SOURCE: Strout, Nathaniel. “As You Like It, Rosalynde, and Mutuality.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 41, no. 2 (spring 2001): 277-95.

[In the following essay, Strout maintains that in As You Like It Shakespeare advocated the concept of mutuality through his characters' expressions of love and through the choices that they make. The critic contrasts this notion of mutuality with Thomas Lodge's Rosalynde (1590), which reinforces a patriarchal order based on rigid, absolute human behavior.]

Over the years, critics have noted a variety of thematic oppositions in As You Like It: fortune versus nature, country versus court, a view of time “as the medium of decay” versus time “as the medium of fulfillment,” “contrary notions of identity,” “the conspicuous narrative artifice of the opening scenes” versus the “equally prominent theatrical artifice in the forest scenes,” two different “manipulative modes,” and, most recently, the concerns of a “generally privileged audience” versus “the concerns of wage laborers, servants, and clowns.”¹ Even the play's title seems to refer to an opposition between audience and author, leading George Bernard Shaw, for one, to read it as a “snub” of the audience's taste: here is what you, the spectators, like (but I, the playwright, do not).² Are the oppositions placed in a kind of balance by the end of the play (at least in the character of Rosalind), dissolved by the play's skeptical treatment of seemingly clear-cut distinctions, or are they necessarily partial and constrained gestures toward recognizing the value of what might have seemed to Shakespeare and his audience to be culturally subversive attitudes?³ It all appears to hinge on whether we think Shakespearean comedy creates harmony among discordant elements, acts like a solvent on social constructions of difference, or serves to contain (though not always completely) the threats to the dominant social and cultural order its characters might sometimes express or embody.

None of these formulations, however, addresses what I would argue is the most important aspect of drama: the dynamic nature of the relationship between audience and play, spectator and actor. A performance in a theater, after all, is a mutual experience—not necessarily an equal one on both sides, but one in which two different groups respond to each other as the play unfolds. A responsive audience will help actors perform better. Good acting will help an audience become better involved in what they are watching. Whether As You Like It received applause at the Globe depended on the skill of the actors to produce enjoyment for the audience, and the enjoyment of the audience rewarded the skill of the actors.

Applauding the actors also meant, of course, that the audience was participating in any number of theatrical conventions, not just the convention that applause expresses the pleasure one has received from a performance, but also such basic conventions as boys playing female roles, commoners playing dukes, and the same stage serving as court and as forest. It is currently fashionable to treat any awareness within a work of its foundational conventions as automatically reflecting deep skepticism about their status and value. But to note the conventional aspects of a human activity may merely be to record its very nature. Just as theatrical performances rely on conventions to be successful, so too do certain social performances—marriage, for instance. To the mutual relationship between actor and audience, I suggest, As You Like It parallels the mutual relationship between lovers, a relationship which, if it is to end with the couple getting married, similarly depends on conventions being accepted and experiences being shared, especially in Tudor and Stuart England, when “from contact to contract, from good liking to final agreement, most couples passed through a recognizable series of steps.”⁴ The play, in other words, and, as we shall see, in marked contrast to Thomas Lodge's Rosalynde (1590), its main source, establishes connections between past mutual interactions and future mutual outcomes: Rosalind and Orlando's liking for each other leads to their becoming man and wife; our liking for the play and its players leads to our applause at the conclusion of the performance.

One way to connect the past to the future is through the use of narratives, which bring the past into the present so that characters (and audiences) can respond to it. Shakespearean drama typically includes many reports of off-stage events and many accounts of what we are to imagine as having happened in the past lives of characters.⁵As You Like It was once criticized on the grounds that the beginning of the play relies too much on characters narrating background that their on-stage listeners either already know (Orlando telling Adam about his past relations with Oliver) or do not at that moment need to know (Charles telling Oliver about recent events at court), but narratives occur throughout As You Like It, not just in the first scenes, suggesting that narration is not opposed to the play's theatrical core but central to it.⁶ There are, for example, several accounts, like those in the first scene, that describe events or supposed events from a time before the play begins, including Celia's eight-line description of how Rosalind and she came to be such close friends that they are “like Juno's swans”; Touchstone's nine lines recalling his love for Jane Smile; Rosalind's fifteen-line fiction (as Ganymede) of her curing a youth in love; and Touchstone's seventeen-line tale of the duel he had “like to have fought.”⁷ There are also at least seven narratives of recent off-stage events, all but one delivered in the forest: in I.ii Le Beau narrates in ten lines the triple success of “Charles, the Duke's wrastler” (line 126); in II.i a lord takes thirty-four lines to describe how he and Amiens overheard Jaques “weeping and commenting / Upon the sobbing deer” (lines 65-6); in II.vii Jaques excitedly recounts for twenty-two lines his finding “a fool i' th' forest” (line 12); in III.ii Celia's narrative to Rosalind of how she came across Orlando “under a tree, like a dropp'd acorn” (line 235), never gets further than two short sentences, thanks to Rosalind's interruptions and the entrance of Orlando himself; in III.iv Rosalind tells Celia in four lines that she “met the Duke yesterday, and had much question with him” (lines 34-5) but did not reveal herself to her father; in IV.iii Oliver narrates his rescue from a lion by Orlando, a story of fifty lines; and in V.iv the second brother reports in a dozen lines the conversion of Duke Frederick and his companions “both from his enterprise and from the world” (line 162).

