SOURCE: Kelly, Thomas. “Shakespeare's Romantic Heroes: Orlando Reconsidered.” Shakespeare Quarterly 24, no. 1 (winter 1973): 12-24.

[In the following essay, Kelly argues that unlike most of Shakespeare's romantic heroes, As You Like It's Orlando possesses considerable self-control and self-awareness.]

The romantic heroes of Shakespeare's comedies have always enjoyed a questionable importance within their own plays. The heroines easily eclipse them and even the fools—Dogberry, Feste, and Bottom—have commonly commanded more attention than the generally innocuous young men. A further irony is that when we do notice one of Shakespeare's romantic heroes it is often for an unheroic trait. Lingering about most of them is a hint of something disagreeable. Several, for example, are at best fickle. Lysander, Bassanio, and Claudio have the excuse of varying degrees of duress, and in their cases the effect is sometimes comic. But what of Demetrius, Proteus, and Bertram? Their cavalier disregard of their vows is generously countenanced by the heroine, but it rarely commends them to their critics.

Furthermore, should the romantic hero remain faithful, he frequently seems adolescent in savoring a sentimental melancholy when his suit is temporarily thwarted. Thus, without denying the manifest differences between the early Valentine and the late Orsino, one can see their essential kinship. When Valentine (in Two Gentlemen of Verona) is informed of his banishment from Milan and Silvia, he responds in high “romantic” fashion:

O, I have fed upon this woe already,
And now excess of it will make me surfeit

(III.i.219-20)

and anticipates Orsino's maudlin first speech in Twelfth Night:

If music be the food of love, play on,
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.

(I.i.1-3)¹

If, on the other hand, the romantic hero is both faithful and mature, his stature may be undercut by a circumstance beyond his control. Catching her first sight of Ferdinand, Miranda is instantly enraptured and declares that she “might call him a thing divine.” But we should measure her exultation and, hence, Ferdinand's attraction by the fact that Miranda's previous experience of young men has been limited to the unlovely Caliban.

The search for more penetrating critical generalizations about this anomalous characterization must focus, however, on two other recurrent features, two failures Shakespeare's romantic heroes commonly exhibit. The first is a failure of control. For reasons about which we can only speculate, Shakespeare chooses in the comedies to let the heroine rule the play.²The Merchant of Venice is typical in the direction Portia gives to each of the story lines. She coaches Bassanio to choose the leaden casket, she provides a refuge at Belmont for Lorenzo and Jessica, she delivers Antonio from the snare set by Shylock, and she engineers the charade of the ring exchange. “Who dares do more,” as Macbeth says in a somewhat different context, “is none.”

A second frequent failure of the romantic hero is one of awareness. Orsino's delicious melancholy springs in large part from a myopic vision, a near-sightedness which prevents his seeing beyond his own desires. The speech with which he answers Viola's veiled profession of love is characteristic:

There is no woman's sides
Can bide the beating of so strong a passion
As love doth give my heart; no woman's heart
So big to hold so much; they lack retention.
Alas, their love may be call'd appetite—
No motion of the liver, but the palate—
That suffer surfeit, cloyment, and revolt.

(II.iv.91-97)

That we hear the echo of his opening lines and sense the contradiction implicit in his present sentiment is, of course, part of his blindness and half the joke.

The hero's limited awareness is given dramatic form, too, in a number of the comedies. One purpose of the disguises of Julia, Portia, Viola, and Helena (in All's Well That Ends Well) is to dramatize the rigidly circumscribed perception of the young men with whom they are paired. How much a character sees is often a symbol for how much he knows, a fact which goes far to explain why Oberon directs Puck to anoint the eyes of the Athenian youth who has deserted his first love.

As a rule, then, we are inclined to regard Shakespeare's romantic heroes as peculiarly inept and slightly ridiculous figures. The generalization seems warranted and may, in addition, offer a valuable insight into the deepest nature of Shakespearean comedy. Like all powerful generalizations, however, its very strength constitutes a danger. If our recognition of a pattern in many plays disposes us to discover less obvious but similar patterns in a few others, we can record a critical gain. But what if the general pattern prejudices our reading of apparently similar plays? What if it thereby threatens to subvert the special meaning a given work should develop?

