SOURCE: Hunt, Maurice. “Kairos and the Ripeness of Time in As You Like It.” Modern Language Quarterly 52, no. 2 (June 1991): 113-35.

[In the following essay, Hunt describes Shakespeare's references to classical and Christian notions of time in As You Like It as they suggest the possibility of a renewed Golden Age or the providential recovery of a lost paradise.]

Not every series of critical articles cumulatively deepens our understanding of a Shakespearean play. Such an effect, however, does come from critics' exploration of the motif of time in As You Like It. In a now-classic essay, Jay Halio first defined a contrast in the play between the time consciousness of the court and the regenerative timelessness of the forest of Arden and a previous generation's gracious way of life. Taking issue with Halio, Rawdon Wilson has argued that the dialectic of As You Like It concerns not time consciousness and timelessness but the objective process of either public or natural time and the subjective, private time sense of characters such as Rosalind and Orlando. For Wilson, the comedy reveals a “constant play between the objectivity of time (as the correlative of motion) and its relativity (as the correlative of a knowing mind).” Wilson, writes Donn Taylor, “holds that the chief characters' perception of the objective, threatening time of Frederick's court undergoes gradual change to ‘a sense of interior time which becomes possible in Arden’ and which ‘can exist, as a particular reflection of consciousness, only when objective time loses its importance and is no longer marked.’”¹ Taylor thus redefines Wilson's objective time in As You Like It, stressing the ability of characters to seize the opportune moment, the kairos of classical art as modified by medieval thought.² Of particular interest to Taylor is the concept of physical ripeness, and whether Rosalind and Orlando seize moments opportune for their growth as lovers worthy of one another. “Most of the characters seize their Occasion,” he concludes, “complete their growth to maturity, and are joined in good Fortune through the multiple marriage which concludes the play” (p. 127).

Taylor's idea of kairos, however, is incomplete. By focusing exclusively upon the Greek and Roman notion of the opportune moment, brought by Occasion, he overlooks the greater importance of Judeo-Christian kairos for As You Like It. According to G. F. Waller, “The New Testament writers transform the Jewish concept of a time of opportunity to the time, the kairos, the advent of Jesus of Nazareth in whom the time is fulfilled. The commencement of a new aion or era was proclaimed, in which men were called to live eschatologically, in a new pattern of living in which the quality of eternal life is revealed in time.”³ In Frank Kermode's opinion, “It is the New Testament that lays the foundation for both the modern sense of epoch … and the modern distinction between times: the coming of God's time (kairos), the fulfilling of the time (kairos—Mark 1.15), the signs of the times (Matt. 16.2, 3) as against passing time, chronos. The notion of fulfillment is essential; the kairos transforms the past, validates Old Testament types and the prophecies, establishes concord with origins as well as ends.”⁴ By seizing moments latent with spiritual, even incarnational, significance, individuals—both in life and in literature—redeem time lost or misspent to the salvation of themselves and their society.⁵ It is a version of providential kairos that Shakespeare repeatedly represents in As You Like It. By seizing certain propitious moments, Orlando re-creates heroic events in Hercules' and Aeneas's lives so that (in a sense to be explained later) the Golden Age returns. The spiritual dimension of these kairos becomes apparent in the fulfillment of time that Providence effects in the play. The kairoi of heroic moments from a classical age conclude in the masque of Hymen with an epiphany of the Garden of Eden. The reenactment of time in the play progresses to a point at which the audience realizes that a moment of innocence has been miraculously recovered.

Similarly, Shakespeare's idea of ripeness, of maturity in time—both spiritual and intellectual—is more complex than Taylor's notion of physical perfection. The twenty-five-year-old country bumpkin William may, as Touchstone admits, be physically ripe, but he scarcely can be said to have attained intellectual maturity. In As You Like It, Shakespeare plays off different kinds of ripeness within the same character and among characters. A question gradually posed in the play is whether the characters' acts of seizing opportune moments coincide with a time of most significant personal ripeness: that of fulfilled spiritual or intellectual growth. For Rosalind and Orlando, the question concerns the degree to which their individual ripening as lovers coincides with the final spiritual kairos of the play: their re-creation of Adam and Eve's marriage.⁶

Whatever fulfillment the characters of As You Like It achieve must occur at moments within certain unalterable time frames. The first moment involves the law of primogeniture, among sons the inheritance rights of the eldest, always ahead of his brothers because born first in time. “I know you are my eldest brother,” Orlando tells Oliver at the play's beginning, “and in the gentle condition of blood you should know me. The courtesy of nations allows you my better, in that you are the first-born, but that same tradition takes not away my blood, were there twenty brothers betwixt us” (1.1.43-49).⁷ Cruelly kept a peasant by his brother, Orlando certainly has a complaint; yet playgoers should notice that he is not challenging Oliver's superior legal rights but his inhumane, legally irremediable treatment of him. A satiric remark of Touchstone's suggests that Orlando would do wrong by trying forcibly to overthrow Oliver or deprive him of his rights by primogeniture. Touchstone refers to Celia's father, the younger brother who has wrongfully deposed the elder brother, Duke Senior, as “old Frederick” (1.2.76). The incongruous adjective amounts to Touchstone's barbed comment on the violation of primogeniture—on, that is, the “elder” position that Frederick has unjustly seized. By making the courtly usurper the younger brother, Shakespeare throws his audience's sympathy behind Duke Senior and the principle of the first-born's rights. While he obviously was interested in portraying abuses of privileges granted by the law of primogeniture, Shakespeare, in his depiction of the two dukes and their relationship, implies that the principle nevertheless deserves respect.⁸ The playwright was, after all, the eldest of John Shakespeare's four sons, only one of whom died in childhood. Orlando must overcome Oliver within the framework fixed by a law based on his inferiority in time, the time of birth order.

In the very first episode of As You Like It, intricate play on the word boy suggests that Orlando has attained not only physical but a certain spiritual ripeness as well. Challenged by Orlando's claims that he has kept him a peasant, Oliver strikes him and attempts to remind him of his inferior place as youngest brother by exclaiming, “What, boy!” (1.1.52). Orlando, grasping his assailant, resents Oliver's insult more than the blow: “Come, come, elder brother, you are too young in this” (1.1.53-54). Orlando implies that, while Oliver may be the eldest brother, he is the younger in strength and skill in fisticuffs. When frightened Oliver asks, “Wilt thou lay hands on me, villain?” (1.1.55), Orlando replies, “I am no villain. I am the youngest son of Sir Rowland de Boys: he was my father, and he is thrice a villain that says such a father begot villains” (1.1.56-59). Within the context of Oliver's insult “What, boy!” the father's name, by linguistic association, pointedly links Orlando to the patriarch.⁹ “Sir Rowland of the Boys” suggests a special boyishness, a youthfulness that still exists in the strength of the respectful son.¹⁰ Concerning Oliver's abusiveness, Orlando exclaims, “The spirit of my father grows strong in me, and I will no longer endure it” (1.1.70-71). The spirit of the deceased, paternal boy lives in the boy devoted to his memory—his youngest son. Unintentionally, Oliver has been the catalyst for the spiritual ripening of a dead father within a loving, neglected son.