From beginning to end, then, in the court and in the forest, the characters of As You Like It keep telling stories to each other, enlarging the imaginative world of the play beyond the visible stage, both in space and in time. For Stephen B. Dobranski, the result is an increase in the illusion of realism: in his plays, Shakespeare “convinces us of the worlds that he creates by intimating suggestive details of his characters' past experience.”⁸ The details also help establish and reinforce the importance of mutuality. Lawrence Danson has argued that in Shakespearean comedy, and especially in As You Like It, “Shakespeare discovers the self in the matrix of the family.”⁹ To place a character in a family is to give him or her the illusion of a past life growing up in mutual relationships with parents, siblings, and relatives. Celia, for example, explains her present affection for Rosalind by stressing her prior mutual interactions with her cousin:

                                                                      We still have slept together,
Rose at an instant, learn'd, play'd, eat together,
And wheresoe'er we went, like Juno's swans,
Still we went coupled and inseparable.

(I.iii.73-6)

Significantly, though, even Touchstone and Jaques, neither of whom is connected in the play to a family, are given past lives. Touchstone's, perhaps, is a joke: his love of Jane Smile and his avoiding a duel may merely be the court jester's comic fictions. Duke Senior's response to Jaques, on the other hand, when Jaques wishes for the satirical “liberty” (II.vii.47) of a professional fool, accuses him of forgetting his past, of forgetting what he used to be like himself (II.vii.64-9), an exchange that can otherwise seem “puzzling.”¹⁰ What we have done to and with others sometimes enables our subsequent actions, sometimes restricts them, and sometimes leads to completely opposite behavior on our part: Oliver can change for the better in the forest; Duke Frederick can change for the worse in the court when he suddenly banishes Rosalind.

That actions in the present are influenced by mutual interactions in the past may not seem a remarkable observation about a work by the author of Hamlet, but it is one of the important ways Shakespeare transformed aspects of Lodge's Rosalynde into As You Like It. Most studies of the relationship of the play to this source have focused on how the details of the prose romance are modified in the light of “the leaner efficiency which drama demands” or on showing “how little, in spite of the general similarity of the outlines, Shakespeare actually owed to Lodge.”¹¹ The latter efforts, in turn, have led to locating the complexities of As You Like It in works and writers more sophisticated than Rosalynde and its author: in John Lyly's treatment of boy actors playing girls disguised as boys in Gallathea, for example, or in Sir Philip Sidney's artistically self-conscious treatment of pastoral conventions in the Arcadia, or in Rabelais's subversion of the conventional as mediated through the works of Sir John Harington.¹²

But a source can influence a work to be different along a common axis as well as to be similar. Looked at in this way, As You Like It is a reaction against two notable aspects of Lodge's narrative: its understanding of social relations and its presentation of how people explain the ways they act. In Rosalynde, male concerns are so much more important than female ones that the latter are effectively excluded from consideration by the time the work ends, and human behavior is repeatedly explained not as a reaction to what other people have done or how they feel about each other, but by reference to long lists of “infallible precepts” that are said to determine our actions.¹³ To Shakespeare, on the other hand, love between men and women is grounded in mutual, not just masculine, behavior, and what has happened between people helps make possible what will happen.

In Lodge, a common explanation for a character's actions is some sort of variation on the claim that “nature must have her course” (p. 76), a claim asserted by the narrator, Adam, Alinda, Saladyne, and Rosalind, often in combination with equally deterministic proverbs, as in the narrator's “fire cannot be hid in the straw nor the nature of man so concealed, but at last it will have his course” (p. 8). The even more frequent euphuistic lists of explanatory analogies have a similar effect, as when Alinda teases Rosalind about her love for Rosader: “The wind cannot be tied within his quarter, the sun shadowed with a veil, oil hidden in water, nor love kept out of a woman's looks” (pp. 103-4). Also similar in effect is the recurring use of the myth of Ulysses and the sirens, which is applied by the narrator and six different characters to describe either the impossibility (the sirens being so alluring) or the effort (Ulysses having had to tie himself to the mast) of resisting the nearly irresistible, variously said to be men's desire to love women, Rosader's complaints about being mistreated by his brother Saladyne, Venus, Rosalind's voice, the idea of brotherly concord as urged by Rosader's and Saladyne's father, untrustworthy male lovers, and the pleasure women receive from men's wit. As this evidence suggests, Lodge's characters feel hemmed in by powerful forces, especially by the force of love, and, like Ulysses, they feel they must face these forces on their own. Love, declares Lodge's Phoebe to Rosalind's father, “whatsoever he sets down for justice, be it never so unjust, the sentence cannot be reversed; women's fancies lend favours not ever by desert, but as they are enforced by their desires; for fancy is tied to the wings of fate; and what the stars decree, stands for an infallible doom” (p. 155).