I belabor what may be an obvious point because the abuse toward which it looks may well be responsible for the relative neglect of at least two of Shakespeare's romantic heroes. Both Florizel in The Winter's Tale and Orlando in As You Like It seem to me to deserve more credit than it is customary to give them. Florizel's is the simpler and the less crucial case. Like The Tempest (and unlike Two Gentlemen of Verona), The Winter's Tale is concerned with restoring, rather than rejuvenating, the old order. Thus, although Florizel may be more perceptive and more effective in shaping events than Perdita is, they are both clearly subordinate to Leontes and Hermione. Redressing an imbalance in favor of Florizel is therefore a marginal undertaking. The center of the play lies elsewhere.

This is patently not the case in As You Like It. Since the play is closer to the design of the earlier comedies, its primary interest is naturally the romance between Orlando and Rosalind. The values of the older generation are important, but they are subsumed under the various attributes of the two lovers. Consequently, to overlook Orlando or to see in him another Valentine, Bassanio, or Claudio is, in a sense, to appreciate only half the play. To characterize him as the least conscious of Shakespeare's unconscious heroes, as one critic has done, is certainly to misread the play.³ But even to patronize him, as is more often the case,⁴ is to obscure the fact that As You Like It, with its more “serious” and competent hero, is a nexus between the early and the late comedies—and perhaps between the early comedies and the tragedies as well.⁵ Orlando, in short, is a breed apart. Helen Gardner's observation that “Orlando has to prove that he truly is, as he seems at first sight, the right husband for Rosalind and show himself gentle, courteous, generous and brave, and a match for her in wit” is exceptionally perceptive.⁶ Another way of putting it is that in Orlando, the romantic hero overcomes his earlier failings: he is, for the first time, a match for the heroine not only in wit but also in awareness and control.

Not everyone, of course, will agree. A fair measure of the general tendency to scant Orlando, for example, is the cursory analysis customarily accorded the events of the first act. The critical consensus seems to be that Shakespeare was in great haste to get his characters into the Forest of Arden. This, some would say, accounts for the confusion of the heights of Rosalind and Celia, of the ages of the two Dukes, and of the time since Frederick usurped the throne. Nothing could be further from the truth. The discrepancies can be discovered, but noticing them hardly strikes at the heart of Shakespeare's method in As You Like It. What should be noticed instead is the typical economy with which one scene in the first act is used to prefigure the rest of the play. The wrestling match may, as Bernard Shaw implied, have pleased the groundlings, but it requires only a little attention to detail to see how much more it does simultaneously.

In the broadest thematic terms, it is a graphic metaphor for the discord announced by the first lines of the play. “The spirit of my father, which I think is within me, begins to mutiny against this servitude,” Orlando tells Adam (I.i.20), and when Oliver enters Orlando is shortly at his throat. Discord at a higher level, in the state itself, is next disclosed by Charles, the professional wrestler. His reply to Oliver's request for news tells us of the overthrow of the old Duke and of his banishment. For the unruly, not to say chaotic, condition of public and private life in the world of the play, the wrestling match becomes a fitting visual symbol. Viewed from a distance, the movement of the play thus turns from the hurly-burly of the wrestling to the forester's informal march with the carcass of the slain deer, to the ritual harmony of the “dancing measures” with which the play ends.

Yet this only begins to disentangle the meanings worked into the “breaking of ribs” interlude. Because the match between Orlando and Charles occurs late in the act, they are each able to represent various aspects of the play's several themes when they finally meet. For example, by accepting Oliver's false report of Orlando's treachery, Charles becomes an agent, if not a surrogate, for Oliver. “This wrestler,” Oliver says, “shall clear all,” (I.i.154).