Appearing at the moment he is beckoned, Charles the wrestler comes to tell Oliver that Orlando's tender age predicts the youth's fatal defeat in the wrestling of the next day. Unexpectedly provided with the means of getting rid of Orlando, Oliver slanders his brother, so that Charles determines to kill him during their bout. Smugly, Oliver concludes the scene by echoing the insulting word that precipitated Orlando's anger: “Nothing remains but that I kindle the boy thither, which now I'll go about” (1.1.170-71). Ironically, Oliver has identified his brother by the surname linking him with his father, the old boyishness that will triumph over Charles.

Just as Bassanio wins Portia's, Orlando wins an admiring lady's heart in the briefest passage of time. Unlike Bassanio, however, Orlando consciously does not undergo a trial to win the woman's love. When he wrestles Charles, he has no knowledge of Rosalind's affections. In fact, his aim in wrestling seems to be only to reassure himself privately of his worth, a reassurance which at the time can have no material advantage. Thus, regarded from Orlando's perspective, his seizure of Opportunity's forelock appears inconsequential, virtually worthless. Nevertheless, Orlando's seizing of the moment coincides with (perhaps precipitates) spiritual kairos—Orlando's strength while wrestling is not only that of the deceased Rowland; it is also that of Hercules. John Doebler has demonstrated that Charles's invitation, “Come, where is this young gallant that is so desirous to lie with his mother earth?” (1.2.188-89), evokes the myth of Hercules wrestling with the giant Anteus.¹¹ The figure of Hercules is not Charles, however. As the match begins, an admiring Rosalind shouts, “Now Hercules be thy speed, young man!” (1.2.198). At the moment of grappling, Hercules' strength joins with that of Sir Rowland de Boys within Orlando, making possible a physical impossibility: his defeat of the previously invincible Charles. For a moment, the heroic past intersects Frederick's court; the spirit of Hercules providentially returns to defeat an incarnation of Anteus.¹²

As interpreted by Renaissance humanists, the myth of Hercules and Anteus signifies reason's overthrow of the passions, associated with the base earth (Knowles, pp. 4-5). Renewed each time he falls upon his mother, Earth, Anteus is defeated when Hercules lifts him off the ground, squeezing the life from him. Shakespeare's reprising of this myth in As You Like It implies symbolically that Orlando has reasonably triumphed not over his passions for Rosalind (which scarcely exist at this instant) but over his angry desire for revenge against Oliver. While collaring his brother, Orlando does not harm him. It is his virtuous self-control, figured in the wrestling, that justifies Rosalind's love. This recovery of a moment from the heroic Golden Age invites comparison with other temporal variations presented early in the play. Like the former Sir Rowland, old Adam possesses a boyish spirit. “Almost fourscore” (2.4.71), he maintains that

Though I look old, yet I am strong and lusty;
For in my youth I never did apply
Hot and rebellious liquors in my blood,
Nor did not with unbashful forehead woo
The means of weakness and debility.
Therefore my age is as a lusty winter,
Frosty, but kindly.

(2.4.47-53)

In his spirit, Adam is not vicious or cynical, that is to say, “old.” Deeply moved by Adam's charitable offer of service, Orlando exclaims: “O good old man, how well in thee appears / The constant service of the antique world, / Where service sweat for duty, not for meed” (2.4.55-57). Orlando believes that, in Adam, he has witnessed the sudden showing forth of a classical virtue in the faithless modern world. Even as Duke Senior believes that the Edenic life can be recovered in the forest of Arden, so Orlando thinks that virtues of an age past can suddenly reappear in a good man like Adam. Both Duke Senior and Orlando do not believe that the world's aging necessarily entails the absolute loss of a previous time and the virtues associated with it.

Nevertheless, while Adam's spirit may be young, he shows unmistakable signs of his advanced age. He himself supplies the first piece of evidence as he and Orlando flee the court:

At seventeen years, many their fortunes seek
But at fourscore, it is too late a week;
Yet fortune cannot recompense me better
Than to die well, and not my master's debtor.

(2.3.73-76)

Adam's spirit is not so young that it can silence the natural pessimism of old age. His old body, overruling his spirit, persuades him that he is too aged to enjoy a new, beneficial fortune. Dramatic events soon contradict his weary conviction that the ars moriendi bene, the art of dying well (in no man's debt), can be his only recompense. The duty of the ancient world may appear in Adam's gesture, but he does not powerfully realize a heroic epiphany, as Orlando does, an epiphany that supersedes his pessimism.

Likewise, Duke Senior does not recover the Golden Age by leading the pastoral life. In his eloquent, idealized portrait of this way of life (2.1.1-17), the duke implies that he has recovered an Edenic time. And yet the actual forest of Arden suggests otherwise. Charles memorably characterizes the duke and his courtiers' life in exile as one in which they “fleet the time carelessly as they did in the golden world” (1.1.118-19). Time, however, is not experienced “fleetingly” in the pastoral world. A place of great antiquity, the forest of Arden measures the slow passage of time and the four seasons necessary for the pastoral exile's enlightenment. The duke claims that

Here feel we not the penalty of Adam,
The seasons' difference, as the icy fang
And churlish chiding of the winter's wind,
Which when it bites and blows upon my body
Even till I shrink with cold, I smile, and say
“This is no flattery. These are counsellors
That feelingly persuade me what I am.”

(2.1.5-11)

The “custom” that has made Duke Senior's life in the woods “more sweet / Than that of painted pomp” is “old” (2.1.2-3); the root of the oak under which Jaques lies is “antique” (2.1.31). The regular appearance of “the winter's wind” that “feelingly persuades” Duke Senior of his mortality depends upon the temporal revolution of the seasons, whose “difference” (decorous natural working) cannot be rushed. These images contradict the idea of time's fleeting passage for pastoral mankind. Since the swift experiencing of time has been the only imagined trait of the Golden Age explicitly evoked, it proves difficult, if not impossible, to maintain that Duke Senior has recovered either heroic or Edenic time.