The trouble with such absolute claims, analogies, precepts, principles, and rules is that they impose an impossible rigidity on human behavior. As You Like It, as Helen Whall has shown, depicts the difference between mistakenly thinking one is “directly receiving infallible doctrines” and accurately recognizing that using analogies is inherently inconclusive.¹⁴ To liken one thing to another does not make one thing into the other. And, as Maura Kuhn has shown, the word if, which occurs more frequently in As You Like It than in any other drama by Shakespeare, both promises a consequence (if that is true, then this will happen) and permits alternatives to be imagined.¹⁵ On the one hand, that is, Rosalind (as Ganymede) can promise Orlando that “if you will be married to-morrow, you shall; and to Rosalind, if you will” (V.ii.72-4). On the other hand, Touchstone can use the word if to demonstrate how quarrels may be broken off thanks to the capacity of a conditional construction to raise new possibilities: “when the parties were met themselves, one of them thought but of an If, as, ‘If you said so, then I said so’; and they shook hands and swore brothers. Your If is the only peacemaker; much virtue in If” (V.iv.99-103). In Lodge's Rosalynde, words such as fortune and fate outnumber instances of if; in As You Like It, the reverse is the case, and by a wide margin.¹⁶

A determinism such as Lodge's, it is true, is vividly expressed in As You Like It by Jaques when, after declaring that “All the world's a stage” (II.vii.139), he invokes another contemporary commonplace: the inevitable chronological succession of the seven ages of man.¹⁷ To Jaques, the future always holds nothing more than “second childishness, and mere oblivion” (II.vii.165), a vision of human experience that, as Helen Gardner noted, leaves out any mention of “love and companionship, sweet society.”¹⁸ In fact, although the speech seems broadly inclusive at the outset—“all the men and women” (II.vii.140)—it narrows quickly to the life of a single male: “And one man in his time plays many parts” (II.vii.142). Even more telling, its list of roles—infant, schoolboy, lover, soldier, justice, old man, senile old man—is made narrower still by its exclusion of the two male roles in relation to women that are played, or that will be played, by the other main male characters in As You Like It—the roles of husband and of father. A passage from a 1605 letter by Harington suggests that pursuing the analogy between life and drama did not require the exclusion of such roles: “the world is a stage and we that lyve in yt are all stage players … I playd my chyldes part happily, the schollar and students part to neglygently, the sowldyer and cowrtyer faythfully, the husband lovingly, the contryman not basely nor corruptly.”¹⁹ Because Harington was writing about himself in this letter, it is appropriate that he mentioned only male activities. Jaques makes a universal assertion about “all the men and women,” yet limits their mutual interactions to “the infant / Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms” (II.vii.143-4) and the lover writing poems “to his mistress' eyebrow” (II.vii.149).

Indeed, women are present in Jaques' list only as those two possessive adjectives. Another contemporary use of the theatrical analogy can once again help us see that Shakespeare has constructed the speech so that Jaques ignores any potential for mutuality. Thomas Heywood's prefatory poem to An Apology for Actors (1612) declares that “All man haue parts, and each man acts his owne,” but then goes on to assign some roles to women that involve their interacting with men:

She a chaste Lady acteth all her life,
A wanton Curtezan another playes.
This, couets marriage loue, that, nuptial strife.(20)

In As You Like It, after Hymen has blessed the four pairs of newlyweds near the end of the play, Jaques acknowledges marriage merely to the extent of predicting “nuptial strife” for Touchstone and Audrey—“And you to wrangling” (V.iv.191), he says to the former about the future of his new relationship. Whereas Hymen addresses the couples as couples (using the phrase “you and you” three times, at V.iv.131, 132, 135), Jaques talks only to the men—to Orlando, Oliver, and Silvius, as well as Touchstone—and starts out with Duke Senior, thereby placing the four new marriages in the context, not of Hymen's mutual love, but of “former honor,” “land,” and “great allies” (V.iv.186, 189). At the end of As You Like It, in other words, we can choose to think of marriage as merely a social convention in a patriarchal society, as a public expression of mutual feelings of love, or as an appropriate outlet for the mutual sexual desire that Touchstone earlier points to as an important motive for marrying: “As the ox hath his bow, sir, the horse his curb, and the falcon her bells, so man hath his desires; and as pigeons bill, so wedlock would be nibbling” (III.iii.79-82).

Rosalynde does not offer its readers these multiple possibilities. Like Jaques, it sees the world in masculine, not mutual, terms, despite the gender of the title character, despite Lodge's giving Rosalind (twice) and Alinda (once) the functional equivalents of soliloquies in which they debate with themselves the appropriateness of loving Rosader and Saladyne respectively, and despite Lodge's having Rosalind explain to Alinda (disguised as Aliena) that in criticizing women while disguised as Ganymede, “I keep decorum: I speak now as I am Aliena's page, not as I am Gerismond's daughter; for put me but into a petticoat, and I will stand in defiance to the uttermost, that women are courteous, constant, virtuous, and what not” (p. 37). The masculine bias of Rosalynde is immediately apparent from its preface “To the Gentlemen Readers.” Although the similar prefaces to Lyly's Euphues (1578) and Robert Greene's Pandosto (1588) suggest that Lodge's is in part conventional, the first of Barnaby Riche's three prefaces to Riche His Farewell to Militarie Profession (1581)—“To the Right Courteous Gentlewomen, bothe of Englande and Irelande”—indicates that a different way of thinking about readers was available at the time.²¹ Lodge, however, moves straight from his exclusionary preface to “The Schedule annexed to Euphues' testament, the tenor of his legacy, the token of his love” (p. xxx), in which he has Lyly's popular hero Euphues inform a friend (Philautus) that the ensuing story will greatly benefit the friend's sons. The narrative proper then opens with Sir John of Bordeaux's death bed bequests, advice, and “Schedule” (p. 7) to his sons. Prominent among Sir John's “infallible precepts” (p. 2) of paternal advice, moreover, is the claim that any woman, even “if she have all these qualities, to be chaste, obedient, and silent, yet for that she is a woman, shalt thou find in her sufficient vanities to countervail her virtues” (pp. 5-6).