Still more important is the alignment between Charles and the Court itself. Adam, at one point, speaks of Charles as “the bonny prizer of the humorous Duke,” and Charles himself admits to being as ambition-ridden and jealous of his position as any of the courtiers. Like them, he regards his footing atop Fortune's wheel as a precarious station, one which cannot be shared:

To-morrow, sir, [he tells Oliver] I wrestle for my credit, and he that escapes me without some broken limb shall acquit him well. Your brother is but young and tender, and for your love I would be loath to foil him, as I must for my own honour if he come in.

(I.i.114 ff.)

Charles, it is true, speaks handsomely about the merry young gentlemen who have joined the exiled Duke in the golden world of the Forest, but his secondhand judgment of Arden is as impersonal as Oliver's unexpected praise of Orlando's gentleness, learning, and “noble device.”

As Charles' opponent, Orlando rightly embodies the values of nature and of a less competitive but more peaceful past. Both literally and figuratively, he stands for the Forest of Arden itself. Translated from the French, his surname (de Bois in its original spelling) identifies Orlando as certainly as any morality figure with the pastoral ideal. Moreover, the frequent reminders that he is the youngest son of Sir Rowland (Orlando is in fact an anagram for Rowland) make clear that the virtues of the antique world still live in Orlando. Adam's greeting after Orlando has bested Charles is especially pointed:

O my sweet master! O you memory
Of old Sir Rowland! Why, what make you here?
Why are you virtuous? Why do people love you?
And wherefore are you gentle, strong, and valiant?
.....O, what a world is this, when what is comely
Envenoms him that bears it!

(II.iii.3-15)

A second but no less effective indication of Orlando's position is Adam's explicit assertion, however illogical and bumbling, that Oliver is not Sir Rowland's son:

Within this roof
The enemy of all your graces lives.
Your brother (no, no brother! yet the son—
Yet not the son—I will not call him son
Of him I was about to call his father.)

(II.iii.17-21)

The awkwardness of the lines may even be informative. May it not typify the disjointed times over which Oliver and Duke Frederick preside?

The more purely natural aspect of Orlando's character is established by his account of his training at his brother's charge. “He keeps me rustically at home,” Orlando tells Adam. And to Oliver himself he complains, “You have trained me like a peasant, obscuring and hiding from me all gentlemanlike qualities.” That Orlando goes on to demand “such exercises as may become a gentleman” need discomfort no one. Touchstone, it is true, makes memorable sport of such gentlemanly exercises as poison, bastinado, faction, and policy, just as Oliver shows them in practice. But the irony of Orlando's demanding membership in such a class, like the irony of his competing with Charles, has been carefully measured. Because of it, Orlando is saved from becoming either a stereotyped prig or a sentimental cartoon.

Still, for those who prefer to take their heroes straight, the play permits the feeling that Orlando is neither corrupted nor corruptible. There is nothing to suggest and much to deny that, as a member of the Court, Orlando would also succumb to its code of expediency and lust for power and privilege. Hence, when the wrestlers meet, we are prepared to take one, Charles, as the hireling of the Court and Fortune, and the other, Orlando, as the champion of Nature and the pastoral ideal.

The Wrestling Scene is instructive, furthermore, in confirming that comic time governs As You Like It. The news that the old Duke and the many young gentlemen who surround him “fleet the time carelessly” merely posits an alternative to the brawling present. Somewhat more hopeful is the early speech by Celia, the immediate purpose of which is to declare the deep regard in which she holds Rosalind:

You know my father hath no child but I, nor none is like to have; and truly, when he dies, thou shalt be his heir; for what he hath taken away from thy father perforce, I will render thee again in affection.

(I.ii.14 ff.)

The secondary effect of such a promise, it seems to me, is to commit time to a redemptive role, rather than a destructive one. It remains, however, for Orlando to dramatize, in the wrestling match, the full vigor of comic time, to demonstrate that our normal causative expectations can be upset. Life, in Susanne Langer's terms, triumphs over Fate when Orlando throws Charles, the man who, by all odds, ought to have won. Other “accidents” abound in the play and finally crown it, but most of them are only actions which had no reason to happen. Orlando's success is in another class altogether—it has a reason not to happen. For once, not even Rosalind is able to see beyond appearance. “Pray heaven I be deceived in you,” she says to Orlando. And, of course, she is—a fact commonly disregarded by critics who want Orlando always to play the dupe to Rosalind's Ganymede.

