SOURCE: Berry, Edward I. “Rosalynde and Rosalind.” Shakespeare Quarterly 31, no. 1 (spring 1980): 42-52.

[In the following essay, Berry compares Shakespeare's Rosalind in As You Like It with the title figure of Thomas Lodge's Rosalynde, observing that Shakespeare instilled his Rosalind with psychological depth, linguistic brilliance, and compelling virtue.]

Thomas Lodge's Rosalynde, the narrative source of As You Like It, provides a particularly instructive guide to Shakespeare's play. As a coherent, engaging, yet thoroughly conventional work, Rosalynde enables us to define with unusual precision some of the differences between skill and genius. Critics have drawn upon it to highlight many distinctive features of As You Like It: its structural integrity, its thematic and linguistic richness, its moral seriousness, its complex development of romantic and pastoral conventions.¹ A reading of Lodge, I believe, also illuminates Shakespeare's conception of his main character, Rosalind. A comparison of the two heroines allows us to observe the means by which a successful narrative role is transformed into a great dramatic one, to appreciate aspects of Rosalind's characterization that critics have generally ignored, and to discover, in Rosalind's experience, a dynamic that shapes the play as a whole.

In a broad sense Shakespeare seems to have found in Lodge's Rosalynde everything he needed for his own. He alters little in the narrative that directly affects his heroine. In both versions Rosalind falls in love at first sight, is banished into Arden, discovers her beloved in the forest, and engages, while disguised, in a game of courtship with him; in both Rosalind reveals herself to her father and lover in a climactic scene before returning to a renewed court to be married. The characterization of Lodge's Rosalynde is also remarkably similar to Shakespeare's. The vivacity, wit, romantic yearning, and delight in disguise are all present, at least embryonically, in Lodge. Shakespeare's obvious dependence upon Lodge for so many details makes his departures from the source all the more striking and significant. He changes little but with great effect.

I

To begin with the obvious, Shakespeare makes Rosalind the protagonist. She stands so firmly at the center of the play that the history of its criticism seems in large part an attempt to explain from different critical perspectives the preeminence of her role. For John Dover Wilson, who tempers somewhat a long tradition of Victorian effusions, she is simply Shakespeare's “ideal woman.”² For Peter G. Phialas she synthesizes the play's “different and even conflicting attitudes to love” and thereby expresses “Shakespeare's comic approach or attitude to the human situation.”³ For C. L. Barber she maintains an “inclusive poise” of the kind achieved by the whole play.⁴ For David Young she “comes to embody the ideals of love and the values of pastoral.”⁵ For Margaret Boerner Beckman, she “is a seemingly impossible reconciliation of opposites.”⁶ Whatever the individual merits of these varied perspectives—and we will observe later a collective limitation—they all testify to the centrality of Rosalind's role, and they could not apply to her source. Despite his work's title, Lodge gives his Rosalynde no such importance; she is nearly indistinguishable from Alinda (Celia), whose courtship is given almost equal attention. A comparison with Lodge thus underlines a distinctive feature of the mature comedies and histories—the presence of a central character whose consciousness takes in the central problems of his or her play. Studies of Prince Hal as a character who reconciles oppositions and mediates between extremes often sound like descriptions of Rosalind.

Shakespeare increases not only the stature of Rosalind but her scope. The addition of Touchstone and Jaques to Lodge's story extends the role of the heroine considerably. When Rosalind jests with Touchstone or, better, endures his jests at her and her lover's expense, as in his parody of Orlando's verses, the effect is not only to complicate the comedy of the play but to extend the range of her character. The same is true of her brief encounter with Jaques: “And your experience makes you sad. I had rather have a fool to make me merry than experience to make me sad—and to travel for it too!” (IV. i. 27-29).⁷ Touchstone and Jaques serve as foils to Rosalind, setting off her distinctive qualities. But their presence also adds more subtly to our impression of her psychological richness and poise. In drama as in life, it seems, our appreciation of complexity in character increases with the variety of relationships against which it is defined. The two Rosalinds may share a propensity to playfulness and wit, but the diverse sounding boards provided by Shakespeare create resonances that lie outside Lodge's range.