A second epiphany of heroic time, kairos in the spiritual, divine sense, occurs in the forest of Arden when Orlando carries Adam, faint from hunger, on his back to the duke's banquet. A reenactment of Aeneas piously bearing his father, Anchises, appears onstage; a moment from the story of Troy, as told by Virgil, lives again.¹³ Orlando's surprising reference to himself as a “doe” and Adam as his “fawn” needing sustenance underscores the special relationship between heroic deeds and time (2.7.127-29). Rather than suggesting something unorthodox about Orlando's sexuality, his likening himself to a doe reflects the strength of his desire to succor Adam, a desire stereotyped as maternal. More important, by likening Adam to a fawn, Orlando stresses the youthful spirit of Adam. In the case of Adam, the playgoer has the impression of time running backward in Orlando's metaphor, as it will soon seem to do in the recovery of a heroic moment when the image of a pious “son” carrying a reverend “father” to safety, away from death by burning, appears onstage.¹⁴

In Orlando's speaking picture of filial piety, the Golden Age providentially returns for an instant for those with eyes and ears to perceive it. Adam trusted that “he that doth the ravens feed, / Yea providentially caters for the sparrow” would comfort him in a wilderness (2.3.43-45). Dropped manna, however, does not succor Adam; Orlando's charitable deeds do instead. Absent from Duke Senior's philosophy of pastoral life is the importance of well-doing in the Sidneyan sense, of active deeds of charity that issue from right thinking. Physics—noble doing—must complement Duke Senior's Edenic metaphysics, his passive meditation, for his philosophy to have value. Orlando's charitable deed, his bearing Adam, represents his seizing the opportune moment for his and Adam's personal advantage (kairos in the classical sense), an act apparently eliciting and justifying the sudden epiphany of heroic time (kairos in the religious sense). This epiphany confirms the inner ripeness of Orlando's filial piety, a virtue that complements the earlier expression of his physical ripeness, his Herculean strength.

Shakespeare takes pains in As You Like It to sketch life devoid of these special recoveries of heroic time. As Jaques reports, Touchstone, contemplating his portable sundial in the forest, says:

                                                                                                    “It is ten o'clock,
Thus may we see,” quoth he, “how the world wags:
‘Tis but an hour ago since it was nine,
And after one hour more ‘twill be eleven;
And so from hour to hour, we ripe, and ripe,
And then from hour to hour, we rot, and rot,
And thereby hangs a tale.”

(2.7.22-28)

Whatever wisdom Jaques hears in Touchstone's meditation pertains to satire on contemporary life; he refers to Touchstone's moralizing of the time (2.7.29) rather than to his moralizing on time as a metaphysical subject. The playgoer, however, appreciates Touchstone's anatomy of time as philosophical speculation.¹⁵ His conclusion, “‘And thereby hangs a tale,’” heard in the context of his earlier utterance “‘how the world wags,’” creates a pun—tale/tail—that evokes a four-legged creature—a dog, presumably.¹⁶ Considering the bleakness of life lived in the time of Touchstone's depiction, the playgoer finds this metaphoric slanting downward toward animal life appropriate. A dog, in comparison to mankind, experiences time as a valueless and unvalued process of physical ripening and rotting. Shakespeare stylistically strengthens our impression of time drained of enriching value through Touchstone's thrice-repeated “and,” a conjunction beginning four successive verses and creating a paratactic syntax relatively rare in the Shakespeare of 1599. By Touchstone's account, existence in the “wagging” world consists of a fixed sequence of ripening and rotting moments, none of which is more or less important than any other, none of which is subordinate to a central moment realizing a meaningful existential design or life goal.¹⁷

Conspicuously absent from Touchstone's portrait of time's depressing progress is any mention of cresting, the moment of fullest ripeness, the moment celebrated in several Shakespearean sonnets as the instant when the flower and the young man “hold in perfection.” And yet it is precisely this moment and its value that Touchstone's account of time implicitly (and almost certainly unintentionally) emphasizes. The jester's portrait of time suggests that only the capitalized-upon moment of full ripeness—whatever that may mean—lends value to an otherwise physical existence that, in its biological flowing and ebbing, does not differ materially from that of a dog. Without seized, epiphanic moments of fulfillment, the tale that hangs from Touchstone's re-creation of time could be the tale of Oliver, hirsute and forlorn in the forest, never rescued by Orlando or killed by the serpent and lioness threatening him.¹⁸ Quite simply, it could be the tale of a vicious man who dies in despair after a period of both physical and spiritual rotting in a forest.

Wanting to hear social satire in Touchstone's musings, Jaques overlooks in the jester's meditation a complex suggestion that affects him along with the rest of mankind. Struck “that fools should be so deep-contemplative,” Jaques states that he “did laugh, sans intermission, / An hour by his dial” (2.7.32-33). In other words, Jaques wastes his time by demonstrating that he has not seized the moment to fathom the implications of Touchstone's speech. Because his laughter is egoistically scornful, Jaques's overlooking the burden of Touchstone's remarks reflects a degree of poetic justice. Touchstone himself obviously believes that the forest offers no moment of ripeness worth seizing.¹⁹ Interjected between scenes in which Orlando succors Adam and himself (2.6; 2.7.88-203), Touchstone's meditation on time is framed by vivid examples of seized moments.

Not surprisingly, the pessimism of Touchstone's version of time's progress recurs in Jaques's portrait of mankind's seven ages, an account of courtly or civilized time that complements Touchstone's pastoral analysis of the subject. Like Touchstone, Jaques does not imply that the good things in life can be seized at opportune instants. In fact, his account of the seven ages reflects neither a ripening nor a rotting process; it leads neither toward nor away from a moment of fulfilled being. His word pictures, for the most part, express his cynical outlook on life: the infant mewls and pukes in the nurse's arms; the schoolboy whines, “creeping like snail / Unwillingly to school”; the lover sighs “like furnace, with a woeful ballad / Made to his mistress' eyebrow” (2.7.139-49). In Jaques's view, neither education nor love ripens the scholar and lover. “Seeking the bubble reputation / Even in the cannon's mouth” (2.7.152-53), the soldier of the fourth age illustrates Jaques's belief that the chief moment seized in life often proves fatal because it is pursued recklessly. With no personally meaningful crest of inner ripeness, mankind's life slips into one of words, not deeds, into a language most likely unappreciated and then lost to the speaker altogether. The corpulent justice's “wise saws, and modern instances” (2.7.156) surely fall on bored ears; and the sixth age, that of “the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,” turns toward a “childish treble,” in which the aged man—clownish in the overtones of “pantaloon”—“pipes / And whistles in his sound” (2.7.157-63). The emptiness of the seventh age, mankind's final days, resounds in Jaques's image of “second childishness and mere oblivion, / Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything” (2.7.165-66). Rather than impel mankind upward to ripeness and a redemptive moment and then downward naturally, consolingly, to death, time, according to Jaques, moves in a depressing circle from first to second childhood without providing occasions for special instants of personal triumph. Even though his portrait lacks Touchstone's suggestions of bestial life (the wagging tail), Jaques's tracing of time's course reduces mankind's dignity at least as far as Touchstone's does.²⁰