Rosalind's other remarks at the wrestling also deserve attention. As surely as Charles is leagued with Oliver, Rosalind leagues herself with Orlando. “The little strength I have, I would it were with you” (I.ii.171), she says. But Oliver and Rosalind are clearly passive participants. For the moment, the stage is the wrestlers' and, after Charles is borne away speechless, Orlando's alone. Later, in a thinly disguised rehearsal for the wedding to come, Rosalind claims her share of the victory by placing a lightly ironic chain around Orlando's neck. “Wear this for me, one out of suits with Fortune,” are her words as she links Nature with Nature's own. How Shakespeare could have done more in one act to give Orlando a place equal in every respect to Rosalind's I find hard to imagine.

A single scene, however, especially a symbolic one, does not constitute a play. The sense that Orlando determines the final shape of the comedy may be conveyed in the Wrestling Scene, but his ability to recognize more of reality than its conventional surface must be proved in Arden. This is not to say that he must possess either perfect vision or complete knowledge. Probably no one does: each of the likely contenders for such perfection in As You Like It fails one or more times to comprehend fully the experience in which he is involved. Thus, though the old Duke can find “tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything” (II.i.16-17), he does not recognize his daughter; Rosalind, as we have already seen, is deceived in Orlando's power; and Touchstone, the play's great realist, mistakes among other things the author of the verses which Rosalind enters reading. (He is also blind to parody of any but the most gross kind—that is, his own.)

A more reasonable criterion of Orlando's perception therefore is whether he sees as much or as deeply as the best of the others. His understanding, to be estimable, must rival Rosalind's, not ours. Consequently, it is worth noting several passages which show that his perceptions and hers are admirably alike. Consider, for example, their initial responses to the “green world” of the Forest of Arden. Despite Duke Frederick's imperious threats, the departure of Celia and Rosalind for Arden retains the character of a prank. One is reminded most perhaps of The Merchant of Venice. The distinction between a daughter's manners and her father's,⁷ the gathering of jewels, and the masquerade all echo the elopement of Lorenzo and Jessica. But Arden, like Prospero's island, is a more subjective paradise than Belmont, a lesson that both Rosalind and Orlando quickly learn from appropriate “counselors.”

The notable lack of enthusiasm in Rosalind's lines when she, Celia, and Touchstone arrive at Arden has often been remarked:

O Jupiter, how weary are my spirits!
.....I could find it in my heart to disgrace my man's apparel
and to cry like a woman.
.....Well, this is the Forest of Arden.

(II.iv.1-11)

To quicken her spirits she has to observe and to talk to Corin, the old shepherd who has so thoroughly assimilated Nature's lessons that he cannot utter an unsound word or do an ungenerous deed. His advice to Silvius is compassionate, humble, and wise. Within Rosalind's hearing Corin admits to having been drawn by his fancy into a thousand actions “most ridiculous.” (One thinks, without disapproving, of Orlando's dashing from tree to tree, carving Rosalind's name.)⁸ Moreover, when Rosalind asks help for the fainting Celia, Corin's instinctive response pointedly affirms the true and permanent value of the pastoral ideal:

CORIN.
Fair sir, I pity her
And wish, for her sake more than for mine own,
My fortunes were more able to relieve her;
But I am shepherd to another man
And do not shear the fleeces that I graze.
My master is of churlish disposition
And little recks to find the way to heaven
By doing deeds of hospitality.

.....

By reason of his absence, there is nothing
That you will feed on; but what is, come see,
And in my voice most welcome shall you be.

(II.iv.67-79)

Were Touchstone allowed to intrude, he would doubtless observe that one can make but a poor meal of words. It is Celia, however, surely speaking for Rosalind as well as herself, who responds “I like this place and willingly could waste my time in it” (II.iv.86-87).

