[In the following essay, Ford examines themes of estrangement and doubling as part of the process of attaining self-knowledge and personal metamorphosis in As You Like It.]

The forest of Arden in As You Like It destroys as playfully as it creates. In addition to its celebrated powers of defining and restoring relationships, Arden also has a magician's talent for making individual characters appear, disappear, re-appear—metamorphosed, it almost seems, before our very eyes. Some characters, like Adam, simply vanish into thin air at the very moment we are most absorbed by the condition of their estate. When Adam appears at the Duke Senior's camp, he provides a living refutation of Jaques' confident abstraction of the seventh age. We've just heard Jaques' “wise saws and modern instances” (II. vii. 156).¹ Here, the play seems to show us, is the thing itself. And then he's gone. Others, like Oliver and Duke Frederick, rush into the forest in their own person, only to vanish and then re-appear “converted” (the same term is used for both) into figures completely alien from their former selves:²

'Twas I. But 'tis not I. I do not shame
To tell you what I was, since my conversion
So sweetly tastes, being the thing I am.

(IV. iii. 135-37)

Duke Frederick, who invaded the forest “in his own conduct,” is similarly “converted” in the “wild wood.” Throughout the play, lesser characters are “conjured” in and out of existence by Arden: Sir Oliver Martext wanders in, then out, of being, as do William and a modest society of “old religious men,” magicians, and uncles.

In the last scene of the play, hardly the time or the place to introduce new characters, Arden conjures up two more. First, just as the characters are beginning to recognize one another through the filter of the various disguises, rhetorical poses, and opaque dispositions that have so beguiled them throughout the play, in walks a mythological god, Hymen, to clarify truth in sight. And there follows an apparition even more startling. Just as we are accommodating ourselves to Hymen, even made strangely comforted by his assurance “[t]hat reason wonder may diminish” (V. iv. 138), enter Jaques de Boys, “the second son of Old Sir Rowland,” who earnestly asks “audience for a word or two” (V. iv. 150-51). The sudden construction of Jaques' character is especially intriguing. He is mentioned by name as early as the second sentence of the play. But then this wisp of a character disappears, exiled from the play, forever it would seem, like Hisperia, the princess' gentlewoman, only to re-appear unannounced, uninvited, indecorously, at the play's formal resolution.³ Who might be his mother?

Why does this play take such self-conscious delight in the sudden, arbitrary creation and dissolution of so many characters? And why do so many of them share the same name, or near echo of that name: two Jaques, two Olivers, two Dukes? Does this play suggest a relationship between exile and identity? Between identity and mirrored social relation?⁴

Certainly, the exiles that wander through Arden at the beginning of the play represent a wide range of estrangements as almost every kind of social and familial chord is strained or broken: bonds of service, friendship, brotherhood, political loyalty. But these separations are particularly violent and unnatural, in that they hint that the violations of bonds that estrange one from another are also self-estranging. The near echo of Orlando and Oliver's names gives to their opening struggle a hint of psychomachia. The two Dukes are similarly “twinned.” The “good” Duke is not even named, but distinguished from Frederick only by his seniority and his moral status. This doubling, as several critics have pointed out, is reinforced not only by the mirroring of similarly structured scenes featuring the two dukes but also by the tendency in performance to double the two roles.⁵

Mirrored blocking and lighting can create another kind of uneasy “doubling.” In The Acting Company's 1997 production of As You Like It,⁶ precisely this technique was used to create the disturbing visual effect of a “natural perspective,” allowing the audience to fuse, just for a moment, Rosalind and Jaques, perhaps the two most “distinct” characters in the play. When we first see Rosalind, she stands alone, upstage center, her back half-turned to the audience. The lighting emphasizes her isolation, creating a silhouette in exile. When we first see Jaques, we see him also alone, upstage center, half-turned, recreating Rosalind's silhouette, the soft sweep of Rosalind's dress now becoming the outline of Jaques' long, full coat. How do we respond to such an ambiguous, resonating image?⁷ How do we like it? Truly, in respect that it is Rosalind, it is a figure who magically presides over both the comic community and the music of this play. But in respect that it is Jaques, it is a figure whom the play must expel, unfit for Arden's dancing measures.