If Shakespeare enriches Rosalind's character by complicating her social environment, he also enlarges the role symbolically. As the director and “busy actor” (III. iv. 60) in her own “play,” and the Epilogue in Shakespeare's, Rosalind becomes in a sense a figure for the playwright himself, a character whose consciousness extends in subtle ways beyond the boundaries of the drama. As a magician, moreover (and Shakespeare alone gives her magical powers),⁸ she has a capacity that exceeds even Prospero's: an ability to surprise her audience. When as Ganymed she calls the lovers into her magic circle and promises them fulfillment in love, we rest secure in comic anticipation; all that remains is for her to appear, as she does in Lodge, in her proper attire. When she next enters, however, it is with still music and the god Hymen. Even more mysteriously than Prospero, she can bring down a god to sanction her festivities. Efforts to explain away the appearance of Hymen, as if he were merely Adam or some forester decked out by Rosalind, seem wide of the mark, since the mystery seems integral to the play and adds so effectively to the audience's sense of wonder. At its climax the play becomes a masque-ritual, and Rosalind, the poet-magician, its high priestess. The alias Ganymed, which Lodge includes but only Shakespeare exploits, complements this symbolic extension of the role; for as Rosalind says, Ganymed is “Jove's own page” (I. iii. 124). In the history plays, which develop the mystique of kingship, these hints of transcendental power in the protagonist seem almost inevitable. In the romantic comedies, as the contrast between the two Rosalinds suggests, the symbolic extension seems to be Shakespeare's distinctive variation on the theme of Petrarchan idealization.

The actresses who have made the role peculiarly their own, however, have attended less to its hints of the supernatural than to its richly human emotional range. Audrey Williamson, who found Edith Evans' Rosalind “the loveliest Shakespearean performance by an actress in approaching twenty years of playgoing,” was most impressed by the variety and volatility of her emotions: “She was wayward and gay, grave and loving, in an instant; as changing in moods as an April day, yet with a glow at the heart as bright as Juliet's own.”⁹ We can recognize in much of this description not only Shakespeare's Rosalind but Lodge's; the essential difference lies in the phrase “in an instant.” For what impresses us about Shakespeare's heroine, and differentiates her from Lodge's, is a compression of thought and feeling that makes her every exchange a rich psychological event. The distinction is a subtle one, but perhaps a close look at a single episode, that in which Rosalind falls in love (I. ii), will help to make it clear.

II

In both versions Rosalind falls in love at the Duke's wrestling match. In Lodge's narrative Rosalynde and Rosader (Orlando) fall in love without even exchanging words; Rosalynde's amorous glances alone give Rosader enough strength to defeat the Norman wrestler. As a token of her love, Rosalynde takes a jewel from her neck and sends it after Rosader, who replies in kind with a sonnet. In As You Like It the characters converse, however haltingly, and the jewel becomes a chain given in person. The differences are significant in several ways. Shakespeare's version is obviously more dramatic, but it is also more symbolic, since the golden chain becomes by the end of the play a bond of love that unites not only Rosalind and Orlando but, in Hymen's song, earth and heaven. More important from the point of view of psychology is the fact that in giving the chain Shakespeare's Rosalind has far more on her mind than Lodge's. Shakespeare creates this psychological density not so much by what the character says, though that is part of it, but by complicating the situation to which she must respond and thus generating pressures beneath the words.

In Lodge's account there is little preparation for Rosalynde's declaration of love. When she sends her jewel to Rosader, we know only that she is remarkably beautiful (Lodge describes her in a set piece), that her father has been banished, and that she has been trading amorous glances with Rosader at the wrestling match. The state of mind in which she sends the jewel typifies Lodge's conventionality: “she accounted love a toye, and fancie a momentarie passion, that as it was taken in with a gaze, might bee shaken off with a winck; and therefore feared not to dallie in the flame” (p. 172). Although Rosalynde is genuinely “touched” by Rosader's “beautie and valour” (p. 172), her gift expresses only a naive flirtatiousness. The psychology is conventional, but not unnatural.