Orlando's initiation to the forest is strikingly similar. When Adam, like Celia, “can go no further” and calls a temporary halt, Orlando sees around him an “uncouth forest,” a “desert.” The air, he says, is “bleak.” He discovers the genius of the place, however, when, searching for food for Adam, he comes upon the banquet spread for the old Duke and finds his rude demands answered by gracious, natural hospitality:

DUKE Senior:
What would you have? Your gentleness shall force
More than your force move us to gentleness.

.....

Sit down and feed, and welcome to our table.

(II.vii.101-104)

But Orlando, much like Rosalind, had been playing a part to protect himself:

Speak you so gently? Pardon me, I pray you.
I thought that all things had been savage here,
And therefore put I on the countenance
Of stern commandment.

(II.vii.105-108)

Moreover, in his response to the Duke's assurance of “what help we can,” Orlando quietly discloses a revised view of Arden:

Then but forebear your food a little while,
Whiles, like a doe, I go to find my fawn
And give it food.

(II.vii.126-28)

The ease and clarity with which Rosalind and Celia on the one hand and Orlando on the other perceive the moral climate of Arden is in pointed contrast to the hypercritical vision of Jaques and to the sharp, but essentially superficial, vision of Touchstone. Although Jaques' moralizing on the deer “that from the hunter's aim had ta'en a hurt” shows “a mind full of matter,” it is a mind unable to conceive solutions for the discords it sees everywhere. He can pierce through “the body of the country, city, court; Yea, and of this our life” (II.i.59-60), but he cannot ascend to the irrational world of love and grace.

As a cynic, Jaques is one of two real aliens in Arden's green world. The other, of course, is Touchstone. Jaques dissolves the distinctions between Court and country by regarding them through the prism of his pessimism; Touchstone dissolves them through his unrefracted realism. When he arrives at Arden, not his spirits but his legs are tired. Given the opportunity to make sport of Orlando's parody of romantic verse, Touchstone is careful to exempt time for “dinners, and suppers and sleeping hours.” His offer of marriage to Audrey, the goatgirl, is the fitting expression of a frank, physical need. How close, yet how far, Touchstone stations himself from Corin's natural perspective can be seen by the fine line that separates the focus of two of their juxtaposed speeches:

CORIN.
Sir, I am a true labourer; I earn that I eat, get that I wear; owe no man hate, envy no man's happiness; glad of other men's good, content with my harm; and the greatest of my pride is to see my ewes graze and my lambs suck.
TOUCHSTONE.
That is another simple sin in you: to bring the ewes and the rams together and to offer to get your living by the copulation of cattle; to be bawd to a bell-wether, and to betray a she-lamb of a twelve month [Audrey] to a crooked-pated old cuckoldy ram [himself] out of all reasonable match.

(III.ii.67 ff.) [Italics mine]

The relative awareness of Orlando, Rosalind, Touchstone, and Jaques can also be plotted by analyzing their respective perceptions of another of Arden's defining parameters—time.⁹ Touchstone's attitude toward time has been accurately understood when we see him as Fortune's timepiece. He does not, however, hold that office alone. Because his famous “And so from hour to hour we ripe and ripe and then from hour to hour we rot and rot” (II.vii.27), is related with approval by Jaques, and because he (Jaques) has his own set speech on time, the moribund Seven Ages, the honor should be shared between them. Touchstone's time, moreover, strongly resembles the Court's time. Like Touchstone, Duke Frederick rules, in a sense, by the clock. When he exiles Rosalind, for example, he leans heavily on temporal terms for force:

DUKE Frederick.
Mistress, dispatch you with your safest haste
And get you from our court!
ROSALIND.
Me, uncle?
DUKE Frederick.
You, cousin.
Within these ten days if that thou beest found
So near our public court as twenty miles,
Thou diest for it.

(I. iii. 36-40)

Moreover, lest the point be missed, the threat is repeated fifty lines later. “If you outstay the time,” Frederick tells his niece, “you die.” Again, after learning that Celia has fled with Rosalind, he commands that Orlando or Oliver be brought before him “suddenly.” And when Oliver appears, he is told to produce his brother

Within this twelvemonth, or turn thou no more
To seek a living in our territory.