Touchstone's and Jaques's meditations on time are largely designed to raise the question of whether Rosalind and Orlando will recognize the opportune moment of ripeness in their romantic love and be able to seize it in betrothal and marriage. To do so, they must overcome a built-in challenge, the protracted delay usually required for romantic love to ripen into permanent affection. While Rosalind falls “into so strong a liking with old Rowland's youngest son” “on … a sudden” (1.3.24-26), it will take time for her “liking” to mature. Pleading with her father to rescind Rosalind's exile, Celia argues that over time she has come to know the worth of her cousin. As Rosalind's girlish playmate, she “was too young … to value her, / But now I know her” (1.3.67-68). The same point is made later during Touchstone and William's dialogue. The jester sarcastically terms William's age of twenty-five years “ripe” (5.1.20). A raw youth in his literal-mindedness, fostered by an uncultivated life spent in the forest, William lacks intellectual ripeness. If William is the playwright's comic alter ego, as several critics have proposed,²¹ then the point about the lengthy time needed for ripening is even more complex. At twenty-five, the thirty-four- or thirty-five-year-old creator of As You Like It was most likely writing aesthetically immature works such as the Henry VI trilogy, which he himself almost certainly recognized as unripe compared to intervening plays such as The Merchant of Venice and Henry V.

Shakespeare metaphorically establishes the forest as a place of ripening for Orlando and his love by having Celia tell Rosalind that she “found him under a tree like a dropped acorn” (3.2.230-31). Throughout the pastoral scenes of As You Like It, Shakespeare counterpoints the lovers' eagerness to fulfill or memorialize their love instantaneously with references to the time required for its growth. Orlando expresses his desire in inflated, adolescent poetry in which his impatience colors his view of mankind's life span. One of his written “civil sayings,” proposed for hanging on a bough, chronicles

                    how brief the life of man
          Runs his erring pilgrimage
That the stretching of a span
          Buckles in his sum of age.

(3.2.126-29)

Carving his love thoughts into trees and hanging sheets of poetry from their boughs, Orlando seeks to protect his romantic passion from time's ravages. By turning the leaves (silvae) of the forest into the leaves (silvae) of the book of nature, Orlando illustrates the pastoral lover's impulse to make the quality of his love permanent. And yet the puerility of his sentiments suggests that the eventual loss of their record through the decay of tree bark might be appropriate. Objecting to the “false gallop” of Orlando's discovered verses, Touchstone quips that the tree bearing them “yields bad fruit” (3.2.111-14). In one sense, Orlando's poetry is rotten before ripe.

That Touchstone thinks Orlando's verses “rotten” is confirmed by Rosalind's immediate allusion to the medlar tree, fascinating to Renaissance poets. Answering Touchstone tit for tat in defense of her lover, she declares, “You'll be rotten ere you be half ripe, and that's the right virtue of the medlar” (3.2.117-18). Touchstone's wisefoolishness is generally rotten in the sense that it resembles the cynical commentary of an old man. And yet linking Orlando to the medlar is apt; like the medlar, rotting before it mellows, his imagination may in time ripen into a finer expression of romantic love than his bad poetry promises. Mainly, however, Oliver illustrates the truth of Rosalind's assertion that some people rot before they ripen. His reformation is meaningful only because he has been an egregious villain; his spiritual ripening develops out of, in fact gains significance from, his moral rottenness. To Rosalind's claim that time can rot before it ripens, Touchstone replies, “You have said; but whether wisely or no, let the forest judge” (3.2.119-20). The forest judges in Rosalind's favor by presenting Oliver asleep beneath an oak tree, in despair and ready for his sudden ethical ripening. On occasion, rottenness does possess a “right virtue.” Earlier, when Adam offers Orlando gold and service, the depressed young man exclaims, “But poor old man, thou prun'st a rotten tree, / That cannot so much as a blossom yield, / In lieu of all thy pains and husbandry” (2.3.63-65). But after a period of dark, inner rottenness caused prematurely by Oliver's neglect and abuse, Orlando romantically blooms under Rosalind's cultivation. The positive effect upon characters of the inversion of time's normal natural progress suggests that further remarkable warping of the medium may occur in Arden.

While Orlando wastes his time in the forest by poetizing Rosalind, she resolves to seize the moment. She determines to test Orlando—to physic him, actually—to see if his clichéd poetry proceeds from a form of self-love—from his being in love with love. In effect, Rosalind seeks—prematurely, we learn later—to discover if time has ripened Orlando into a mature, clear-sighted lover. By playing the role of shrew under her disguise as Ganymede, she hopes to purge him homeopathically of any egoism concerning love.²²

When Rosalind argues that “men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love” (4.1.101-3), her cynicism is carefully calculated to counteract Orlando's foolish belief that Petrarchan lovers expire from unrequited passion for their mistresses. Yet by naming Hero and Leander and Troilus and Cressida as legendary couples who died not for love, as poets feign, but ignominiously, from a swimmer's cramp and a “Grecian club,” Rosalind hits upon an important truth. Neither Leander nor Troilus managed to seize a moment opportune for consummating his love so as to avoid personal tragedy. Certainly Rosalind, optimistic and life-loving, does not want to die in the tragic manner of the lovers described by Marlowe and Chaucer. She knows that she and Orlando must be alert for the time to crown their love prosperously, so that they do not likewise end up the subjects of future poets' tragic poems.

In act 2, scene 4, Orlando appears unable to use time to his advantage; he has missed his first appointment with his physician, who, naturally enough, interprets his absence as a sign of weak love for Rosalind (3.4.1-29). Apparently, Orlando is not Rosalind's true lover, or his sighs and groans would have marked time until the moment of his meeting with “Rosalind” (3.2.295-99). Perhaps the lover is too green for Rosalind to seize the moment for refining his affection. Still, it is in her sanguine nature to take the opportunity to educate others. Rather than scorn the pageant of Silvius's painful love for Phebe and her proud rejection of him, Rosalind determines to “prove a busy actor in their play” (3.5.55). She berates Phebe for her pride and ingratitude, attempting to correct her vices through direct, personal criticisms. Her near insults conclude with a carpe diem:

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.

(3.5.57-60)

Like Orlando, however, Phebe is not ready to hear and understand Rosalind's blunt wisdom. Inwardly unripe, she vainly falls in love with Ganymede's feminine face, a mirror image of the beauty she cherishes in herself.

When Orlando does appear for his session of therapy, he states that he has come “within an hour” of the time appointed (4.1.40-41). But as Rosalind herself has pointed out, there is no clock in the forest to synchronize its inhabitants' subjective perceptions of time's pace (3.2.302-27). Driven by passion, Rosalind internally computes time more exactly than Orlando does: “Break an hour's promise in love! He that will divide a minute into a thousand parts, and break but a part of the thousand part of a minute in the affairs of love, it may be said of him that Cupid hath clapped him o' th' shoulder, but I'll warrant him heart-whole” (4.1.42-47). While Rosalind's unreasonably exacting reprimand is primarily part of her physic of confronting Orlando with exaggerated versions of his love conceits in order to refine or purge them, it also expresses her genuine impatience that her love is still unfulfilled. In her memorable account of time's various paces, she characterizes herself as the young maid with whom it “trots hard.”²³ Earlier, she jokes that if the interval between her betrothal and wedding “be but a se'nnight, Time's pace is so hard that it seems the length of seven year” (3.1.307-11). Rosalind's unfeigned desire to hasten time makes her feel the truth of her claim that true lovers painstakingly, almost unnaturally, compute the time until their next meeting.