In As You Like It Shakespeare prepares for the meeting of the lovers by introducing Rosalind and Celia briefly prior to the wrestling match. The episode serves the usual expository purposes, but it also sets in motion psychological currents that complicate and intensify Rosalind's eventual response to Orlando. Rosalind enters the play melancholy for her banished father. “I pray thee Rosalind, sweet my coz, be merry” (I. ii. 1-2) are Celia's opening words. Shakespeare's first gesture, then, is to open up areas of feeling that Lodge never explores.¹⁰ When Celia tries to snap her out of her melancholy, the game Rosalind proposes is that of “falling in love” (l. 25). That she considers love a sport reminds us of Lodge's Rosalynde, who “dallies” with its flame, but that the sport serves as a psychological defense against melancholy shows how far Shakespeare goes beyond the conventional psychology of Lodge.

When Rosalind actually falls in love, moreover, the reality, like the game, is intertwined with her love for her father. The bond between Duke Senior and the dead Sir Rowland ties Rosalind immediately to Orlando:

My father lov'd Sir Rowland as his soul,
And all the world was of my father's mind.
Had I before known this young man his son,
I should have given him tears unto entreaties,
Ere he should thus have ventur'd.

(ll. 235-39)

What we witness in this episode, then, is not a sudden, inexplicable passion, but a subtle psychological modulation from one kind of love, one kind of yearning, to another. And Rosalind's love for Orlando, like that for her father, is complicated by melancholy. For because Duke Frederick and Sir Rowland are enemies—as they are not in Lodge—Rosalind gives her chain to Orlando with little hope of fulfillment: “Wear this for me: one out of suits with Fortune, / That could give more but that her hand lacks means” (ll. 246-47). In Lodge, by contrast, nothing stands between the lovers until Rosalind's banishment.

By altering a few details, then, Shakespeare creates in Rosalind's falling in love a dramatic moment of considerable psychological and emotional complexity. Though not without playfulness, Shakespeare's Rosalind is hardly “dallying” with love. With a subtle emotional logic, her yearning for a banished father is transformed into a passion for the son of her father's friend, who is himself beyond her reach. The modulation not only intensifies and enriches the emotion of the scene, providing several kinds of feeling in an instant, but helps to make it psychologically credible. If Shakespeare is conventional in giving us love at first sight, he is exceptional in providing a convincing psychology behind the convention.

Having introduced the motif of parental love, Shakespeare does not let it drop. In the brief exchange between Rosalind and Celia immediately after Rosalind has fallen in love—a scene that has no counterpart in Lodge—Celia's opening brings us back to Rosalind's melancholy: “Why, cousin, why, Rosalind! Cupid have mercy, not a word?” (I. iii. 1-2). This time, as Celia's needling makes clear, Rosalind's melancholy derives from a different source: “But is all this for your father?” (l. 10). Rosalind's witty reply—“No, some of it is for my child's father” (l. 11)—casts her relationship to fatherhood in an entirely new light. That she goes on, half-humorously, to rationalize her new love in terms of the old—“The Duke my father lov'd his father dearly” (ll. 29-30)—is hardly logical, as Celia wrily demonstrates: “By this kind of chase, I should hate him, for my father hated his father dearly …” (ll. 32-33). But behind the specious logic lies an emotional truth. What Rosalind's love forces upon her—and what love demands from all of Shakespeare's comic heroines—is a reorientation of feelings toward those for whom she already has strong emotional ties. We are reminded of Hermia and Egeus, or Viola and Sebastian, or Portia and her father's “will.” As we shall see, the experience in Arden resolves the apparent tension between two loves and enables Rosalind to give herself fully to both. Though unmotivated once she is in Arden, the period of separation from her father seems as necessary to Rosalind's development as her role-playing with Orlando.

III

Much of the psychological complexity that Shakespeare achieves in Rosalind's role hinges upon his ability to transform Lodge's mannered prose into an expressive instrument. It is difficult to find in the two works passages close enough for meaningful comparison, but perhaps a few lines that Shakespeare steals from Lodge's Alinda (Celia) will serve to illustrate differences that are pervasive. The passages occur on different occasions, but both refer to Rosalind's witty slander against her own sex:

And I pray you (quoth Aliena) if your roabes were off, what metall are you made of that you are so satyricall against women? Is it not a foule bird defiles the owne nest?

(Lodge, p. 181)

You have simply misus'd our sex in your love-prate. We must have your doublet and hose pluck'd over your head, and show the world what the bird hath done to her own nest.