(III. i. 7-8)

Time therefore is inflexible and threatening for the Court, as for the realist and the cynic. Like Fortune's wheel, its movement is inexorable and destructive. It is a primary source of limitation. In another context, it would be tragic:¹⁰ it leads forth death.

The natural time of Arden, on the other hand, is comic: it leads forth life. As Jaques concludes his “strange eventful history” of man in

Second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything

(II. vii. 164-165)

Orlando enters with the fawn-like Adam. It is Orlando, moreover, who comments most often and most explicitly on this special quality of Arden's time scheme. His comments come, furthermore, in those two encounters with the disguised Rosalind which have always been regarded as the great comic heart of the play. The first is unusual inasmuch as Orlando is allowed to exploit one of Rosalind's few failures of poise. Having learned from Celia that the verse hung “upon hawthornes” is Orlando's work, Rosalind is distracted with nervous anticipation:

Alas the day! what shall I do with my doublet and hose? What did he when thou saw'st him? What said he? How looked he? Wherein went he? What makes he here? Did he ask for me? Where remains he? How parted he with the? and when shalt thou see him again? Answer me in one word.

(III. ii. 208 ff.)

Orlando's entrance a moment later unquestionably increases her girlish excitement. His parody of courtly manners as he takes his leave of Jaques (“I do desire we may be better strangers”) and his defense of Rosalind (“There was no thought of pleasing you when she was christened”) prompt even the cynic to grant Orlando's “nimble wit.” And when Jaques invites him to join in railing against the world, Orlando answers, “I will chide no breather in the world but myself, against whom I know most faults” (III. ii. 267). It is an answer steeped in the humility of self-knowledge. If it is also obtruded somewhat heavy-handedly into a satiric scene, it is nonetheless irrefutable evidence that Orlando is, indeed, an exceptional romantic hero.

From Rosalind's point of view, however, the next exchange may be more precious still:

JAQUES.
The worst fault you have is to be in love.
ORLANDO.
'Tis a fault I will not change for your best virtue.

(III. ii. 269-70)

Love wedded to wit and humility! Is it any wonder, then, that as Rosalind steps forward to “speak to him like a saucy lackey,” she blunders and asks lamely, “I pray you, what is it o'clock?” Orlando's reply, fortunately, gives unexpected point to the question. “You should ask me, what time o' day,” he says. “There is no clock in the forest.” Rosalind's rejoinder that time is relative, traveling in “divers paces with divers persons,” is a brilliant recovery but does not erase Orlando's equally shrewd insight.

Because so much more than a statement of Arden's comic time is accomplished in the second encounter between Orlando and “Ganymede,” it would perhaps be wise to approach the scene more broadly, noting Orlando's superiority within the context of his and Rosalind's total achievement. That achievement, one might begin by noticing, is partly the product of the action which surrounds it. The first encounter takes place at the end of the longest scene in the play and gains, as I have intimated, from what precedes it. Following it is a scene between Audrey and Touchstone. The scene between Silvius and Phoebe, which follows next, precedes in turn the second and principal encounter between Rosalind and Orlando. The principle of juxtaposition is important, of course, throughout As You Like It.¹¹ Once the action has moved to the Forest of Arden, however, the ideas which are juxtaposed are not always the narrow dichotomies of Court versus country, Fortune versus Nature. The hierarchy represented by the three pairs of lovers, for example, can hardly continue the contrast between Court and country since only one of the number, Touchstone, can be taken in any sense as a courtier.

Yet there is a thematic element common to them all. One ambitious suggestion is that the second and deeper theme is “the relation of love and wisdom.”¹² A less abstract, and perhaps mort defensible, way of putting it might be that the second theme is the definition of wisdom as comic flexibility. Rigidity, like limitation and Fate, denies life. In Arden, where perception is the index of character, the ability to recognize multiple levels of experience is salutary. It is superseded, in fact, only by the ability to move at will between various levels, to realize in practice several modes of experience without being locked in the iron embrace of any one. This, I submit, is the profound truth which determines our preference for Rosalind and Orlando. The fleshbound life of a Touchstone and Audrey, we see, is as much a dead end as the fossilized conventional ideal of a Silvius and Phoebe. By achieving a fluid synthesis between these frozen poles, Orlando and Rosalind infuse life with a comic warmth in which we can bask with profit.

