SOURCE: Hamilton, Sharon. “Daughters Who Act in Their Fathers' Stead: Portia (The Merchant of Venice), Viola (Twelfth Night), and Rosalind (As You Like It).” In Shakespeare's Daughters, pp. 125-50. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, 2003.

[In the following excerpt, Hamilton discusses Rosalind in terms of her role as the authority figure who orchestrates much of the action in As You Like It.]

Rosalind, like her sister heroines, is made to fend for herself in the world. She, too, chooses male disguise as protection and release. Because her father is not dead but merely exiled, however, we get to see his influence at firsthand. More than the other two comedies, As You Like It anticipates the romances, particularly The Tempest and The Winter's Tale, in the idealization of a pastoral place where kindness and generosity prevail. The tone is more high-spirited and less nostalgic than that of these later plays, however. Perhaps the reason is that the focus is on the present generation, the resilient daughter rather than the yearning father. Duke Senior does not have Prospero's magic powers or his propensity to orchestrate his daughter's future. But, like the magician, he does act as benevolent overseer and well-wisher, as well as wise mentor of the man she loves. He, too, models the positive values that allow her to flourish in adversity and that help bring about the happy resolution of her conflicts. But it is Rosalind who dons the costume of son and heir and directs the course of her own future.

Like most of Shakespeare's comedies, As You Like It begins with a potentially tragic situation. Duke Senior has been banished by his “brother and usurper” (the description given is in the cast of characters). This is also the case in The Tempest, except that here the evil brother, Duke Frederick, has a daughter instead of a son. At first, Rosalind's lot is difficult but bearable. She is “no less beloved of her uncle than his own daughter” (I.i.103-04), and she and her cousin Celia are devoted to each other. In spite of her conflicting loyalties, Rosalind is reasonably content at Duke Frederick's court. Soon, however, the paranoid usurper turns against her. He banishes her, for no “fault” except, as he charges, “Thou art thy father's daughter, there's enough” (I.iii.42, 54). He ignores Rosalind's sensible objection: “Treason is not inherited, my lord.” Her very “patience” under adversity, he argues, wins her favor with “the people,” and so lessens his own daughter's popularity. Celia will “show more bright and seem more virtuous” (ll. 74-77) when Rosalind is gone, he says malevolently.

The duke has reckoned without the cousins' devotion, however. Celia, troubled before this outburst by her father's “rough and envious disposition,” has already sworn to restore to Rosalind and Duke Senior what Frederick took “perforce” (I.ii.17). This, she stresses, is for her a question of “honor.” Now, at the moment of crisis, Celia does not hesitate to side with Rosalind. She proposes that they flee the court together, following Duke Senior into the Forest of Arden. “Let my father seek another heir,” she says defiantly, arriving at once at the surest way both to wound him and to assert her own will. In rejecting her own tainted legacy, Celia maintains boldly, she goes “To liberty and not to banishment” (l. 134). Rosalind, after a moment's demur, accepts the offer gladly.

The young women, though callow, are resourceful. They plan to take their “wealth” and their “jewels” to sustain them. They also plan to “steal” Touchstone, the court fool, to give them “comfort” (I.iii.125-26) on their travels. Still, they know that there is “danger” for “maids as [they] are” to leave the protection of the court (104-05). Both their riches and their “beauty” could tempt thieves, and the jester is no fighter. Rosalind, the taller, declares that she will “suit me in all parts like a man.” Like Viola's, her male disguise will include a sword. Though in her “heart … lies hidden … woman's fear,” she claims to be no weaker than many “mannish cowards” who have only “a swashing and a mannish outside” (ll. 115-17). This is the joke that Shakespeare develops more fully in Viola's disrupted duel with Sir Andrew. Rosalind, too, will come to a test of “masculine” prowess. But at this point in the play, her donning of “doublet and hose” gives her the swagger needed to “show itself courageous to petticoat” (II.iv.6-7). When, after hours of weary trudging, Celia loses heart, Rosalind—alias Ganymede—first bolsters her spirit with brave speeches. Then she takes the practical step of procuring them shelter. From a local shepherd, she buys “the cottage, pasture, and the flock” of his master, and so assumes the masculine prerogative of owning property.