(Shakespeare, IV. i. 201-4)

Although Lodge's version is by no means excessively artificial—Lodge is far more euphuistic elsewhere—Shakespeare's is both more natural and more vital. He avoids Lodge's alliteration and balanced questions, adds raciness to the diction (in “love-prate” and “pluck'd,” in particular), compresses the ideas, and transforms an illustrative proverb into an expressive metaphor. Through these changes Shakespeare achieves an impression of rapid, vivid, and spontaneous thought. His Celia actually perceives the doublet and hose being plucked over the head—so graphically and immediately, in fact, that the proverb that leaps into her mind becomes concretely visual and humorously obscene. Conversation in Rosalynde is little more than relaxed oratory; in As You Like It, though often based on euphuistic patterns, conversation is thought in action. Celia discovers the full reach of her jest only a step before the audience does.

Rosalind's jesting reaches even farther than Celia's and plays a more complicated role in her personality. Rosalind's wit is, of course, a mark of that “inclusive poise” that holds her at the center of the play, but it also fulfills a subtle psychological function. Like the disguise of Ganymed that she takes on in Arden, her wit offers a protective shield behind which Rosalind can explore and test her identity. A simple phrase like “No, some of it is for my child's father” not only expresses her emotional entanglement in her potential roles—as daughter, wife, mother, sexual partner—but enables her to detach herself from them momentarily and turn them around in the freedom of imaginative play. To see her wit as merely a static attribute of character, as is implied in most discussions of the role, is to ignore its creative function. Shakespeare's fondness for witty heroes and heroines in the mature histories and comedies, one suspects, owes something to the fact that they tend to be engaged in defining their identities in play before assuming adult roles—as married women, or, in Hal's case, as king.

IV

The fact that Rosalind links her new melancholy for Orlando with that for her father, as we have seen, suggests another dimension that Shakespeare adds to the role, that of psychological development. If we sometimes respond to Shakespearean characters as if they inhabited the real world, wondering how many children Lady Macbeth might have had, we do so in part because the roles develop with an internal consistency that we associate with living people. The point may seem obvious, but Lodge, like many Elizabethan writers—Marlowe, say—seems relatively unconcerned with this aspect of character. Perhaps because his interest lies more in convention than in characterization, Lodge tends to think in individual scenes alone. His Rosalynde, though consistent, is not developed with the continuity that seems central to our conception of “personality.” On the other hand, despite his dependence upon the scenic unit and his fascination with the interplay of conventions (nowhere more evident than in As You Like It) Shakespeare portrays in his heroine a continuous psychological development.

Rosalind's relations with Silvius and Phebe provide a case in point. Lodge treats the Silvius-Phebe plot more seriously than Shakespeare—plays it “straight,” as it were, as a paradigm of unrequited love—and develops it with the same conventionality he lavishes upon the other pairs of lovers. By heightening the artificiality of the Silvius-Phebe episodes, Shakespeare indirectly increases our acceptance of the love between Rosalind and Orlando; the conventionality of the Silvius-Phebe affair serves as a lightning rod to draw off the laughter of disbelief. The most important difference for our purposes, however, is that only Shakespeare integrates the Silvius-Phebe plot into Rosalind's psychological development.

The scene in which Phebe falls in love with Rosalind disguised as Ganymed (III. v) appears in both Lodge and Shakespeare and exploits similar comic effects. In both versions Rosalind reproaches Phebe for her cruelty and pride, only to precipitate her love. The most significant difference between the two episodes is that Shakespeare's Rosalind interrupts the wooing, as Ralph Berry puts it, with “quite astonishing warmth—and rudeness.”¹¹ Amazed at the effect of her words, Rosalind admits to being out of temper: “she'll fall in love with my anger” (l. 67). Berry's question—“Why so much heat?” (p. 183)—is perceptive, for it directs us to the psychological dynamics of the scene, which is generally viewed merely as comic commentary on Silvius and Phebe's allegiance to the artificial conventions of pastoral love.¹² Rosalind plays the role of satirist here, of course; but she is neither detached nor objective. Her satire, like that of Jaques, is fueled by private motives. Berry suggests that Rosalind's harshness springs from a nature “motivated above all by a will to dominate” (p. 184). But this explanation strikes me as unnecessarily cynical. More to the point, it is based upon the mistaken assumption that Rosalind's character is static.