That Rosalind possesses the requisite imagination for such a synthesis is, as I understand it, the thematic import of Ganymede's proposing to cure Orlando's love if he would but come every day to the sheep cote and woo a make-believe lover. The dazzling circumstance of a child actor playing Shakespeare's Rosalind playing Rosalind's Ganymede playing Ganymede's Rosalind is, by general agreement, the finest moment in the play. Since we must simultaneously cope with a choice of speaker—Rosalind, Ganymede, or “Rosalind”—and with the possibility that two or more of these speakers may share some speeches, the multiple layers of character create seemingly inexhaustible layers of irony. Between Shakespeare's Rosalind and Ganymede's Rosalind we sense a variable field of force which often holds the figures apart but which sometimes collapses to let them overlap and occasionally merge.

Unfortunately, the delight we take in Rosalind's marvelous virtuosity seems to have obscured the fact that Orlando is her imaginative equal. Rosalind, we have already seen, is not the only one to enter Arden disguised: Orlando's countenance of stern commandment at the forester's feast was also “put on.” Armed with the memory of that charade, we may suspect that the Silvius side of Orlando:

I would not have my right Rosalind of this mind, for I protest her frown might kill me

(IV. i. 93)

is no more “real” and no more limiting than the Touchstone side of Rosalind:

Maids are May when they are maids, but the sky changes when they are wives. I will be more jealous of thee than a Barbary cock-pigeon over his hen [sic], more clamorous than a parrot against rain, more newfangled than an ape, more giddy in my desires than a monkey.

(IV. i. 127 ff.)

The body of external evidence which supports the feeling that while Ganymede is playing “Rosalind” Orlando is playing “Orlando,” is not inconsiderable. Perhaps the clearest sign of the distance which separates the two Orlando's is his pointed failure to dress as becomes his assumed part. The marks of the conventional prisoner of love are “a lean cheek … a beard neglected … sleeve unbottoned … shoe untied, and everything … demonstrating a careless desolation.” But, says Rosalind to Orlando, “You are no such man: you are rather point-device in your accoustrements, as loving yourself, than seeming the lover of any other” (III. ii. 357 ff.).

Additional indications that Orlando has adopted a role for the nonce frame the Wooing Scene. Orlando's greeting to Rosalind (“Good day and happiness, dear Rosalind”) is jeered at by Jaques as “blank verse”—as language, in other words, appropriate to artificial discourse, if not explicitly to the stage. Moreover, Orlando proves as shamelessly tardy a lover as earlier he had proved point-device. “I come within an hour of my promise,” he says, provoking from Rosalind both some courtly railings about lovers being prompt to the thousandth part of a minute and a Touchstonesque quip about horned snails and cuckoldry.

The importance of the exchange is confirmed, I think, when Rosalind returns to the question in her last full speech in the scene:

ROSALIND.
… if you break one jot of your promise or come one minute behind your hour, I will think you the most pathetical break-promise, and the most hollow lover. … Therefore beware my censure and keep your promise.

(IV.i.164 ff.)

Orlando's rejoinder, “With no less religion than if thou wert indeed my Rosalind,” is as steeped in irony as any line spoken by Rosalind. On the level of the private play in which Orlando and Rosalind have been engaged, the vow is securely within the courtly convention. (We may remember Silvius protesting, “So holy and so perfect is my love, and I in such a poverty of grace. …”) The ironic coloring—the strength of the vow depends on a fact which Orlando does not know to be true—complicates, but does not subvert, the convention. If, on the other hand, the speaker is the Orlando who overthrew Charles and who fed Adam, the vow is a useful means of demonstrating where Orlando's values lie. Since, in effect, Orlando fails to keep his hour when he elects to save Oliver from the “sucked and hungry lioness,”¹³ we must either applaud his breach of romantic faith or, much better, see that conventional romanticism as a momentary role.