This curious triangulation, one that associates doubling with both estrangement and identity, is reflected in some of the play's central images as well as in the metamorphic design of many of its scenes. In fact, in As You Like It, the most powerful representations of both estrangement and consort, both alienation and relation, find verbal and visual expression in the same image of physical conflict. The wrestling scene, for example (I. ii), is central to As You Like It. The scene itself, indeed the several references to wrestling and falls, to better parts thrown down, to tripping up heels and hearts, define and relate the many currents of thought and feeling in this play, with delightful economy, into the “full stream of the world” of As You Like It. Oliver's unkind and uncivil assault on his brother breaks into open wrestling in the play's first scene.

Throughout the play the image will not only recur, but will transform itself wonderfully into the multiple shapes of human entanglement the play reflects. It will define the affectionate energies of two cousins who would challenge one another into merriment: “come, lame me with reasons” (I. iii. 5-6). The erotic play in the image hints not only at the antagonisms and violence that may shadow sexual desire, but at the strange power of love to transform violence into concord, to “take the part” of a better wrestler.⁸ Similarly, the religious and civic undertones of reverberant terms like “fall” and “overthrow” help establish how alien “the fashion of these times” is to some lost antique world (II. iii. 59). And yet the human features that most redeem us, kindred compassion, love, and foolery, all involve wrestling with affections: whether the internal and external battles Orlando must undergo before rescuing his brother; or his being “overthrown” by “something weaker” than Charles, whom Orlando has just subdued; or Duke Senior's good natured inclination to “cope” with Jaques in his more “sullen fits” (II. i. 67); or, indeed, the gamut of erotic consort provided by these “country copulatives.” We may have lost the Golden World, but these are happy falls. Even the free, natural elements of the forest, the season's difference, define the playful ardor of Arden. The winter's wind has a healthy churlishness that “feelingly persuades” as it chides. And even the brooks engage in pleasing combat, as they “brawl along this wood” (II. i. 32).

In other words, in As You Like It words, no less than the actors who speak them, are required to “double” their parts, provoking in the audience the very dialectical conditions of imaginative judgment that this play celebrates. Such verbal doubling teases us with the intriguing possibility that the conditions of “blessed bond of board and bed” that Hymen celebrates may themselves exist in relation with, may even be defined by, the unblessed conditions of separation and aggression (V. iv. 142). It is in performance, of course, that the wrestling scene becomes most suggestive as it articulates and unifies these contesting ideas.⁹ In Terry Hands' 1980 RSC production, according to John Bowe, the actor who played Orlando, the wrestling scene took on the magical and reconciling ambiguity of fairy tales: “In keeping with the fairy tale idea we had a fight that was reminiscent of professional wrestling at the local town hall between opponents grossly mismatched. It had moments of hilarity mixed with moments of alarming brutality.”¹⁰

The 1996 Shenandoah Shakespeare Express performance also combined the mixed tones of fairy tales and professional wrestling.¹¹ Charles' proud declaration that he wrestles for his credit and his warning of the risks that might befall Orlando took on something of the comic bluster of a pre-fight interview, especially given the actor's use of a Philadelphia accent not unlike Rocky Balboa's. But this production went even further in exploiting the transforming and cathartic power of fairy tales, where worlds can be renewed by the virtue of “ifs.” There was a comic, even cartoon-like, manner of representation of character and event. The actors had transformed themselves into the inanimate furniture of the wrestling ring. Four of them become the four posts that supported the ropes of the ring. But these were no ordinary posts. Indeed, they seemed almost human. Like the trees and running brooks and stones the Duke Senior finds in Arden, these posts were charged with human feeling (a metamorphosis that reverses, with comic precision, Jaques' later desire “to be sad and say nothing,” to be, as Rosalind would translate it, “a post”). They deftly and literally sidestepped Charles' attempts to use them to bash Orlando's head. But later in the match, when the tables turn and Orlando, aroused and enlivened by Rosalind's encouragements, attempts the same battering tactic on Charles, these posts stiffened with a sympathetic pride and moral resolve reminiscent of a Mrs. Potts or Gaston the Candlestick in Disney's Beauty and the Beast. There were “sermons in stones and good in everything.”

An even more radical metamorphosis was implicit in the 1998 production at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre.¹² Such a theatre space, of course, renders all discrete boundaries between the conjured world of dramatic illusion and the concrete world of theatregoers deeply problematical. But this production blurred the lines even more, as the action of the wrestling spilled from the stage into the “space” of the audience. Wrestlers jockeyed for advantage in the yard with the rest of us groundlings, who were ourselves wrestling for our credit, constantly shifting our ground both in order to get a clearer view and to keep out of harm's way. In the midst of the confusion, one member of the audience scampered up the temporary wooden steps leading to the stage where, at last, she might gain an unobstructed vantage point. It was Rosalind! If this were played upon most stages now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction.