To explain Rosalind's passion, we need only return to the conversation with Celia that immediately precedes the scene in question. This exchange, which occurs only in Shakespeare, focuses on Rosalind's anxiety at Orlando's failure to keep his appointment: “But why did he swear he would come this morning and comes not?” (III. iv. 18-19). Celia's wry humor does little to put Rosalind at ease: “Yes, I think he is not a pick-purse nor a horse-stealer, but for his verity in love, I do think him as concave as a cover'd goblet or a worm-eaten nut” (ll. 22-25). In his wooing of Phebe, then, Silvius becomes a reflector for Rosalind's own predicament, as he was, indeed, at their first encounter: “Jove, Jove! this shepherd's passion / Is much upon my fashion” (II. iv. 60-61). Rosalind sees in Phebe's indifference to love a counterpart to Orlando's, and in Silvius' frustration a mirror of her own. Her ire is thus directed more at the absent Orlando than at poor Phebe. As if to accentuate her comic anxiety, Shakespeare splices between Orlando's earlier promise to return and this episode the scene in which Touchstone betrays his doubtful motives in wooing Audrey, calling into question the truth of all lovers' verses: “the truest poetry is the most feigning, and lovers are given to poetry; and what they swear in poetry may be said as lovers they do feign” (III. iii. 19-22).

When Silvius presents Rosalind with Phebe's letter, he himself bears the burden of her frustration. Rosalind is again on edge from waiting: “How say you now? Is it not past two a'clock? And here much Orlando!” (IV. iii. 1-2). She therefore plays a brutal game with Silvius as he reads the letter, leading him on only to reveal its devastating contents, and prompting even Celia to sympathy: “Alas, poor shepherd!” (l. 65). The phrase echoes Rosalind's sentiment upon her first meeting with Silvius: “Alas, poor shepherd, searching of [thy wound], / I have by hard adventure found mine own” (II. iv. 44-45). Now, however, Rosalind is utterly without compassion: “Do you pity him? No, he deserves no pity. Wilt thou love such a woman? What, to make thee an instrument, and play false strains upon thee? not to be endur'd!” (IV. iii. 66-69). Read “man” for “woman” in this outburst and its motive becomes clear. Rosalind sees herself reflected yet again in Silvius' lamentable mirror; she sees herself as an instrument played upon by a lover so indifferent that he will not even keep time. And this time her anger turns inward, against her own folly at loving such a man.

To see Rosalind as merely a detached satirist in these episodes is to oversimplify the emotions they evoke and to ignore their significance in the development of her love. Rosalind certainly makes sport of Silvius and Phebe, but the game she plays is psychologically significant.

V

Rosalind's comic anxiety about Orlando's love also underlies the scenes of their mock-courtship. Lodge's version serves as the basis for Shakespeare's, for in Lodge Rosalynde's disguise enables her to test her lover, pitting her suspicions of man's inconstancy against his protestations of faithful love. In Rosalynde, however, the game is played in verse, not in prose. After listening to one of Rosader's sonnets, Rosalynde proposes that he pretend she is indeed Rosalynde and woo her in an amorous eclogue. He does so, only to be answered by a skeptical sonnet of her own, which he then parries with a romantic reply. So it goes until Rosalynde, convinced of his love, finally yields, completing his rhyme, and Alinda plays the priest for their mock-marriage. As Lodge observes, it is a “jesting match, that after proovde to a marriage in earnest” (p. 214).