But Rosalind's heart, like Viola's and Portia's, remains feminine. Her emotional life is focused not on her dire predicament or her banished father, but on romantic love. Shakespeare is careful to establish her mindset before she changes into male attire. When Celia bids Rosalind to “be merry” in spite of Duke Frederick's malevolence, the light-hearted topic that Rosalind proposes to distract them is “falling in love.” At her first meeting with the handsome, stalwart young wrestler, Orlando, Cupid's arrow strikes with its usual speed. By the time that he has defeated the duke's champion, the brutish Charles, Rosalind is deeply smitten. She “gives [him a] chain” [stage direction, I.ii.226] and hints strongly that her heart goes with it. Orlando, although equally attracted to her, is paralyzed with self-consciousness. Years of oppression at his jealous brother's hands have deprived him of the courtier's easy eloquence. After Rosalind has gone off, he despairs that he has appeared before the lively young woman as “a mere lifeless block” with “weights upon [his] tongue” (ll. 232, 238). But the whole structure of the comedy works to confirm Rosalind's intuitive sense that Orlando is her rightful mate.

Crucial to bringing about their union is the influence of the benevolent father. That figure includes not only Duke Senior but also Orlando's late father and Shakespeare himself as creator and orchestrator. The first speech of the play is Orlando's, and its subject is his spiritual patrimony. As “the youngest son of Sir Rowland de Boys,” he says, he has within him “the spirit of [his] father” (I.i.20). That legacy makes him chafe against the “servitude” in which Oliver, his cruel elder brother, keeps him. Oliver has seized his inheritance and refused to school or train him. Orlando confronts Oliver with these charges, whose response is to scorn and strike him. Orlando, more than a physical match for his persecutor, “seizes him” and threatens to throttle him. He refrains from carrying out the threat, however, partly at the behest of old Adam, the loyal family retainer, who pleads, “For your father's remembrance, be at accord” (ll. 58-59). Oliver, however, does not deserve accord. He is, as he soon accuses Orlando of being, “a secret and villainous contriver against his natural brother” (ll. 152-53). Hypocritical and envious, he arranges the wrestling match with the aim of having the burly Charles murder the young man. His motives are as baseless and as obsessive as Duke Frederick's toward his brother: “My soul, yet I know not why, hates nothing more than he” (ll. 152-53). This generation of brothers, however, will be redeemed: the spirit of Sir Rowland is moving events toward benevolent and happy ends.

First, Orlando wins the match, soundly defeating Charles and gaining Rosalind's admiration and love in the process. Obstacles only enhance this initial attraction. The paranoid Duke Frederick, while praising Orlando at first as “a gallant youth,” sees his heritage as a reason to nullify all reward: “The world esteemed thy father honorable / But I did find him still mine enemy” (I.ii.206-07), he pronounces. Scolding Orlando for not having “another father,” he sweeps off with all his train. Rosalind is stung into sympathetic defiance. She overcomes her maiden modesty to solace the young man: “My father loved Sir Rowland as his soul, / And all the world was of my father's mind” (ll. 216-17). Later, when Celia expresses amazement at Rosalind's falling so suddenly “into so strong a liking with old Sir Rowland's youngest son,” Rosalind retorts with the same point that she made to Orlando: that her own father “loved his father dearly” (I.iii.25-28). Celia calls this a silly motive. But in Shakespeare's plays, as in real life, affinities often extend through the generations. Both absent fathers are giving a symbolic blessing to Rosalind and Orlando's union.

Old Adam is the living confirmation of Orlando's benevolent parentage. He addresses the young man affectionately—“O you memory / Of old Sir Rowland”—and commends him to his face as “gentle, strong, and valiant” (II.iii.3-4, 6). Adam has come to warn his favorite not to return to his brother's house. Oliver has reacted to the wrestling victory by cutting Orlando off entirely, and the young man can see beggary or theft as the only courses left to him. But Adam, emblem of “the constant service of the antique world,” gives Orlando his life savings and pledge to go with him and defend him. The nostalgic strain that permeates the romances sounds in this episode: the longing for a “golden world” (I.i.111) in which such qualities as Adam represents, “truth and loyalty” (II.iii.70), can thrive. So Orlando, too, escapes from the corrupt court to the Forest of Arden. There the prevailing presence is another father, Rosalind's, who lives like “Robin Hood of England” in a spirit of amity and trust.

Unlike Prospero, Duke Senior does not have supernatural powers, nor does he act as a director of his daughter's courtship. But through both example and direct intervention in Orlando's plight, Duke Senior helps bring about the happy resolution. In the face of betrayal and exile, he has remained exuberant and resourceful. His first speech in the play contains the maxim that he lives by: “Sweet are the uses of adversity” (II.i.12). He tells his “brothers in exile,” former courtiers who have joined him in the forest, that they are well rid of the “painted pomp” of the “envious court” (ll. 1-4). He extols the benefits of their pastoral life, friendship, simplicity, and integrity, and asserts that the message of the greenwood is to find “good in everything.”