Even Lodge's 1596 narrative A Margarite of America: For Ladies Delight, and Ladies Honour, which would appear by its title to be especially directed toward women (at least of a certain social class), and which is dedicated to Lady Russell, not a male aristocrat, has a preface addressed “To the Gentlemen Readers.”²² During the tale itself, the narrator acknowledges the audience mentioned in the work's subtitle on two occasions—once in regard to Margarite's feelings: “but what she dreamed I leaue that to you Ladies to decide, who hauing dallied with loue, haue likewise beene acquainted with his dreames”; and once in regard to the love poems of the villain: “which I offer to your iudgement (Ladies).”²³ The closest Rosalynde comes to directly addressing women is when the text's usual third person narrative voice suddenly, and uniquely, changes to the first person plural in order to describe how Rosalind and Alinda overhear two shepherds: “Drawing more nigh we might descry the countenance of the one to be full of sorrow, his face to be the very portraiture of discontent, and his eyes full of woes, that living he seemed to die: we, to hear what these were, stole privily behind the thicket, where we overheard this discourse” (p. 40). This momentary uniting of narrator, female characters, and “gentlemen readers” (who will soon “overhear” the shepherds' discourse by reading it on the page) contrasts with Shakespeare's constant blurring throughout As You Like It of a single, masculine point of view.

Not surprisingly, the final paragraph of Rosalynde reinscribes the values of Lodge's male-centered beginning as the work effectively excludes women not only from being readers, but also from being important to the story at all: “Here, gentlemen, may you see Euphues' Golden Legacy, that such as neglect their fathers' precepts, incur much prejudice; that division in nature, as it is a blemish in nurture, so 'tis a breach of good fortunes; that virtue is not measured by birth but by action; that younger brethren, though inferior in years, yet may be superior to honours; that concord is the sweetest conclusion, and amity betwixt brothers more forceable than fortune” (p. 165). Lodge, that is, conflates his “gentlemen readers” with the sons of Philautus, all of whom are to find lessons about male behavior from Rosalynde, not insights into how men and women interact.

As You Like It, of course, begins with a scene depicting a conflict between brothers, a conflict that revolves, in part, around Oliver's refusal to grant Orlando his inheritance from their father.²⁴ But this focus on males and their property shifts in the second scene, which has no exact parallel in Lodge, as we see Celia and Rosalind talking together. More important, the now well-known epilogue at the end of As You Like It, in contrast to the final paragraph of Rosalynde, addresses both men and women: “I charge you, O women, for the love you bear to men, to like as much of this play as please you; and I charge you, O men, for the love you bear to women (as I perceive by your simp'ring none of you hates them), that between you and the women the play may please. If I were a woman I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleas'd me, complexions that lik'd 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” (Ep. lines 12-23). “If I were a woman” has been the focus of much attention recently as a metatheatrical moment revealing that central convention of Shakespeare's theater: boys playing female roles.²⁵ It is also important to notice that the epilogue begins by referring to another theatrical convention: “It is not the fashion to see the lady the epilogue; but it is no more unhandsome than to see the lord the prologue” (Ep. lines 1-3). This final concern for convention is related to Rosalind's oft-noted engagement throughout the play with the problem of determining the extent of Orlando's love for her. As Ganymede, Rosalind, several times, tells Orlando that he has failed to follow the conventions for lovers: he looks too healthy and is dressed too neatly (III.ii.373-84); he is not sufficiently concerned with being on time to meet his beloved Rosalind, even if he thinks Ganymede is just pretending to be her (IV.i.38-41). How can Rosalind be certain Orlando is in love with her if he does not act like a lover? On the other hand, how can Rosalind trust conventional behavior to express true motives? Acting as a lover is expected to act can make a young man look as if he were in love when he is, instead, merely passing the time, merely engaging in what Rosalind jestingly calls early in the play the “sport” of “falling in love” (I.ii.24-5).

Whether of courtship or of the theater, conventions are meaningful only if the parties involved mutually accept them. Within the play, for example, Orlando's saying “I take thee, Rosalind, for wife” (IV.i.137) will not result in marriage if Rosalind says, “I do take thee, Orlando, for my husband” (IV.i.139), only in her disguise as Ganymede. Similarly, the boy actor's saying “If I were a woman” to the assembled onlookers in the theater has an impact only if we participate, for the main body of the play, in the convention that Rosalind is female. The boy actor's gender is, in a sense, up to our imaginations, and the success of his performance depends on our having been pleased enough by it to accept the invitation implicit in the play's title to like what we have seen. The epilogue underscores the importance of mutual enjoyment to an extraordinary degree. In its twenty-three lines, seventeen first person pronouns are linked to eleven second person pronouns through ten instances of the word good and several forms of to like and to please, all within the structure of a well-reasoned argument—assertion (“it is not” [line 1], “'tis true that” [line 4]), counterassertion (“but” [line 2],”yet” [line 5]), conditional statement (“if” [lines 3, 18]), and conclusion (“then” [line 7], “therefore” [line 10], “I am sure” [lines 20-1]).

