. Ralph Berry, Shakespeare's Comedies: Explorations in Form (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 183-85.

15. Thomas Lodge, Rosalynde. Euphues' golden legacie, in H. E. Rollins and H. B. Baker, eds., The Renaissance in England: Nondramatic Prose and Verse of the Sixteenth Century (Boston: Heath, 1954), p. 781.

16. I owe this observation to Stephen Greenblatt's analysis of Iago's improvisation of power in Othello. Iago sees Othello for what he is, a story which the story-teller takes seriously and believes is his own or his true self. “But Iago knows that an identity that has been fashioned as a story can be unfashioned, refashioned, inscribed anew in a different narrative.” See Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 238. This kind of awareness and just such a strategy might be said to describe Rosalind as well, but with some differences. Rosalind has motive, whereas Iago has only strategy perforce. Iago's strategy is entirely self-serving, whereas Rosalind's serves others as well.