For all his optimism, the duke is no fool or weakling. He has drawn men to his service because he understands their needs and treats them justly. Those qualities are evident in his treatment of the desperate Orlando. The young man, in anguish at old Adam's collapse from hunger and exhaustion, invades the Duke's rural banquet “with sword drawn” and demands that the courtiers “eat no more” (II.vii.88). The sardonic Jaques responds with wry witticisms at the aggressor's expense. The Duke, in contrast, is perceptive and generous. He asks Orlando what has caused his lapse in “civility”—“distress” or “rude despis[ing] of good manners” (ll. 91-93). The young man responds that he is not brutish by nature; still, however, he is threatening them with death. Duke Senior teaches him a lesson in “gentleness.” “What would you have?” he asks, and offers, “Sit down and feed, and welcome to our table” (ll. 101, 103). All the fire goes out of Orlando's rage. He expresses amazement at the Duke's courtesy. In an ironic reversal, he has found in the wild none of the savagery that he has come to expect at the court. The lesson takes instant effect: “I blush, and hide my sword” (l. 119), he says. Orlando then shows his own altruism by refusing to “touch a bit” (l. 133) of the food until he has fed Adam. He thanks the Duke and wishes that he be “blest” for his kindness. This first meeting between father and future son-in-law confirms their mutual sympathies and their shared belief in “sacred pity” (l. 123).

When Orlando returns with Adam, Duke Senior continues to play the spiritual guide and perfect host. He refrains from questioning the young man and provides music while the famished pair eat. The song that accompanies their feast concerns the lowest sin in the Duke's credo: “man's ingratitude.” No “sting” of “winter winds” is “so sharp / As friend remembered not” (II.vii.174-76; 188-89). The scene taking place against that musical backdrop demonstrates the exact opposite: Orlando “whisper[s]” (l. 192) his story and the Duke recognizes his resemblance to Sir Rowland. Dropping the disguise of the forester, he confirms what Rosalind has said earlier about the friendship in the older generation: “I am the Duke / That loved your father” (ll. 195-96). All the humane values lacking in the bitter song—generosity, loyalty, gratitude—inform this new bond.

The Duke's influence extends beyond this initial meeting. It is in going later on “to attend the Duke at dinner” (IV.i.164) that Orlando stumbles upon the great test of the old values. The treacherous Oliver, having been ordered by Duke Frederick to capture Orlando “dead or living” (III.i.6), has gone into the Forest of Arden to hunt him down. But it is the “most unnatural” brother (IV.iii.123) who turns out to be in mortal danger. Orlando stumbles upon him asleep under a tree, menaced first by a “green and gilded snake” and then by a starving lioness. Orlando unwittingly frightens off the serpent, and then is twice tempted to leave Oliver to the beast's clutches. But “kindness, nobler than revenge” (l. 129), wins out, and he attacks the lioness with his bare hands.

Shakespeare wisely chose to narrate rather than dramatize this fairy tale rescue, and to have the would-be victim relate the “unscene.” The battle between ruthless beast and dauntless young hero would be hard to stage convincingly. So too would be the idyllic outcome: Oliver's repentance and the reconciliation between the brothers. Some twelve years later in Shakespeare's career, in The Tempest, a parallel conflict is less perfectly resolved. Prospero forgives his evil brother, but Antonio does not repent and the wronged Duke admits that he remains perfidious. Despite the nostalgic tone of the romance, it is darker than the comedy, where the brother's conversion is instantaneous and complete. Again, the prevailing benevolent force in As You Like It is “the gentle Duke.” In another off-stage scene, Orlando leads Oliver to his new mentor, who provides Oliver with “fresh array” and “commit[s]” him to his “brother's love” (IV.iii.144-45). Only then does the brave Orlando reveal the wound that he received. He also shows the newfound trust in his brother that the Duke has urged. He sends Oliver in quest of “his Rosalind,” bearing the “napkin,” “dyed in his blood” (ll. 155-56) as evidence of the reason for his missed appointment.

The encounter of messenger and recipient marks the turning point in the play. Rosalind, hearing from Oliver the story of her lover's courage and seeing the red sign of his suffering, “swoons” (stage direction, IV.iii.157). It is the undeniable proof of her love, her body's declaration of her bond with Orlando. While she does not then confess her true identity to Oliver, she cannot keep up her insouciant front, and he chides her with “lack[ing] a man's heart” (ll. 164-65). Celia, worried about her cousin's pallor, cuts short Rosalind's feeble pretense of “counterfeiting” and insists on leading her home to rest. So it is Duke Senior who has, wittingly or not, brought the lovers to this mutual sympathy. He has rescued Orlando, confirmed the young man's native integrity, sanctioned his heritage, and provided Oliver with the succor that leads to his repentance and the brothers' reconciliation. In all this time, he has not interacted directly with his daughter. Does he know of her plight?