We have seen that Jaques' seven ages speech clearly rejects the idea that mutual relationships are possible. It has not been sufficiently noticed that when Silvius describes being in love to Orlando, Phebe, and Rosalind (as Ganymede), he does nearly the same thing from the opposite direction:

It is to be all made of fantasy,
All made of passion, and all made of wishes,
All adoration, duty, and observance,
All humbleness, all patience, and impatience,
All purity, all trial, all observance.

(V.ii.94-8)

In a now classic study of the play, Harold Jenkins remarks that because “Touchstone is only once, and Jaques never, allowed a sight of Silvius before the final scene of the play,” we should understand that “Silvius has not to be destroyed or the play will lack something near its center.”²⁶ Certainly, Silvius's extravagant view of love would be quickly deflated by the cynical realism of the other two characters had they been present. Yet the absence in this scene of Celia and Oliver from those listening to Silvius's hyperbole is as important as the absence of Touchstone and Jaques: Silvius defines unreciprocated love, not a mutual relationship.

What Silvius says about love, in fact, differs significantly from what Rosalind says to Orlando earlier in the scene about the rapid progress of Celia and Oliver's feelings for each other. Rosalind describes a mutually experienced sequence of events: “your brother and my sister no sooner met but they look'd; no sooner look'd but they lov'd; no sooner lov'd but they sigh'd; no sooner sigh'd but they ask'd one another the reason; no sooner knew the reason but they sought the remedy: and in these degrees have they made a pair of stairs to marriage” (V.ii.32-8). No sooner do Rosalind and Orlando meet, look, and sigh in act I, but Orlando gets tongue-tied and the two are separated from each other. In addition to its suddenness, then, Rosalind describes a mutuality in the relationship between Celia and Oliver that in V.ii is still missing from her relationship with Orlando (for she is still disguised as Ganymede) as well as missing from the relationship between Silvius (in love with Phebe) and Phebe (who at the moment thinks she is in love with Ganymede). “Neither call the giddiness of it in question, the poverty of her, the small acquaintance, my sudden wooing, nor her sudden consenting; but say with me, I love Aliena; say with her that she loves me; consent with both that we may enjoy each other” (V.ii.5-9). To Oliver, who speaks these lines to his brother, as to Rosalind, the rapidity with which Celia and he make “a pair of stairs to marriage” is not as important as their climbing those stairs together.

This mutual joy is not, however, shared by Orlando: “They shall be married to-morrow; and I will bid the Duke to the nuptial. But O, how bitter a thing it is to look into happiness through another man's eyes! By so much the more shall I to-morrow be at the height of heart-heaviness, by how much I shall think my brother happy in having what he wishes for” (V.ii.42-7). The phrasing suggests self-involvement—I can't be happy though my brother is. Surprisingly, Orlando is the character in the play whose lines have the highest frequency of the personal pronouns I, me, and my—not Jaques or Frederick or Oliver, all of whom might come to mind as speaking or acting selfishly. Orlando begins the play by asserting himself and his interests against his brother, and when he first meets Duke Senior, he sounds a similar note: “he dies that touches any of this fruit / Till I and my affairs are answered” (II.vii.98-9). The Duke, as has often been noted, though usually in contrast to Jaques, speaks throughout the play of community and of sharing—“Now, my co-mates and brothers in exile” (II.i.1); “Sit down and feed, and welcome to our table” (II.vii.105);

                                                                                every of this happy number,
That have endur'd shrewd days and nights with us,
Shall share the good of our returned fortune.

(V.iv.172-4)

Orlando turns everything toward himself: “Fair youth, I would I could make thee believe I love” (III.ii.385-6); “then in mine own person, I die” (IV.i.93); “I can live no longer by thinking” (V.ii.50).

Rosalind has been said to be so self-aware that she can educate Orlando about the nature of love.²⁷ Orlando has been said to be self-aware enough to know that he is only “playing Orlando” in his exchanges with Ganymede: “I take some joy to say you are [Rosalind],” he says, “because I would be talking of her” (IV.i.89-90).²⁸ Yet in V.ii, it is the sudden love of Celia and Oliver, not anything Rosalind as Ganymede has said, nor anything Orlando has learned from her, that prompts him to end the game. “I can live no longer by thinking” is surely an extravagant, extreme statement. Orlando seems not to have heard (or not to have believed) what Rosalind has already told him, that “men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love” (IV.i.106-8). The actor John Bowe has explained that he performed the exchange with Ganymede in V.ii to show that Orlando there “realizes that the dream is no substitute for the reality.”²⁹ But from Orlando's point of view, the dream is to marry Rosalind, the now unsatisfying reality is to pretend that Ganymede is the woman he loves. What Orlando wants are his wishes and dreams fulfilled, and the possessive pronoun in his very last line in As You Like It is the final indication of the importance, to him, of his feelings for Rosalind, no matter how conventionally extravagant his declarations of love sound to anyone else: “If there be truth in sight, you are my Rosalind” (V.iv.119; emphasis mine).