Aside from the shift from verse to prose, Shakespeare makes two other changes that are important for the characterization of his Rosalind: he complicates her skepticism by injecting a strong dose of antifeminism—Lodge's Rosalynde is concerned only with man's inconstancy, not woman's¹³—and, as we have seen, he adds Rosalind's obsession with keeping time. Both of these elements are crucial to Rosalind's plan to “cure” Orlando of his love-sickness (and the medical motif is itself Shakespeare's invention). In Shakespeare, however, the scheme is motivated, not by a conventional feminine skepticism, as is the testing in Lodge, but by specific insights into Orlando's behavior as a lover. For Shakespeare invents two episodes in Act III, scene ii that afford Rosalind some disconcerting discoveries: the episode in which Orlando's verses are found and mocked by Celia, Touchstone, and Rosalind herself, and the episode in which Orlando and Jaques, as Signior Love and Monsieur Melancholy, exchange barbed compliments. Rosalind's impulsive decision to speak to Orlando “like a saucy lackey, and under that habit play the knave with him” (ll. 295-97) is playful, of course, but again the sport is psychologically significant: the conventional behavior that threatens to turn Orlando into an allegory (Signior Love) must be made to yield its true meaning. If merely a role, it may be false; if truly felt, it may be dangerously naive. The “cure” that Rosalind proposes thus enables her to play out two kinds of doubts. Is his love true?—“men are April when they woo, December when they wed” (IV. i. 147-148). Is his idealism, his “deifying” of Rosalind, strong enough to sustain contact with her human fallibility?—“maids are May when they are maids, but the sky changes when they are wives” (IV. i. 148-49).

In attacking women, then, Rosalind works toward (but hopes against) Orlando's disillusionment. By being exposed to woman's “real” nature—her capriciousness, her shrewishness, her faithlessness—Orlando will be driven, like Ganymed's earlier “patient,” to “forswear the full stream of the world, and to live in a nook merely monastic” (III. ii. 419-21).¹⁴ To such a “nook” the play's true cynic, Jaques, finally retires. Ganymed's “physic” is thus of the kind that Don John administers in a heavier dose to Claudio in Much Ado About Nothing. When Claudio “discovers” Hero playing the role of Ganymed's portrait of Rosalind, he betrays the emptiness of his conventional romanticism by losing faith and turning cynic:

For thee I'll lock up all the gates of love,
And on my eyelids shall conjecture hang,
To turn all beauty into thoughts of harm,
And never shall it more be gracious.

(IV. i. 105-8)

Unlike Claudio, whose test is admittedly more severe, Orlando refuses to be shaken. He perseveres despite Ganymed's many variations upon the theme of woman's frailty: “Virtue is no horn-maker; and my Rosalind is virtuous” (IV. i. 63-64). In a forest with horns behind every tree and a Touchstone behind every verse, Orlando remains true to his own image of Rosalind. His idealism is not shattered by his exposure to what Touchstone would call, if he traded in clichés, “real life.”

Rosalind asks more from Orlando than resistance to Ganymed's antifeminism, however; she demands that he prove his own faith. And since a lover's words are ambiguous, as Touchstone's example confirms, she demands proof in action: Orlando must keep time. While Lodge's version of the mock-wooing culminates in Rosalynde's yielding in reality, Shakespeare's ends with her demanding, despite her passionate impatience, another interview, to be kept on time. As she herself observes at the end of the scene, “Time is the old justice that examines all such offenders, and let Time try” (IV. i. 199-200). This insistence upon deeds as well as words serves in many ways as a paradigm of the difference between Lodge's art and Shakespeare's. Lodge's Rosalynde is wooed and won in verse; she voices her skepticism in poetry and yields in poetry. Her agreement to participate in the wooing eclogue seems symbolic of Lodge's attitude toward his art: she moves into the realm of fiction and accepts it as truth. By contrast, the attitude of Shakespeare's heroine mirrors his double allegiance, to both art and life. Rosalind's acceptance of Orlando depends ultimately upon deeds rather than words; she will yield only if he can treat their fiction as if it were reality, keeping time for Ganymed as if he were Orlando's “very” Rosalind. Orlando's faith is true only if he lives by it. Rosalind's delightful obsession with punctuality therefore expresses much more than her conventional impatience as a lover.