The play offers only elliptical evidence. Rosalind recounts for Celia's amusement another unscene in which she met the Duke in the forest. He asked about her “parentage,” she answered wittily it was “as good as his,” and “he laughed and let me go” (III.iv.32-34). If he guesses her identity, he does not try to force her hand, nor does she, despite her precarious circumstances, choose to reveal herself and cling to him. To Celia, she claims to be bored with this subject: “What talk we of fathers when there is such a man as Orlando?” (ll. 34-35) she demands. Rosalind has her father's independent spirit and single-minded sense of purpose. She feels no need of his direct aid. In her pursuit of the man she loves, “truly the lady fathers herself” (Much Ado About Nothing, I.i.98).

What does Rosalind accomplish in donning the guise of Ganymede? She gets Orlando to let down his guard; after his isolated upbringing, he is comfortable with other men in a way that he cannot be with women. She has a chance to try out her theories, born of self-doubt, on the fickleness of romantic attachment. Most important, she can test the depth of his love for Rosalind. Seeing the trees of the forest laden with verses written in her honor, Rosalind cannot doubt that the writer is infatuated. The poems commend Rosalind's “beauty,” “majesty,” and “modesty.” But, as she may sense, these are superficial qualities, their praise inspired by one brief meeting. Besides, Touchstone is present at their discovery to mock the “false gallop” of their faulty meter and to undermine their rapturous tone with a bawdy parody. Rosalind is equally contemptuous of the anonymous versifier—until Celia begins to hint that it is Orlando. For all of Rosalind's boyish bravado, she does not have, as she tells her cousin, “doublet and hose in [her] disposition” (III.ii.186-87). Usually the soul of wit, Rosalind loses all sense of humor on this subject. “The devil take thy mockery!” she exclaims to the bemused Celia, and then appeals to her sisterhood for sincere understanding: “Speak sad brow and true maid.”

When Orlando himself appears, Rosalind's immediate instinct is to mask all these hopes and doubts. Ganymede's comic misogyny is the perfect disguise. In two parallel scenes, “he” lists the “giddy offenses” (III.ii.330) supposedly typical of women and defines love as “merely a madness”: “changeable,” “proud,” “fantastical” (ll. 376; 385-86). Ganymede's avowed purpose is to cure Orlando of this insanity by posing as his Rosalind and enacting all the shallowness and inconstancy of his beloved. The actual effect of this daring game is to keep pushing Orlando to greater protestations of devotion without risking her own self-esteem. As Rosalind admits, in a delicious double entendre, a woman is more apt to believe her lover when he professes that he feels ardor “than to confess she does” (l. 367). She treats Orlando's protest that he will die if his love goes unrequited with sardonic dismissal. He is taking too exalted a view, she maintains mischievously. The accounts of the tragic fates of legendary lovers are “lies”: “Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love” (IV.i.96-98).

Rosalind even goes so far as to put Orlando through a mock nuptial, with Celia acting as parson. Ganymede undercuts every protest of constancy with arch jibes at both sexes. Men, she claims, are “April when they woo, December when they wed” (IV.i.134-35). Rosalind, she predicts, will welcome Orlando to her bed “and twenty such.” She will then use her “wit” to exculpate herself, for, she warns, “You shall never take her without her answer unless you take her without her tongue” (ll. 157-59). Orlando is shocked by these quips, but his own constancy is unshaken. As proof, he promises her “with no less religion than if thou wert indeed my Rosalind” (ll. 181-82) to keep his vow of meeting her again at two o'clock—and goes off to his fateful rescue of Oliver.

Celia, a silent witness to these encounters, is outraged by Rosalind's “male” chauvinism: “You have simply misused our sex in your love-prate” (IV.i.185-86), she charges. But Rosalind is unrepentant—in, fact, exhilarated. “O coz, coz, coz, my pretty little coz,” she chants, “that thou didst know how many fathom deep I am in love!” (ll. 189-90). For Orlando has passed every test of faith: he is as sincere and devoted as she could wish. Shakespeare implies here, as in Much Ado, that the woman's initial fears about infidelity are not groundless. The bawdy Touchstone and the cynical Jaques are present in the greenwood to remind us of the worldly take on romantic idealism. As You Like It, like all the comedies, is full of jokes about cuckoldry. Even the song about the killing of the deer, which follows the love scene, has as chorus a bawdy pun: “the horn, the horn, the lusty horn” (IV.ii.17), it reiterates, is every man's fate.