Because Rosalind displays “a wry awareness of her own extravagance while insisting on that extravagance as the only adequate expression of her feelings,” because she seems to be so much in charge of her relationship with Orlando, it may bother us that she uses a string of conditional constructions near the end of the play to give him the final decision regarding their future together, despite his being so much less alert than she is to the tone of what he has been saying: “Believe then, if you please, that I can do strange things” (V.ii.58-9); “if it appear not inconvenient to you” (V.ii.65-6); “if you will be married to-morrow, you shall; and to Rosalind, if you will” (V.ii.72-4).³⁰ One way to understand this deference is that it reflects a natural hesitation to commit one's life to another. Rosalind, in Barbara Bono's words, has to “exorcise her own fears about love” during the course of the play.³¹ Her deference also partly reflects the uncertainty of ever knowing the full truth about what is going on in the “unexpressed interior” within another person's “theatricalized exterior.”³² We have only outward appearances by which to judge others' inner feelings, as Rosalind knows when she says to Orlando: “if you do love Rosalind so near the heart as your gesture cries it out” (V.ii.61-3). Rosalind needs Orlando to commit himself to her, just as she is willing to commit herself to him, if the two are to enter into the mutual commitment of marriage.

The string of if clauses can also, I suggest, be seen as a gesture toward that mutuality, not in the modern sense, with its implication of a meeting of equals, but as the concept might be understood within the social context of a patriarchal hierarchy.³³ Although the marriage service in The Book of Common Prayer (1559) gives as one of “the causes for which matrimony was ordained” “the mutual society, help, and comfort that the one ought to have of the other, both in prosperity and adversity,” mutuality in a hierarchical world must have always been to some degree unequal.³⁴ When “The Homily on Marriage” (1562) encourages “mutual love and fellowship” between husband and wife, for example, it does so through the unequal exchange of female submission for male forbearance.³⁵ No matter how strong their impulses “to controul or command, which yet they may do, to their children, and to their family,” wives must “perform subjection” to husbands. A husband, in turn, should “yield some thing to the woman”: by forbearing to assert authority all the time, “thou shalt not only nourish concord, but shalt have her heart in thy power and will.” How these dynamics might work themselves out in an actual marriage is illustrated in a revealing story recorded by Harington: according to him, his wife once told Queen Elizabeth that “she had confidence in her husbandes understandinge and courage, well founded on her own stedfastness not to offend or thwart, but to cherishe and obey; hereby did she persuade her husband of her own affectione and in so doinge did commande his.”³⁶ In a hierarchical system, exchanges of mutual affection get imagined and phrased in terms of mutual deference to each other's authority: the wife's obedience commands the husband's love; by not always giving orders, the husband can put his wife's heart in his “power and will.”³⁷ So, even though it is Orlando (and Silvius and Phebe) who is obedient to Rosalind's “commands” (V.ii.121) as she arranges matters so that their love can end in the mutual commitment of marriage, Rosalind must also acknowledge the authority of Orlando for the relationship to be mutual.

Orlando, of course, is too much in love not to marry. From his point of view, all that is necessary for his commitment is a reunion with Rosalind. But our sense of his certainty should not obscure the possibility of his refusing. The idea that the marriage could be broken off at the last minute is, I take it, an important implication of Touchstone's extended description of how an argument can move in a series of seven steps from “the Retort Courteous” to “the Lie Direct” and so to a duel (V.iv.92, 96). Like the progress toward Celia and Oliver's marriage, as described by Rosalind, the progress toward a duel, as described by Touchstone, follows from the mutual responses of the two parties, and, as we have seen, Touchstone concludes that a duel can be avoided even after the seventh step has been reached through a mutually agreed on if statement: “All these you may avoid but the Lie Direct; and you may avoid that too, with an If” (V.iv.97-8). Orlando and Rosalind, though, do not wish to avoid getting married; when they use “an If” it expresses their commitment to each other rather than serves as an escape clause from that commitment: “If there be truth in sight, you are my Rosalind” (V.iv.119); “I'll have no husband, if you be not he” (V.iv.123). Marriage is their mutual choice, what each of them would like to have happen.

As we have seen, Lodge ends Rosalynde by recalling its patriarchal beginning in which a dying father bequeaths his property to his sons and advises them about the inevitable dangers of women, an ending perfectly in keeping with the feelings of Lodge's characters throughout the narrative that they do not have much freedom to decide their own fates. In As You Like It, “we see persons in relation”: to each other through their immediate actions on the stage, to their pasts, which are brought before the audience through the many instances of narration in the play, and also to their futures, which depend, in part, on the many choices they make—Celia choosing to accompany her banished cousin into the forest, Adam choosing to accompany his master as he seeks safety from his brother, Rosalind choosing not to reveal herself right away to either the man she loves or her father, Orlando choosing to save Oliver from the lioness, and Jaques choosing not to leave the forest with Duke Senior and the others, to list only a few.³⁸ Shakespeare, that is, ends As You Like It so that we understand how the title need not mean that the author is simply giving in to the opposing values of the audience. As depicted in the relationships between Orlando and Rosalind, Celia and Oliver, actor and audience, “as you like it” both expresses the freedom we have to choose whether we like or do not like a play or a person—it is up to Orlando and to Rosalind each to say yes to marriage; it is up to each of us whether to applaud after the epilogue or not—and also acknowledges that for lover and beloved, performer and spectator, sometimes the feeling is mutual.