A similar sense of metamorphosis often governs the movement within individual scenes. Every scene but one in the play begins by defining a social group. Sometimes the group constitutes a microcosmic community, such as “Duke Senior, Amiens, and two or three lords like foresters” (II. i); or “Duke [Frederick], lords, and Oliver” (III. i). Usually a pair of characters will enter, defining one of the several individual relationships the play will explore: Orlando and Adam; Rosalind and Celia; Orlando and Oliver; Touchstone and Audrey. Some of these pairs open more than one scene. Of these, Rosalind and Celia and Orlando and Adam are the two pairs most likely to initiate, and thus to help define, the shape and tone of a scene. Curiously, not a single scene is initiated by Rosalind and Orlando, even though, of all the civil couples heading towards this ark, this pair clearly occupies the center of the play's and the audience's interest. It is almost as if their relationship, saws of dead shepherds notwithstanding, requires others to define it. After all, neither Rosalind nor Orlando enters the forest in search of each other.¹³ In fact, each goes into Arden to share life with someone quite different. As Orlando and Adam resolve to seek their fortunes together, their language plights a troth:

ORLANDO.
We'll go along together,
And ere we have thy youthful wages spent,
We'll light upon some settled low content.
ADAM.
Master go on, and I will follow thee
To the last gasp with truth and loyalty.(14)

(II. iii. 66-70)

Celia and Rosalind seek a new life and a new home with a kindly and hospitable uncle: “Now go we in content / To liberty, and not to banishment” (I. iii. 134-35).

Both couples seek “content” in terms that revalidate the very human and social qualities we have earlier seen violated: the bonds of service, kinship, love, freedom. “Content,” of course, is a charged word in this play, one that invokes the powers, both learned and natural, of our sympathetic imaginations to “translate the stubbornness of fortune” into a world in which we might “willingly waste [our] time,” as we like it.¹⁵ Rosalind and Celia will find their content, but not with whom they seek. Indeed, it is a special quality of Arden, as Duke Frederick and Oliver might tell you, that no one who enters this forest succeeds in finding whom he seeks.¹⁶ Travelers must be content, pleased with what they get.

It may be no accident that, as Orlando and Rosalind discover the ties of their relationship, the play begins to lose interest in the bond between Orlando and Adam. In fact, Adam completely disappears from the play after Act II, scene vii. Or are the ties that bind Orlando and Adam merely absorbed into other dimensions of the play, notably into the energies and mutual affection growing between Orlando and Rosalind, much as in a later play, set in a much harsher exile, where the acerbic and corrective wit of a Fool will be absorbed into his master? Has Adam been, as Amiens (and perhaps Peter Quince) might put it, “translated”?¹⁷

Celia's case is much more difficult since she remains a powerful, if increasingly silent, center of the play's interest until she discovers love at first sight with Oliver. But her invitation to Oliver—“Good sir, go with us” (IV. iii. 178)—marks the beginning of a curious estrangement from Rosalind. The two will never speak to one another again for the remaining life of the play. Indeed, these are Celia's final words in the play.¹⁸ And yet the two have grown strangely even more intimate. They will enter together in the play's final scene, exit together in mid-scene, and re-enter together as Ganymede undergoes yet another transformation, back to Rosalind. It is as if the two had become in “fact” what Celia had always claimed to be true in rhetoric. To her father, Celia had insisted:

                                                                                          … If she be a traitor
Why so am I. We still have slept together,
Rose at an instant, learn'd, play'd, eat together,
And whereso'er we went, like Juno's swans,
Still we went coupled and inseparable.

(I. iii. 68-72)

A few lines later Celia gently admonishes Rosalind:

CELIA.
I charge thee be not thou more griev'd than I am.
ROSALIND.
I have more cause.
CELIA.
                                                                                          Thou hast not, cousin.
… Rosalind lacks then the love
Which teacheth thee that thou and I are one.