Rosalind's depiction of this worst-case scenario acts as a sort of charm against such cynical resignation. She is much more of a realist about love than her starry-eyed suitor. She wants to believe in Orlando's fidelity, but she will not allow herself to do so without proof. Her astuteness about the nature of love is shown in her reaction to the shepherd Silvius's infatuation with the scornful Phebe. Rosalind is frank about the marriage mart, advising the uncouth Phebe: “Sell when you can, you are not for all markets” (III.v.60). At the same time, she urges her to “thank heaven, fasting, for a good man's love” (l. 58). When Silvius meekly accepts Phebe's continued abuse, Rosalind reacts with scorn. She cuts short Celia's expression of sympathy. “He deserves no pity,” she pronounces, and she berates him to his face as “a tame snake” (IV.iii.67, 71). The phallic pun suggests both Rosalind's worldly knowledge and her respect for manly assertiveness.

Orlando has appeared at first to fail the final test of his love by missing his appointment. In fact, the episode confirms every aspect of his worth. He has rescued his brother, borne his wound in silence, and remembered his vow to his beloved. His last conscious thought is of her: the reformed Oliver reports that Orlando “cried, in fainting, upon Rosalind” (IV.iii.150). Rosalind's corresponding faint at the sight of the napkin “dyed in his blood” (l. 156) is irrefutable proof of their bond.

When Rosalind meets Orlando again, he has regained his strength and she has recovered her insouciance. The news of Oliver and Celia's sudden infatuation—this is the play that cites Marlowe's line “Who ever loved that loved not at first sight” (III.v.81)—sets Rosalind happily scheming anew. First, she demands that Orlando swear by the sincerity of his faint: “If you do love Rosalind so near the heart as your gesture cries it out” (V.ii.59-60). Then she undertakes the role of “magician” when she claims to have means to grant each couple their hearts' desire. Rosalind is no Prospero; she does not possess actual magic powers. But the forces of both fate and inventiveness are with her. In this play, it is the daughter, not the father, who acts as matchmaker. Duke Senior plays a benevolent but supporting role.

At the ceremony, the Duke is still the nominal authority figure. He has been invited by Orlando, who gratefully recalls his forest host and offers to “bid the Duke to the nuptial” (V.ii.41). But it is Rosalind who is in charge. Duke Senior again fails to recognize his daughter, still in disguise, though he does “remember in this shepherd boy / Some lively touches” of Rosalind (V.iv.26-27). Ganymede asks for his formal consent to the banns: “You say, if I bring in your Rosalind, / You will bestow her on Orlando here?” (ll. 6-7). But it is she who has arranged the quadruple wedding, of Oliver and Celia, Silvius and Phebe, Touchstone and Audrey, and, of course, herself and Orlando, and she who conducts the ritual. First she goes off to don her feminine garb. Then to each couple, she recites the terms of their marriage contract as a final test of commitment. To her own father and fiancé, she makes identical vows—“To you I give myself, for I am yours” (ll. 110-11), a reminder of what Desdemona calls the daughter's “divided duty.”

Larger forces are present to second Rosalind's arrangement of these “bond[s] of board and bed”: Hymen, god of marriage, appears to join “eight that must take hands … in Hymen's bands” (V.iv.122-23). The joyous celebration is further blessed by the bounty of Providence. The third son of Sir Rowland de Boys, absent during the rest of the play, enters as messenger-ex-machina to announce the miraculous transformation of Duke Frederick. Entering the forest to exact revenge, the evil duke has come under Arden's benevolent influence and undergone a religious conversion. Deeply repentant, he restores his brother's usurped dukedom and retires to a life of prayer and contemplation. Duke Senior, bountiful as ever, promises that all will “share the good of [his] returned fortune” (l. 168). Even before this news, he has welcomed Celia, daughter of his treacherous brother, “in no less degree” (l. 142) than his own daughter. His warmth and optimism permeate the forest, which he celebrates as a place of things “well begun and well begot” (l. 165). He urges all to join in “our rustic revelry.” Even the malcontent Jaques is moved to compliment his liege lord's “patience” and “virtue” as “well deserv[ing]” his “former honor” (ll. 171, 180-81). But it is Rosalind, in the Epilogue, who gets the last word. In As You Like It, the father is an essential supporting figure, but, like The Merchant of Venice and Twelfth Night, this is the daughter's play.