When Orlando promises to return in two hours at two o'clock, Rosalind, who has chided him for being an hour late for his first appointment, emphasizes that she will think him a “break-promise” if he comes “one minute behind [his] hour” (4.1.180-81). Orlando does break his promise when seizing a redemptive moment takes precedence over courting her. Hastening toward the duke's banquet, he discovers a ragged Oliver sleeping beneath an oak tree, threatened by a serpent and a lioness. (Shakespeare accentuates time's ravages on the outcast Oliver by making the oak partly rotten with age; its “high top” is “bald with dry antiquity” [4.3.105] even as Oliver is “o'ergrown with hair” [4.3.106].) After twice resolving to leave his betraying brother to his death, Orlando turns back to battle and kill the lioness to save Oliver's life. Orlando courageously seizes an opportune moment in the passage of time's natural ripening and rotting to express his brotherly love. In doing so, he momentarily recovers the Golden Age; his fight reprises Hercules' slaying of the Nemean lion.²⁴ The epiphanies of kairos outline a progression in As You Like It from the expression of ripened physical strength, through an act of filial piety, to an ultimate deed of brotherly love. In each case, mythic allusion indicates that Orlando has recovered a moment of the heroic age. Traditionally, the lion is a figure of wrath; the playgoer understands that Orlando has triumphed over anger (both his own and Oliver's) through the heroic fury of his fight.²⁵ In this sense, he realizes the heroic potential of his Renaissance name—Orlando Furioso.²⁶

Orlando fails to keep the romantic lover's excruciatingly precise time because a greater love, that of a forgiving brother for a reprobate kinsman, compels him to seize the moment heroically. This fulfilled moment, which prompts Oliver's spiritual transformation, redeems the rottenness of time, symbolized by Oliver's timeworn appearance and the oak's dead boughs. The fact that time, in the course of nature, rots all creatures, including mankind, argues for the necessity, even the duty, of capitalizing upon the rare opportune moments when a massive difference might be made. In a moment, even now, Orlando crystallizes Oliver's latent virtue—and his own, as he comes to learn. Contrary to the spirit of Rosalind's claim that no lover ever died for love, he almost loses his life for love—not the romantic love that she characterizes but brotherly love, a more ideal affection in both the Platonic and Christian schemes.

Shakespeare has taken pains to suggest that providence has a special interest in Orlando and Rosalind's love and marriage.²⁷ In response to Celia's comment about finding Orlando under a tree like a fallen acorn, Rosalind says, “It may well be called Jove's tree, when it drops such fruit” (3.2.232-33). Orlando's character takes place beneath another oak, an ancient one but nevertheless Jove's tree.²⁸ The counterpoint of arboreal imagery stresses two extremes of time, that of budding, the precursor to ripening, and that of the ravages of age. But the coincidence of trees suggests that Jove may have a hand in guiding the action. This possibility should not surprise playgoers; as Ganymede, Rosalind is Jove's faithful servant, and he rewards her with happiness.

Orlando's expressions of filial piety and brotherly love complement his physical strength and conclusively demonstrate the ripeness of his ethical character. But has he ripened as a romantic lover—one worthy of the more mature Rosalind? In the scene in which Rosalind describes the “pair of stairs” that “incontinent” Oliver and Celia will climb to marriage (5.2.1-40), Orlando indicates that the sport of imagining Ganymede as Rosalind is wearing thin. Oliver and Celia's prospect of fulfilled happiness makes Orlando's loneliness and unrealized love bitter. “I can live no longer by thinking” (5.2.50), he tells Rosalind, suggesting that he, unlike Jaques, is ready to involve himself actively in life. Has Rosalind's homeopathic physic purged Orlando's romantic love of its impurities? She tests him to see if his artificial, Petrarchan way of conceiving his love has vanished. “O my dear Orlando,” she cries, “how it grieves me to see thee wear thy heart in a scarf!” “It is my arm,” he unimaginatively replies. “I thought thy heart had been wounded with the claws of a lion,” she jokes, playing upon the homonymic pun of heart/hart. “Wounded it is,” Orlando disappointingly answers, “but with the eyes of a lady” (5.2.19-24). While Shakespeare has presented the metaphorical truth of Orlando's reply, most notably in Rosalind's lacerating effect upon Phebe's sensibility, Orlando appears to understand the familiar Renaissance metaphor as a literal fact. He believes that he suffers from the lover's actually bleeding heart.²⁹ To the degree that Rosalind's therapy has not helped him distinguish between literal and metaphoric truth, Orlando remains romantically unripe, a distant cousin of the literal-minded clown William and a precursor of the late Shakespearean character Caliban, who, half taught by Prospero and Miranda, mistakes Stephano for the man-in-the-moon.³⁰

At play's end, then, Rosalind accepts a suitor whose selfless love has been proved by his rescue of Oliver and his dutiful sending of the bloody handkerchief as an explanation of his failure to keep his lover's appointment, but one whose imagination remains unripe. Rosalind appears to realize that she cannot wait for a better moment to betroth herself to Orlando but must compromise, as Phebe will, by accepting a noble suitor who is immature in at least one important respect. Practically, she realizes that she herself is “not for all markets” but must sell when she can. Thus, some irony attaches itself to Rosalind's claim that she knows that Orlando is “a gentleman of good conceit” (5.2.52-53), that is to say, of good imagination.

The pastoral phase of As You Like It begins in the wintry season of adversity that, while sweet for Duke Senior, nevertheless includes churlish winds and cold weather. It ends in act 5, scene 3, in the springtime of the two pages' song, “It was a lover and his lass” (5.3.16). By moving from winter to spring, pastoral time in the play promises rebirth and happiness. These goods, however, come only to the character who can seize the day. The pages' spring lyric is a carpe diem of love. Lying “between the acres of the rye,” the “pretty country-folks” of the song sing, “How that a life was but a flower, / In spring-time” (5.3.20-31). The pages directly advise their listeners “therefore [to] take the present time … for love is crowned with the prime, / In spring-time” (5.3.32-37). As a pleasant flower, “Rosa-linda,” Rosalind herself is perhaps about to fade, to decline from the “prime” of her physical beauty. The song's burden justifies her seizing the moment to orchestrate her appearance and thus her own and the other lovers' fulfillment. Still, doing so in lovers' springtime is premature when considered from the perspective of late summer or early autumn, the season symbolic of inner, nonphysical ripeness. It is no accident that the imagery of springtime in Prospero's masque of Ceres in The Tempest is at first relatively colorless and barren but gradually becomes richer as Iris moves toward the fulfillment promised by August's sicklemen and the blessing “Spring come to you at the farthest / In the very end of harvest.” The tension within the pages' song in As You Like It underscores Rosalind's haste to wed an Orlando who is only partly ripe. After all, the cornfield of the song is green rather than golden (5.3.16). Still, life is but a flower, “crowned with the prime” (5.3.34)—where “prime” ambiguously connotes the second, spiritually unripe canonical hour as well as natural time and ripeness, before the pattern of inevitable decay sets in.³¹ Love may be crowned with the prime, but as regards the development of the lover's imagination, that crowning may not appear in the springtime of nature.