(I. iii. 88-89, 91-92)

That the same imagery of doubling could suggest both conflict and consort, that characters could gain or lose or change their fictional definitions with such surreal ease—all of this points to two essential qualities of As You Like It. In one sense, the play is using whatever theatrical wizardry it can to hold the mirror up to the relativity of human happiness, perception, even identity.¹⁹

Time travels at diverse paces with diverse persons. A well-disposed mind can translate the stubbornness of fortune, just as an ill-disposed one can suck melancholy out of any song as a weasel sucks eggs. For the magical powers of Arden reflect not so much the objective power of nature but the subjective power—and the subjective limits—of a mind athletically engaged:²⁰ of an actor who can conjure a Rosalind or a Ganymede or, for that matter, his very self, in his own person; or a true poet most given to feigning; or a lover whose “affection hath an unknown bottom, like the Bay of Portugal” (IV. i. 197-98); or a skeptic who knows that “men are April when they woo, December when they wed” (IV. i. 139-40); or a clown who could swear all this true by his honor, if he had any. There is, indeed, much virtue in if—and much need. It is only appropriate that at the very end of this play, when discoveries about self and others become more and more certain, the language expressing those discoveries becomes increasingly conditional:

If there be truth in sight, you are my Rosalind.

(V. iv. 118)

or:

If I were a woman, I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me, complexions that liked me, and breaths that I defied not; and I am sure, as many as have good beards, or good faces, or sweet breaths, will, for my kind offer, when I make curtsy, bid me farewell.

(V. iv. 214-20)

And then there is Touchstone's encomium. The 1997 Shakespeare Theatre performance of As You Like It in Washington, D. C., while in many ways an uneven production, nonetheless offered a wonderfully suggestive enactment of Touchstone's set speech on the manners of quarreling, a reading that brought out all the anxious and redemptive elements that commingle in an “if.”²¹ As Touchstone (Robert Sicular) “nominate[s] in order … the degrees of the lie,” he draws about him an audience, a community made of exiles who nonetheless share a delight in the play and wit of Touchstone's folly. But at the very moment of the fable's happy ending (“And they shook hands and swore brothers”), the new bonds—and the performance that conjured them—are threatened as the Duke Senior (Ted van Griethuysen), suddenly breaking away from the circle of listeners, thinks of his “real” enmity with his “real” brother. Pursuing the Duke, Touchstone woos him with the conclusion of his fable: “Your If is the only peacemaker: much virtue in If” (V. iv. 87, 101-02). Touchstone's words are consoling and restorative here, all the more powerful for their open acknowledgment of the conditions that define their limits. In this performance Touchstone's conditional “degrees of the lie” work as an especially sharp yet playful corrective to Jaques' essentialist nomination of the “seven ages of man.”

But the conjuring suggests something else as well. Even for those characters who see themselves most clearly, there are elements of self-estrangement. In the mirroring and the doubling, as well as in the wrestling, there are intimations of strains that will be more fully explored in another comedy, Twelfth Night, the last of its kind.²² These are natural perspectives, that are and are not. Similarly, the transformation from conflict to atonement involves a precipitate of estrangement from someone. The loyalty and generosity Orlando acquires from Adam are essential to the intimacy and reciprocal trust he finally achieves with Rosalind. But one will require something of the other. Similarly, Rosalind's relationship with Celia, her other self, will be a critical part of Rosalind's multiple sense of self: as critic, as mimic, as provocateur, as actor, as lover.²³ Yet the last we see of these friends suggests an ambiguous intimacy. They enter and exit as one, like Juno's swans. Still, their silence haunts our memory of their voluble affability.

When we first meet Rosalind and Celia, Celia is attempting to coax Rosalind into her own proper spirits by “teaching” her “to forget a banished father” in dizzy, mirrored language that allows uncles and fathers to tumble together: “If my uncle thy banished father, had banished thy uncle, the Duke my father, so thou hadst still been with me, I could have taught my love to take thy father for mine” (I. ii. 4, 8-11). Rosalind's answer picks up the spirit of the game: resignation, even a hint of reproach, enlivened by the promise of imaginative play: “Well, I will forget the condition of my estate, to rejoice in yours” (I. ii. 14-15). Later, when choosing her own new identity in Arden, Celia selects “[s]omething that hath a reference to my state: / No longer Celia, but Aliena” (I. iii. 123-24). Her words are deeply suggestive. The near anagrammatic doubling of the two names suggests, not so much a new, as an ambiguous, resonating self. It also suggests another quirky truth this play celebrates: that it is only under the hard conditions of alienation that we ever discover the conditional liberty to name ourselves.

Notes

1. William Shakespeare, As You Like It, The Arden Edition, ed. Agnes Latham (London: Routledge, 1975). All quotations are from this edition and cited parenthetically in the text.