Notes

1. There is a list of some basic oppositions in Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols. (London: Routledge; New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1958), 2:150-1. The quotations are from the more recent studies of Alexander Leggatt, Shakespeare's Comedy of Love (London: Methuen, 1973), p. 210; Mark Bracher, “Contrary Notions of Identity in As You Like It,” [Studies in English Literature] 24, 2 (Spring 1984): 225-40; Kent van den Berg, Playhouse and Cosmos: Shakespearean Theater as Metaphor (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1985), p. 88; Dale G. Priest, “Oratio and Negotium: Manipulative Modes in As You Like It,” [Studies in English Literature] 28, 2 (Spring 1988): 273-86; and Mary Thomas Crane, “Linguistic Change, Theatrical Practice, and the Ideologies of Status in As You Like It,” [English Literary Renaissance] 27, 3 (Autumn 1997): 361-92, 389.

2. George Bernard Shaw, “Shakespeare and Mr. Barrie,” rprt. in Bernard Shaw: The Drama Observed, ed. Bernard F. Dukore, 4 vols. (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1993), 3:937-43, 937.

3. This list refers, respectively, to the views of C. L. Barber, who describes Rosalind with the phrase “inclusive poise” in his chapter on the play in Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom (1959; rprt. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 222-39, 238; Cynthia Marshall, “Wrestling as Play and Game in As You Like It,” [Studies in English Literature] 33, 2 (Spring 1993): 265-87; and Crane, who elucidates a complex presentation of the relationship between the values of the socially dominant and those who lack cultural and political power, as reflected not only in the language of the play but also in the style of performance suggested by the change from William Kemp to Robert Armin as the company's regular comic actor. Marshall's illuminating discussion of the wrestling match between Orlando and Charles shares my interest in understanding how theatrical and social conventions function in the play, but where she sees an increase in our skepticism about conventional distinctions, I see a stress on the importance of mutual involvement in those conventions.

4. David Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997), p. 234. Courtship conventions are not included among the literary and dramatic conventions in the play listed in Kenneth Muir's The Sources of Shakespeare's Plays (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1978), p. 131.

5. See Anthony Brennan, Onstage and Offstage Worlds in Shakespeare's Plays (London and New York: Routledge, 1989). His discussion of As You Like It does not include the intersection I describe between narratives and mutual interactions (pp. 237-88).

6. See, for example, Jay L. Halio, “‘No Clock in the Forest’: Time in As You Like It,” [Studies in English Literature] 2, 2 (Spring 1962): 197-207, rprt. in Twentieth-Century Interpretations of “As You Like It,” ed. Halio (Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice Hall, 1968), pp. 88-97, 91: “as dramatic exposition this dialogue is at least ingenuous—if not downright clumsy.”

7. William Shakespeare, As You Like It, in The Riverside Shakespeare, 2d edn., ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), pp. 403-36, I.iii.75, II.iv.46-54, III.ii.407-21, V.iv.47. All subsequent citations of the play will be from this edition and will appear within the text by act, scene, and line number; please note that I have removed square brackets indicating emendations.

8. Stephen B. Dobranski, “Children of the Mind: Miscarried Narratives in Much Ado about Nothing,” [Studies in English Literature] 38, 2 (Spring 1998): 233-50, 234.

9. Lawrence Danson, “Jonsonian Comedy and the Discovery of the Social Self,” PMLA 99, 2 (Spring 1984): 179-93, 187.

10. Robert Ornstein, Shakespeare's Comedies: From Roman Farce to Romantic Mystery (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1986), p. 146.

11. Brennan, p. 286; Marko Minkoff, “What Shakespeare Did to Rosalynde,” [Shakespeare Jahrbuch] 96 (1960): 78-89; rprt. in Twentieth-Century Interpretations, pp. 98-106, 106. See also Agnes Latham's introduction to the Arden Edition of As You Like It (London: Methuen, 1975), pp. ix-xcv, xxxvi: “Shakespeare owes his plot to Lodge but not a great deal else.”

12. The argument for John Lyly is made by Leah Scragg in The Metamorphosis of “Gallathea”: A Study in Creative Adaptation (Washington DC: Univ. Press of America, 1982), pp. 79-98; the one for Sir Philip Sidney by Brian Gibbons in “Amorous Fictions and As You Like It,” in “Fanned and Winnowed Opinions”: Shakespearean Essays Presented to Harold Jenkins, ed. John W. Mahon and Thomas A. Pendleton (London: Methuen, 1987), pp. 52-78; the one for Sir John Harington and Rabelais by Juliet Dusinberre in “As Who Liked It?,” [Shakespeare Survey] 46 (1994): 9-21. I use Harington later in this essay for very different purposes.

13. Thomas Lodge, Rosalynde, ed. W. W. Greg (London: Chatto and Windus, 1907), p. 2. All subsequent citations of this work will appear within the text by page number.

14. Helen Whall, “As You Like It: The Play of Analogy,” [Humanities Literature Quarterly] 47, 1 (Winter 1984): 33-46, 35.

15. Maura Kuhn, “Much Virtue in If,” [Shakespeare Quarterly] 28, 1 (Winter 1977): 40-50, 44, 49; also see Priest, pp. 285-6.