By announcing that she can “do strange things,” having since the age of three “conversed with a magician” (5.2.58-62), Rosalind begins to coordinate the time of her own and others' happiness. Since the god Hymen mystically appears at Rosalind's command, we retrospectively believe her claim to magical power.³² Having been a child prodigy, a very young learner of difficult magical arts, Rosalind contradicts Jaques's portrait of the barren, painful first and second ages of mankind. Ripe in a profoundly intellectual sense from a tender age, she challenges the assumption that mental ripening necessarily entails long years of lean and wasteful learning. While the showings forth of Hercules and Aeneas are figurative—avataristic, in fact—that of Hymen, the classical god of marriage, is literal. In this respect, a moment from antiquity manifests itself. Thus far, our focus has been on the appearance of classical moments and heroic deeds. Yet Christian allusions and overtones have been heard in As You Like It as well.³³ For example, the bloody handkerchief that represents Orlando's apology possesses Christian value when considered in the light of his martyrlike brotherly love and defeat of a deadly sin.³⁴ Consistent with these and other Christian allusions, time in a sense never calculated or controlled by the lovers appears to run backward from the present age to recover spiritually key moments in Genesis and the Garden of Eden. The point may be put another way. One has the impression that time at the end of the play, having recovered redemptive moments of the classical, the heroic age, has reached the age of Genesis and the Garden of Eden.

As the play unfolds, allusions to Old Testament events come progressively earlier in the chronology of the Jews' history. Jaques's exclamation—“I'll go sleep if I can; if I cannot, I'll rail against all the firstborn of Egypt” (2.5.57-58)—gives way to his remark “There is sure another flood toward, and these couples are coming to the ark” (5.4.35-36). Providentially time appears to roll backward as it dramatically runs forward; events in the play evocative of those described in Exodus give place to those based on a story in Genesis. As it unfolds, time appears to deliver the characters of As You Like It to a paradisiacal locus near the beginning of Renaissance mankind's religious history. Rosalind and Orlando recapture an Edenic experience of Adam and Eve.³⁵

Admittedly, the backward running of time is only an impression in As You Like It created in playgoers' minds by poetic allusions. Nevertheless, the impression represents the supernatural operation of time in this comedy. Clearly, Hymen has traveled through a time warp to enter the forest of Arden. The actual appearance of the classical god implies that Shakespeare conceived of a metaphysical realm close to the play's world and capable of penetrating it. Recently, Alice Lyle-Scoufos has allegorically interpreted the green world of As You Like It; the symbolic properties of Shakespeare's pastoral link it to the Paradiso Terrestre as defined by Dante, Jacopo Sannazaro, and Sir Philip Sidney (pp. 215-27). In the final cantos of the Purgatorio, Virgil leaves Dante the pilgrim “at the outer limits of Eden—the post-lapsarian Eden that is still beautiful except for the giant Tree of Knowledge that stands tall, dry, and sere in the center of the garden. It is dead and wintry, much like the giant tree, ‘bald with drie antiquitie,’ that Oliver describes for Rosalind and Celia in As You Like It” (p. 216). For Lyle-Scoufos, Orlando's forgiveness of his brother and his victory over the symbolic snake and lioness make the garden and tree spiritually bloom again. “Archetypal images pull the pastoral setting suddenly into the mystical realm” (p. 221). I would put the point differently. The mystical realm, shaping itself in the form of archetypal images, at moments suddenly intersects, or intrudes upon, the pastoral setting of As You Like It.

It is as though key moments and personages in mankind's classical and Christian past continue to exist in an unperceived dimension, alongside the appearing and vanishing instants of an ongoing present. When privileged characters such as Orlando and Rosalind, in the course of their ripening, charitably or bravely seize a propitious moment, profound spiritual events from the past manifest themselves. In the epiphanies of these pregnant moments the time of past ages can be said to be recovered. In As You Like It, Shakespeare gives a unique twist to the Renaissance commonplace of the recovery of a Golden Age in pastoral surroundings. By seizing opportune moments in a modern romance, Orlando and Rosalind recover certain kairoi of mankind's history: the pattern of living that rewards filial piety, the heroic labor of controlling wrath, and the Christian forgiveness of a Cain-like brother with the divine gift of a long-desired complementary self—the gift, that is, of divinely married love.

With the literal epiphany of Hymen, we have the impression that we are near the source of this history, for the classical god reprises God's giving of Eve to Adam. Providence rewards Rosalind's magical seizing of the moment with an unanticipated kairos (in the Judeo-Christian sense): a spiritual epiphany of the creation and bestowal of Eve. Addressing Duke Senior, the god of marriage offers Rosalind as Orlando's helpmate:

Hymen from heaven brought her,
          Yea brought her hither,
That thou mightst join her hand with his
Whose heart within his bosom is.

(5.4.111-14)

God took a rib from Adam's side to make him a companion who might remedy his loneliness; Hymen, through the agency of Rosalind's father, joins to Orlando the woman whose heart has been passionately beating in his breast.³⁶ Shakespeare plays an Aristophanic variation upon a biblical theme. Whereas God divided a whole (Adam) into two complementary beings, Shakespeare's Hymen ritualistically reincorporates man and woman into the single whole they yearn to be. Whereas God took Adam's rib to make Eve, Shakespeare depicts Rosalind's heart displaced within Orlando. In keeping with the generally greater complexity of character of his romantic heroines, Shakespeare makes woman rather than man the source of mankind's life.³⁷