2. The exception, of course, is Jaques. According to Alan Rickman, who played the character in the RSC's 1985 season, Jaques “doesn't change. He starts the play offstage under a tree by a stream, and ends it offstage sitting in a cave” (“Jaques in As You Like It,” in Players of Shakespeare 2: Further Essays in Shakespearean Performance by Players with the Royal Shakespeare Company, eds. Russell Jackson and Robert Smallwood (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988), p. 78. But even Jaques' self-sufficiency has a hint of volatility. Deeply resistant to Arden's charms, he must share the stage with a namesake who modestly helps to fulfill them. Harold Jenkins (“As You Like It,” Shakespeare Survey, 8 [1955], 40-51; rpt. in Shakespeare: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. Leonard F. Dean, [rev. ed. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967], 114-33) is convinced that “these two men—with the same name—were originally meant to be one” (p. 118).

3. Cynthia Marshall, in an unpublished paper, “The Doubled Jaques and Melancholic Traces in As You Like It,” presented at the 1997 meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America, also examines the play's conjurings, its creations and dissolutions of identity and relation but from a Lacanian perspective.

4. A great deal of recent critical discussion has centered on the strategies—usually the failed strategies—of As You Like It to reconcile an individual exploration of self with the mutual discovery of romantic love, both of which are sharply influenced and limited by a third pattern, the process of discovering one's “place” in the patriarchal social structures this play constructs. Louis Adrian Montrose in “‘The Place of a Brother’ in As You Like It: Social Process and Comic Form” (in Materialist Shakespeare: A History, ed. Ivo Kamps [London: Verso, 1995], 39-70) writes of how Shakespeare's plays, especially this one, “explore the difficulty or impossibility of establishing or authenticating a self in a rigorously hierarchical and patriarchal society” (p. 47). See also, among others Barbara J. Bono, “Mixed Gender, Mixed Genre in Shakespeare's As You Like It,” Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History, and Interpretation, ed. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Harvard English Studies, 14 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1986), 189-212; Peter.B. Erickson, “Sexual Politics and the Social Structure in As You Like It,” Patriarchal Structure in Shakespearean Drama (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1985), 22-37, reprinted in Shakespeare's Comedies, ed. Gary Waller (London: Longman, 1991), 156-67; Cynthia Marshall's “The Doubled Jaques” and “Wrestling as Play and Game in As You Like It,” Studies in English Literature, 33 (1993), 265-87. Camille Wells Slights in Shakespeare's Comic Commonwealths (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1993) is somewhat more sanguine. She argues that As You Like It, particularly in the “ritualistic language” of its conclusion, “which subsumes individual voices within the expression of communal solidarity, simultaneously emphasizes individual differences” (p. 212). My argument shares several of Slights' paradoxical premises.

5. See, for example, Sylvan Barnet, “As You Like It on the Stage,” in As You Like It, ed. Albert Gilman (New York: Signet, 1987), 238-50; and James E. Hirsh, The Structure of Shakespearean Scenes (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1981), pp. 114-15. Hirsh also describes a “shared prominence” between Duke Senior and Jaques, two characters often presented as antithetical.

6. Directed by Liviu Ciulei and performed on tour at The Germantown (Tennessee) Performing Arts Center, 29 January 1997.

7. The warrant for such “doubling” of the witty Rosalind and the melancholy Jaques can be seen in Cynthia Marshall's “The Doubled Jaques.” Marshall sees in Rosalind's disguise a simultaneous gain and loss of “self”: “The disguised Rosalind is, or becomes, the real Rosalind. … Melancholy has displaced Rosalind from herself. By means of her banishment and subsequent disguise she recovers her spirits. … Displacement is shown to be the key to characterological recognition” (p. 4). Sophie Thompson, who played Rosalind in the RSC's 1989 production, remembers that “[as] Rosalind I was very interested in Jaques. … I felt Rosalind had a strong sense of melancholy in her, which is why she clued into all those things she hadn't experienced but knew instinctively. This is why Jaques intrigues her …” (“Rosalind [and Celia] in As You Like It,” Players of Shakespeare 3: Further Essays in Shakespearian Performance by Players with the Royal Shakespeare Company, eds. Russell Jackson and Robert Smallwood [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993], p. 83).

8. See D. J. Palmer's “As You Like It and the Idea of Play” in Shakespeare's Wide and Universal Stage, eds. C. B. Cox and D. J. Palmer (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1984), 74-85, on sport's transformations.