Because of this concern with time, the wooing in As You Like It is not resolved until Rosalind, hearing Oliver's explanation for Orlando's second instance of tardiness, swoons. Fainting at the sight of blood betrays Rosalind's femininity, of course, and much of the comedy of the scene hinges upon her inability to keep her masculine disguise under control. But in a way that even Celia does not quite see, “There is more in it” (IV. iii. 159). It is not merely the sight of Orlando's blood that makes Rosalind swoon, but what it signifies. For in listening to Oliver's story Rosalind makes two crucial discoveries: that Orlando has kept time to the best of his ability (the bloody napkin is an emblem of his faith), and that he has saved his “unnatural” brother. Rosalind's anxious question underlines the importance to her of this latter act: “But to Orlando: did he leave him there, / Food to the suck'd and hungry lioness?” (ll. 125-26). For Orlando's deed, which is described emblematically and invested with Herculean overtones,¹⁵ brings both Rosalind and the audience to the recognition of a paradox: by breaking his oath, Orlando has kept his faith. By proving himself his brother's keeper, by acting out of charity rather than revenge, Orlando has proven his love for Rosalind. A similar paradox is employed, although sophistically, by Berowne in Love's Labor's Lost:

It is religion to be thus forsworn:
For charity itself fulfills the law,
And who can sever love from charity?

(IV. iii. 360-62)¹⁶

In a way that Berowne is too immature to take seriously, Orlando has “forsworn” himself religiously and joined romantic love with religious charity. The religious vocabulary that Orlando repeatedly employs as lover—he vows to keep time, for example, “With no less religion than if thou wert indeed my Rosalind” (IV. i. 197-98)—thus proves to be no mere Petrarchan convention. Orlando keeps time, not according to the dictates of the court or of conventional courtship, but according to the forest of Arden, in which there are no clocks, and in which to “fleet the time carelessly” (I. i. 118) may be a way of redeeming it.¹⁷

The relationship between faith and charity developed in Orlando's action places his love against a familiar theological background. As the official homily “Of Faith” makes abundantly clear, the Anglican church stressed that the proof of faith is always charity: “true fayth doeth euer bring foorth good workes, as S. James sayth: Shew me thy fayth by thy deeds.”¹⁸ Religious faith is not at issue in As You Like It, of course, but romantic faith is at the center of the play. Orlando swears “by the faith of my love” (III. ii. 428) to woo Ganymed as if he were Rosalind and earns, finally, even Jaques' blessing: “You to a love, that your true faith doth merit …” (V. iv. 188). In the case of Silvius, romantic faith is played out in terms of Petrarchan convention; his truth to Phebe, despite her cruelty, is rewarded in marriage. In the case of Orlando, the ultimate test of romantic faith is brotherly love.

The play climaxes, then, not merely in a celebration of romantic love. The act that breaks through Rosalind's disguise and allows her finally to abandon it is an act that joins love and charity. This redefinition of love is dramatized in the masque with which the play concludes, for Hymen presents marriage as a force that binds not only individuals but the universe as a whole:

Then is there mirth in heaven,
When earthly things made even
          Atone together.

(V. iv. 108-10)

It is this expansion of love's meaning that enables Rosalind to give herself equally to her father and her husband, and in precisely the same words: “To you [Duke Senior] I give myself, for I am yours. / To you [Orlando] I give myself, for I am yours” (ll. 116-17).

VI

In his article “Thematic Unity and the Homogenization of Character,” Richard Levin has objected to a tendency in modern criticism to subordinate character to theme, as if a play owed its life to the dramatization of an idea rather than “a particular moving human experience.”¹⁹ While the best criticism of As You Like It has managed to explore the play's themes and conventions without losing touch with its “human experience,” it has not entirely avoided oversimplifying Rosalind's role, even when most insisting upon its complexity. To see Rosalind as an “ideal woman,” or as a synthesis of “conflicting attitudes towards love,” or as a representative of “the ideals of love and the values of the pastoral” is to conceive of this engaging character as the static embodiment of an idea.²⁰ To counter this tendency, a reading of Lodge proves particularly helpful. For a comparison of the two central roles enables us not only to appreciate the depth, subtlety, and complexity of Shakespeare's character but, above all, to appreciate its dynamic quality. If Shakespeare inherited from Lyly a comic drama of dialectics, in which characters define themselves along a spectrum of ideas, he welded to it a developmental conception of character. Rosalind is not merely a reconciler of oppositions, but a figure who, through the experience of “playing” at love, discovers more fully who she is.