Hymen's song thus suggests that time has carried the lovers back to the mysterious origin of romantic married love. Granted the solemn, mystical atmosphere of the final scene of As You Like It, one could easily overlook the imperfections of the Rosalind and especially the Orlando who enact Eve's and Adam's roles. Obviously, however, they are not the mother and father of mankind. Providential time in the play is such that, through spiritual kairoi, it allows imperfect yet privileged mortals to approximate archetypal personas in rituals of mythic proportions. Orlando's imagination as a lover may remain unripe, but his Christian charity qualifies him to enjoy in his reunion with Rosalind a special blessing of the prelapsarian Adam. Rosalind may be knowledgeable of promiscuous wives' methods of hoodwinking their husbands, but her general virtue, seen, for example, in her unselfish attempt to reform Silvius and Phebe's romance, marks her as deserving prelapsarian Eve's blessing of a helpmate. In As You Like It, this double perspective on dramatic character is not as pronounced as it is in a later play such as The Winter's Tale. Perdita, by her expressed discomfort with fulfilling her mythological role, never lets us forget that a hesitant, frightened girl brought up by homely shepherds is the Roman goddess Flora. And yet so magnificently does she play Flora in the enriching context of an idealizing pastoral world that, for an instant, she becomes Flora herself in her lover's eyes. At least the lyric rapture of Florizel's spoken hymn of love (4.4.135-46), prompted by his vision of her, suggests as much. In The Winter's Tale, Apollo's providence does not work through a pattern of spiritual kairoi of the kind found in As You Like It, and playgoers never sense that a mythic past returns through epiphanies in the great pastoral scene of the late romance. Still, the later play instructs us in the alternate awareness of character that we need to maintain through the epilogue of the earlier comedy.

Lyle-Scoufos's allegorical reading of the pastoral of As You Like It suggests that Shakespeare and Spenser at times shared a common methodology and teleology. Shakespeare's manipulation of time appears less idiosyncratic when considered in relation to Spenser's in The Faerie Queene. The saints living in the New Jerusalem that the Redcross Knight mystically sees from the Mount of Contemplation were once breathing men and women. A timeless moment is suddenly thrust into the chronological time of the Redcross Knight's pilgrimage of holiness. More to the point, Christ manifests himself in the person of Prince Arthur (7.29-8.28).³⁸ Arthur's diamond shield, “perfect pure and cleene” (7.33.5), reveals the reality behind every appearance and enables him to overthrow any enemy. It represents the perfection of faith (Eph. 6:16), making possible Christ/Arthur's triumphant crucifixion of his own flesh in the person of Orgoglio. Rather than say that Arthur is a type of Christ, readers can just as plausibly claim that the timeless fact of Christ's crucifixion and redemption manifests itself in a moment of a historical narrative concerned with two knights named Arthur and Redcross. Both Spenser and Shakespeare depict in a pastoral realm the intersection of the timeless in chronological, natural time.

Divided between Jaques and Rosalind, the pattern of progressively earlier biblical allusions in As You Like It is Shakespeare's (or the play's). It represents his idea that, under providential control, the fruits not only of heroic moments of the classical age but of Christian time as well can be recovered. Shakespeare implies that the coincidence of Rosalind's praiseworthy seizing of the moment and a primal Christian kairos is no accident but the gift of a shadowy providence ruling the comedy's world. The fact that this providence is sometimes that of Jove, sometimes that of Hymen, and, finally, sometimes that of the Christian god suggests that the ages form a seamless web, a single time in which privileged men and women, like Orlando and Rosalind, are rewarded for their heroic deeds and Christian attitudes with an approximation of the first, the paradisiacal moment of married joy.

Notes

1. Halio, “‘No Clock in the Forest’: Time in As You Like It,” Studies in English Literature: 1500-1900, 2 (1962): 197-207; Wilson, “The Way to Arden: Attitudes toward Time in As You Like It,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 26 (1975): 16-24, esp. 17; Taylor, “‘Try in Time in Despite of a Fall’: Time and Occasion in As You Like It,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 24 (1982): 121-36, esp. 121-22.

2. Taylor cites Erwin Panofsky, who claims that “shortly after the eleventh century, the image of Kairos merged with the feminine image of Fortune to become the ‘Fortune of Time’” (p. 123).

3. The Strong Necessity of Time: The Philosophy of Time in Shakespeare and Elizabethan Literature (The Hague: Mouton, 1976), p. 17.

4. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 48. Kermode asserts that “the divine plot is the pattern of kairoi in relation to the End” (p. 47).

5. Waller charts the transformation of this Christian idea into the secular notion that an individual can seize the moment for his or her personal, especially commercial, advantage—a change that occurred during Shakespeare's lifetime (pp. 24-25, 32-34).

6. Accounts of time in As You Like It outside the Halio-Wilson-Taylor line of argument and different from my reading of the play are given by Frederick Turner, Shakespeare and the Nature of Time (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), pp. 28-44; Ricardo J. Quinones, The Renaissance Discovery of Time (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), pp. 422-26; and Hallett Smith, Shakespeare's Romances: A Study of Some Ways of the Imagination (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1972), pp. 92-93. All of these studies disprove Helen Gardner's claim that Shakespeare's “comedies are dominated by a sense of place rather than of time.” “As You Like It”: More Talking of Shakespeare, ed. John Garrett (New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1959), p. 22.

7. All quotations of As You Like It are taken from the Arden edition, ed. Agnes Latham (London: Methuen, 1975). Quotations of other Shakespeare plays are taken from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

8. The abuse of primogeniture by elder brothers in late sixteenth-century England is described with reference to Elizabethan texts and the makeup of Shakespeare's audience by Louis A. Montrose, “‘The Place of a Brother’ in As You Like It: Social Process and Comic Form,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 32 (1981): 31-37.

9. Montrose notes that Sir Rowland's “surname is a play on ‘woods’ [Bois] and ‘boys’” (p. 43 n. 35).

10. “Orlando is in fact an anagram for Rowland,” Thomas Kelly remarks; it makes “clear that the virtues of the antique world still live in Orlando.” “Shakespeare's Romantic Heroes: Orlando Reconsidered,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 24 (1973): 15.

11. “Orlando: Athlete of Virtue,” Shakespeare Survey, 26 (1973): 111-17. Also see Richard Knowles, “Myth and Type in As You Like It,” English Literary History, 33 (1966): 4-5; and Mark Bracher, “Contrary Notions of Identity in As You Like It,” Studies in English Literature: 1500-1900, 24 (1984): 232.

12. A second Herculean overtone, that of the tongue-tied, modest victor, is identified in this passage by Jeff Shulman, “‘The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye’ and the Tongue-tied Orlando,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 31 (1980): 390.

13. Orlando and Adam's emblematic re-creation of this moment is confirmed by John Doebler, Shakespeare's Speaking Pictures (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1974), pp. 33-34 and pl. 4; and Raymond Waddington, “Moralizing the Spectacle: Dramatic Emblems in As You Like It,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 33 (1982): 156-57. Both critics cite Geoffrey Whitney's emblem Pietas filiorum in parentes in A Choice of Emblemes (1586) as a possible source of Shakespeare's conception. See also Peter Erickson, “Sexual Politics and the Social Structure in As You Like It,” Massachusetts Review, 23 (1982): 75.

14. “Indeed, if we recall that [Orlando's] exile to Arden has come about because Oliver ‘… means / To burn the lodging where you use to lie,’ the Virgilian backdrop becomes appropriate in more ways than one” (Waddington, p. 157).