9. For alternative readings of the wrestling scene, see Marshall's “Wrestling as Play and Game” and Montrose.

10. John Bowe, “Orlando in As You Like It,” in Players of Shakespeare 1: Essays in Shakespearean Performance by Twelve Players with the Royal Shakespeare Company, ed. Philip Brockbank (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), p. 70. D. J. Palmer also discusses how “[w]restling makes sport out of conflict” (p. 75).

11. Directed by Ralph Alan Cohen and on tour at Jobe Hall Auditorium, Delta State University, Cleveland, Mississippi, 18 April 1996.

12. Directed by Lucy Bailey. The performance I saw was on 8 August 1998.

13. Peter Erickson argues differently that “Rosalind and Orlando approach the forest in strikingly different ways. Rosalind's mission is love. … Orlando, for his part, does not go forward in pursuit of love until after he has become friends with Duke Senior” (p. 226). But while Rosalind may feel something of the contagion of Sylvius's laments—“This shepherd's passion / Is much upon my fashion” (II. iv. 58-59)—Orlando is the last person Rosalind expected to find in Arden, or else she might have packed more than a doublet and hose.

14. John Bowe describes Adam as “a main character and influence in the story of Orlando. … He is the one who is closest to Orlando throughout the first half of the play” (p. 71).

15. John Russell Brown discusses further implications of this term in his 1957 essay “Love's Order and the Judgment of As You Like It,” reprinted in Twentieth Century Interpretations of “As You Like It,” ed. Jay L. Halio (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1968), p. 80.

16. Sophie Thompson writes that “I found it was important when I played Rosalind to remember that she doesn't go into the forest in order to meet Orlando” (p. 81).

17. See Slights on the influence of Celia and Adam in allowing Rosalind and Orlando “to form recognizable social identities” (p. 204).

18. Fiona Shaw and Juliet Stevenson in “Celia and Rosalind in As You Like It” in Players of Shakespeare 2: Further Essays in Shakespearean Performance by Players with the Royal Shakespeare Company, eds. Russell Jackson and Robert Smallwood (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988) interpret this silence not so much in terms of “separation” but as a signal for a metamorphosis the play itself undergoes: “the play becomes another beast, a creature of new dimensions into which each character's separate through line or private experience is absorbed” (p. 70).

19. See especially John Russell Brown; Helen Gardner's 1959 essay “As You Like It,” reprinted in As You Like It, ed. Albert Gilman (New York: Signet, 1987), 212-30; and Alexander Leggatt, Shakespeare's Comedy of Love (New York: Methuen, 1974), 185-219.

20. See Harold Jenkins. Susan Snyder's “As You Like It: A Modern Perspective” in As You Like It, eds. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine, The New Folger Shakespeare Library (New York: Washington Square, 1997), 231-42, argues that “the landscape created by the play's dialogue is a kind of composite literary wilderness … a construction of the mind” that provides the freedom of a “time-out” (p. 232-33). For a more skeptical view of Arden's transformative powers, see Erickson: “We are apt to assume that the green world is more free than it actually is” (p. 158).

21. Directed by Lawrence Boswell at the Landsburgh Theatre, Washington, D.C., 27 March 1997. See, for examples the reviews of Lloyd Rose, “As You Like It: A Romp in the Woods,” Washington Post, 18 Feb. 1997, D1+; and Bob Mondello “So That's the Way You Like It,” City Paper, 20 Feb. 1997, n. pag.

22. See Anne Barton's “As You Like It and Twelfth Night: Shakespeare's Sense of an Ending” in Shakespearian Comedy, Stratford-Upon-Avon Studies 14 (New York: Crane, 1972), 160-80, for an extended discussion of the differences in the manner in which As You Like It and Twelfth Night create dramatic forms that contain within their own designs elements of fragmentation.

23. Many critics, especially in recent years, have argued that whatever discoveries we finally make about the rich resourcefulness of Rosalind's subjectivity, particularly as she defines her gendered self, are seriously undermined by the fact that Shakespeare wrote the part of Rosalind for a male actor. See, for example, Jean E. Howard's The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1994), 118-20. But that “fact” only makes the implications of the epilogue all the more slyly consonant with the spirit of this play. For the actor's own “self” here is a role he has constructed, composed of many simples, for the purpose of the epilogue. The boy actor, as he speaks these lines, is performing. He is at play, in every sense of the word.