A final sign that Orlando has consciously adopted a momentary role deserves special attention. The decision to bring down the curtain on the masquerade within Arden is, not without reason, given to Orlando. His “I can live no longer by thinking” (V.ii.48) is the cue for Ganymede's metamorphosis, but it is also a reminder of Orlando's initiative. Moreover, it shows that Orlando knows what Shakespeare never forgets, namely, that Arden, like the theater itself, is only a means to an end. It is misleading, therefore, to think of As You Like It as a test of Orlando. From the moment he triumphs over Charles, Orlando establishes himself as a romantic hero of a new stamp. The succeeding scenes may fill in the outline and deepen the colors, but there should never be the least doubt of Orlando's unique stature. Unlike his peers among Shakespeare's romantic heroes, Orlando is self-possessed and possessed of exceptional self-knowledge.

Notes

1. The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. Irving Ribner and George Lyman Kittredge (Waltham, Mass., 1971). All quotations from the plays follow this edition.

2. One suggestion that seems reasonable is Northrop Frye's (The Anatomy of Criticism [Princeton, 1957], p. 183): “In the rituals and myths the earth that produces the rebirth is generally a female figure, and the death and revival, or disappearance and withdrawal, of human figures in romantic comedy generally involves the heroine.” Another is Bernard Shaw's in the letter to A. B. Walkley which commonly stands as the preface to Man and Superman: “The Don Juan play, however, is to deal with sexual attraction … and to deal with it in a society in which the serious business of sex is left by men to women. … That the men, to protect themselves against a too aggressive prosecution of the women's business, have set up a feeble romantic convention that the initiative in sex business must always come from the man is true; but the pretense is so shallow that even in the theatre, that last sanctuary of unreality, it imposes only on the inexperienced. In Shakespeare's plays the woman always takes the initiative” (Bernard Shaw: Complete Plays with Prefaces [New York, 1963], III, 495-96). The parallel between Ann Whitefield's cry, “A father, a father for the Superman” and Rosalind's immediate perception of Orlando as her “child's father” is particularly striking in this regard, and either explains or makes ironic Shaw's disdain for AYL.

3. Bertrand Evans, Shakespeare's Comedies (Oxford, 1960), p. 92.

4. For example, Harold C. Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, I (Chicago, 1951), 283: “Orlando at his best is thoroughly worthy of the woman he loves, but by and large she sets him in the shade.”

5. The relation of the comedies in general and AYL in particular to the tragedies is the poorly worked-up theme of James Smith's article on AYL in Scrutiny, IX (June 1940), 9-32. The relation of AYL to the histories is pertinent to John Russell Brown's discussion of the play in Shakespeare and His Comedies (London, 1957), pp. 141-59.

6. Helen Gardner, “As You Like It,” reprinted in Discussions of Shakespeare's Romantic Comedy, ed. Herbert Weil, Jr. (Boston, 1966), p. 63.

7. Compare Le Beau's “Neither his daughter, if we judge by manners” (AYL, I.ii.261) and Jessica's “But though I am a daughter to his blood, I am not to his manners” (Merch. II. iii. 18).

8. For an atypically generous assessment of Orlando's verse making, see G. K. Hunter, Shakespeare: The Late Comedies (London, 1962), p. 37.

9. See also Jay L. Halio, “‘No Clock in the Forest’: Time in As You Like It,” Studies in English Literature: 1500-1900, II (Spring 1962), 197-207.

10. For example, Macbeth, where unnatural haste is continually contrasted with natural growth.

11. See Harold Jenkins, “As You Like It,” Shakespeare Survey 8 (Cambridge, 1955), pp. 40-51, for the standard treatment of this notion.

12. Goddard, p. 282.

13. Thematically, as John Shaw (“Fortune and Nature in As You Like It,” SQ, [Shakespeare Quarterly] VI (1955), 45-50) points out, it is not a question of election. Since Orlando is a figure for Nature, he must aid Oliver: “But kindness … and nature made him give battle to the lioness.”