15. In a picture and poem in Whitney's A Choice of Emblemes, E. Michael Thron finds an emblem analogous to Touchstone's portrayal of time. “Jaques: Emblems and Morals,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 30 (1979): 86.

16. For other readings of this pun (and Touchstone's meditation in general), see Helge Kökeritz, Shakespeare's Pronunciation (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1958), pp. 58-59, 117, 141, 149; and Jenijoy La Belle, “Touchstone's Dial: Horology or Urology,” English Language Notes, 24 (1987): 19-25. Kökeritz hears Touchstone making a sexually obscene joke, punning upon hour/whore, ripe (ripen/search), and tale/tail (sexual organ), while La Belle argues that Touchstone is not meditating on time so much as on his own sexuality, with dial meaning “penis” and poke “codpiece.”

17. Harold Jenkins notes that Touchstone “dares to speak in Arcadia, where one can never grow old, of Time's inevitable processes of maturity and decay. By this the ideal life of the banished Duke is mocked, and since Touchstone's words are repeated by Jaques with delight and uproarious laughter, the mockery is double.” “As You Like It,” Shakespeare Survey, 8 (1955): 49.

18. Cf. C. L. Barber, who argues that the tale that “hangs” for the telling is that of Jaques's seven ages of mankind. Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (1959; rpt. Cleveland: World, 1963), p. 226.

19. John Russell Brown describes the moment at which Touchstone comes closest to altering the regularity of time's hours: “The first time we see [Audrey and Touchstone] together, he is offering to ‘fetch up’ her goats and is already impatient of Time, questioning ‘Am I the man yet? doth my simple feature content you?’” (3.3.1-4). Shakespeare and His Comedies (1962; rpt. London: Methuen, 1968), p. 152.

20. Both Turner (pp. 32-38) and Quinones (pp. 422-23) analyze the defects of Jaques's view of time as delineated in his portrait of mankind's seven ages.

21. See, for example, William Jones, “William Shakespeare as William in As You Like It,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 11 (1960): 228-31; and Howard Cole, “The Moral Vision of As You Like It,” College Literature, 3 (1976): 26-27.

22. For an analysis of Rosalind's homeopathy, see R. Chris Hassel, Jr., Faith and Folly in Shakespeare's Romantic Comedies (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980), p. 136; Ruth Nevo, Comic Transformations in Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1980), p. 193; and Maurice Hunt, “Homeopathy in Shakespearean Comedy and Romance,” Ball State University Forum, 29 (1988): 50-52.

23. In The Heart's Forest: A Study of Shakespeare's Pastoral Plays (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1972), David P. Young defines the relativity of Rosalind's account, arguing that the passage is part of the play's larger presentation of the truth of subjectivity (p. 58).

24. Both Knowles (pp. 5-6) and Doebler (“Athlete of Virtue,” pp. 114-15) note allusions to Hercules killing the Nemean lion and strangling the serpent sent by Hera in Orlando's victory over the lioness and snake.

25. On the lioness as a type of both Oliver's and Orlando's wrath (and on the symbolic importance of Orlando's triumph over anger), see Latham, p. xliii, and Montrose, p. 44.

26. Alice Lyle-Scoufos describes the relevance of Robert Greene's Orlando Furioso for Shakespeare's Orlando in “The Paradiso Terrestre and the Testing of Love in As You Like It,” Shakespeare Studies, 14 (1981): 217-18, 219.

27. Sylvan Barnet describes the Christian providence of As You Like It in “‘Strange Events’: Improbability in As You Like It,” Shakespeare Studies, 4 (1968): 121-22, 127-29.

28. Alluding to Spenser, Homer, Virgil, and the Old Testament, René Fortin establishes the divinity of the oak trees mentioned in As You Like It in “‘Tongues in Trees’: Symbolic Patterns in As You Like It,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 14 (1972-73): 573-77. Also see Jeanne Addison Roberts, “Shakespeare's Forests and Trees,” Southern Humanities Review, 11 (1977): 117-23.

29. Admittedly, the passion of romantic love, according to the Renaissance Galenic theory of the humours, could so strike at the lover's heart and body that death was an imagined possibility. But as Lily B. Campbell clearly implies in her summary of this view, such a death was an imagined rarity. Shakespeare's Tragic Heroes: Slaves of Passion (1930; rpt. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1968), pp. 63-83. As Rosalind has noted, Orlando in his neat dress shows no signs of “adust” love melancholy, the extreme form of a disease that might result in death. Shakespeare's focus is on Orlando's naïve blindness to the often-invoked metaphorical dimension (or status) of medical theory that was only on rare occasions thought (usually by doctors and not by writers) to be fatal.

30. D. J. Palmer also finds Rosalind's cure of Orlando's lovesickness unsuccessful. “Art and Nature in As You Like It,” Philological Quarterly, 49 (1970): 37-38. For the contrary view—that Rosalind's physic proves the ideal quality of Orlando's love—see Edward Berry, “Rosalynde and Rosalind,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 31 (1980): 49-50; and James Black, “The Marriage-Music of Arden,” English Studies in Canada, 6 (1980): 393-95.

31. For the precedent of “prime” referring to the moment of full ripeness, see sonnet 12: “When I do count the clock that tells the time, / And see the brave day sunk in hideous night; / When I behold the violet past prime.”

32. Margaret Beckman locates the source of Rosalind's magical powers in her marvelously inclusive character, which is able to control the “natural harmony of opposed forces that constitutes man's ‘possible perfection.’” “The Figure of Rosalind in As You Like It,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 29 (1978): 49.

33. Christian allusions in As You Like It are recorded by Fortin (pp. 575-81); Hassel (pp. 110-48); Knowles (pp. 9-19); Edward A. Armstrong, Shakespeare's Imagination (1946; rpt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963), pp. 125-28; Michael Taylor, “As You Like It: The Penalty of Adam,” Critical Quarterly, 15 (1973): 78-79; and A. Stuart Daley, “To Moralize a Spectacle: As You Like It, Act 2, Scene 1,” Philological Quarterly, 65 (1986): 147-70.

34. The association of Orlando's bloody redemption of his brother with Christ's redemption of mankind is explored by Fortin (p. 580) and by Knowles (p. 13).

35. Knowles remarks that “the golden age was commonly taken as the gentile corruption of the Genesis story of paradise by English Renaissance writers such as Arthur Golding and Sir Walter Raleigh” (p. 10).

36. Armstrong identifies imagery in acts 1 and 3 of As You Like It that is suggestive of “the rib which was taken from man to form woman” (p. 127).

37. For an alternative analysis of the masque of Hymen, see Marilyn Williamson, “The Masque of Hymen in As You Like It,” Comparative Drama, 2 (1968): 248-58, esp. 255-57.

38. The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton (London: Longman, 1980).