Notes

1. Among the many source studies are Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, II (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958), 143-57; Agnes Latham, ed., As You Like It, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1975), pp. xxxv-xlvi; Marco Mincoff, “What Shakespeare Did to Rosalynde,” Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 96 (1960), 78-89 (rpt. in Jay L. Halio, ed., Twentieth Century Interpretations of “As You Like It” [Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968], pp. 98-106); Kenneth Muir, Shakespeare's Sources, I (London: Methuen, 1957), 55-66; Robert B. Pierce, “The Moral Languages of Rosalynde and As You Like It,” Studies in Philology, 68 (1971), 167-76; Albert H. Tolman, “Shakespeare's Manipulation of His Sources in As You Like It,” Modern Language Notes, 37 (1922), 65-76. As will become apparent, I disagree with Mincoff's assertion that Shakespeare's Rosalind “is less complex and less true to nature than Lodge's” (Halio, p. 106).

2. Shakespeare's Happy Comedies (London: Faber and Faber, 1962), p. 162.

3. Shakespeare's Romantic Comedies; The Development of Their Form and Meaning (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1966), pp. 243, 242.

4. Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and its Relation to Social Custom (1959; rpt. Cleveland: World Publishing, 1963), p. 238.

5. The Heart's Forest: A Study of Shakespeare's Pastoral Plays (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1972), p. 68.

6. “The Figure of Rosalind in As You Like It,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 29 (1978), 44.

7. The Riverside Shakespeare, gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). All Shakespeare quotations are from this edition.

8. In Lodge's version Rosalynde tells Rosader that she has a friend experienced in magic who can bring Rosalynde to him; see Bullough, II, 246. All further references to Lodge's Rosalynde. Euphues golden legacie (London, 1590) will be taken from Bullough, II, 158-256.

9. Old Vic Drama (London: Rockliff, 1948), p. 63.

10. Lodge refers to Rosalynde's sorrow for her father's plight only once, briefly, when she discovers him in the forest (pp. 247-48).

11. Shakespeare's Comedies: Explorations in Form (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972), p. 183.

12. See, for example, Phialas, pp. 250-52.

13. The passage in which Alinda accuses Rosalynde of slandering women, quoted above, is the only one that touches upon this theme, and it is unconnected with the mock-courtship.

14. It may be worth noting that in his Anatomy of Melancholy (London, 1621), Robert Burton proposes a remarkably similar remedy for love-melancholy; see Floyd Dell and Paul Jordan-Smith, eds., The Anatomy of Melancholy (New York: Tudor, 1938), pp. 777-96.

15. For an illuminating study of the symbolic dimensions of Orlando's role, see Richard Knowles, “Myth and Type in As You Like It,” ELH, 33 (1966), 1-22.

16. In “Love Versus Charity in Love's Labor's Lost” (Shakespeare Studies, 10 [1977], 17-41), R. Chris Hassel, Jr. develops the theological controversies that may lie behind these lines.

17. I draw here upon two studies of the theme of time in the play which, although insightful in many regards, have little to say about Rosalind's insistence upon punctuality: Jay L. Halio, “‘No Clock in the Forest’: Time in As You Like It,” Studies in English Literature, 2 (1962), 197-207 (rpt. in Halio, pp. 88-97); Rawdon Wilson, “The Way to Arden: Attitudes Toward Time in As You Like It,” SQ [Shakespeare Quarterly], 26 (1975), 16-24.

18. Mary Ellen Rickey and Thomas B. Stroup, eds., Certaine Sermons or Homilies: A Facsimile Reproduction of the Edition of 1623 (Gainesville, Fla.: Scholar's Facsimiles & Reprints, 1968), p. 29.

19. Modern Language Quarterly, 33 (1972), 29.

20. A rare exception to this tendency is William J. Martz's treatment of Rosalind in Shakespeare's Universe of Comedy (New York: David Lewis, 1971), pp. 84-99. Although we define Rosalind's development in different terms, our interpretations are generally complementary. There are also some illuminating remarks on Rosalind's mock-courtship as a lesson in awareness preparatory to marriage in D. J. Palmer, “‘As You Like It’ and the Idea of Play,” Critical Quarterly, 13 (1971), 240-43, and Helen Gardner, “As You Like It” (Halio, pp. 55-69). Gardner's essay originally appeared in More Talking of Shakespeare, ed. John Garrett (New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1959), pp. 17-32.