16. By my count, fate(s) and fortune(s) occur over 200 times in the tale, compared to roughly 150 instances of if. In Shakespeare's play, the ratio is 25 instances of fortune(s) and none of fate(s) to 138 for if. Data here and later in this essay on the number and frequency of words in As You Like It are drawn from volume 1 of A Complete and Systematic Concordance to the Works of Shakespeare, comp. Marvin Spevack, 6 vols. (Hildesheim Ger.: Georg Olms, 1968-70).

17. The commonplaces are treated at length in Leo Salingar, Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy (London: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1974), pp. 256-98.

18. Helen Gardner, “As You Like It,” in More Talking of Shakespeare, ed. John Garrett (London: Longmans, Green, 1959), pp. 17-32, rprt. in Twentieth-Century Interpretations, pp. 55-69, 65.

19. Sir John Harington, The Letters and Epigrams of Sir John Harington together with “The Prayse of Private Life,” ed. Norman Egbert McClure (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1930), p. 31.

20. Thomas Heywood, “An Apology for Actors,” in The Seventeenth Century Stage, ed. Gerald Eades Bentley (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1968), pp. 10-22, 11.

21. Barnaby Riche, Riche His Farewell, rprt. in Eight Novels Employed by English Dramatic Poets of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth (London: Shakespeare Society, 1846), p. 3.

22. Lodge, Margarite, in “Menaphon,” by Robert Greene, and “A Margarite of America,” by Thomas Lodge, ed. G. B. Harrison (Oxford: Blackwell, 1927), p. 113.

23. Lodge, Margarite, pp. 170, 207.

24. For the patriarchal implications of this opening, see Louis Adrian Montrose, “‘The Place of a Brother’ in As You Like It: Social Process and Comic Form,” [Shakespeare Quarterly] 32, 1 (Spring 1982): 28-54.

25. The complex layering of actor, character, and character-in-disguise that can result from the use of the convention in plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries has been treated in great detail by Michael Shapiro, Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage: Boy Heroines and Female Pages (1994; rprt. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1996), esp. pp. 119-42 for As You Like It; a useful summary of the varied recent critical positions on the epilogue is on pp. 132-3. The male homoerotic implications of the convention have been stressed most recently by Stephen Orgel in Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare's England (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996). For an interpretation stressing the importance of female homoeroticism in the play, see Jessica Tvordi, “Female Alliance and the Construction of Homoeroticism in As You Like It and Twelfth Night,” in Maids and Mistresses, Cousins and Queens: Women's Alliances in Early Modern England (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999), pp. 114-30.

26. Harold Jenkins, “As You Like It,” ShS 8 (1955): 40-51, rprt. in Twentieth-Century Interpretations, pp. 28-43, 38.

27. See Marjorie Garber, “The Education of Orlando,” in Comedy from Shakespeare to Sheridan: Change and Continuity in the English and European Dramatic Tradition, ed. A. R. Braunmuller and J. C. Bulman (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1986), pp. 102-12.

28. Bracher, p. 236 (emphasis his).

29. John Bowe, “Orlando in As You Like It,” in Players of Shakespeare: Essays in Shakespearean Performance by Twelve Players with the Royal Shakespeare Company, ed. Philip Brockbank (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 67-76, 74.

30. Leggatt, p. 204.

31. Barbara J. Bono, “Mixed Gender, Mixed Genre in Shakespeare's As You Like It,” in Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History, and Interpretation, ed. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski (Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1986), pp. 189-212, 204. One possible fear that has not been fully recognized is the fear of childbirth, the natural consequence of marriage. Dobranski shows how “again and again, Beatrice conflates her feelings for Benedick with sex and pregnancy” (p. 238). After her first encounter with Orlando, Rosalind similarly associates her thoughts of him with children, telling Celia “some of it [her sadness] is for my child's father” (I.iii.11). Whatever the actual statistics on mothers dying in childbirth, on stillbirths and miscarriages, and on infant mortality, the perception of the time was that childbirth was fraught with risks, a view well expressed by Richard Hooker in Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity (V.74.1): “the fruit of marriage is birth, and the companion of birth travaile, the griefe whereof being so extreeme, and the daunger alwaies so great” (quoted from The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker, ed. W. Speed Hill, 3 vols. (Cambridge MA and London: Harvard Univ. Press, 1977-81), 2:406.

32. The terms are from Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 2.

33. For a different view of how the patriarchal context affects our understanding of Rosalind, see Kay Stanton, “Remembering Patriarchy in As You Like It,” in Shakespeare: Text, Subtext, and Context, ed. Ronald Dotterer (Selinsgrove PA: Susquehanna Univ. Press, 1989), pp. 139-49.

34. The Book of Common Prayer, 1559: The Elizabethan Prayerbook, Folger Library Edition, ed. John E. Booty (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1976), pp. 290, 291.

35. “The Homily on Marriage,” rprt. in Certain Sermons or Homilies Appointed to Be Read in Churches in the Time of Queen Elizabeth of Famous Memory (Liverpool, 1799), pp. 393-4.

36. Harington, Nugae Antiquae: Being a Miscellaneous Collection of Original Papers, in Prose and Verse, Written during the Reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Queen Mary, Elizabeth, and King James, ed. Thomas Park, 3 vols. (London, 1804; rprt. New York: AMS Press, 1966), 1:177-8.

37. The classic instance in Shakespeare's works of this dynamic in a relationship between parent and child is Cordelia and Lear each kneeling to the other when they are reunited in King Lear, IV.vii.

38. Latham, p. xlvi.