Issues on Shakespeare's As you like it

S.P.Dutta, M.A.(English), ACIB (London)
Guest Lecturer in English,
Ramakrishna Mission Residential College, Narendrapur
RESIDENCE : 395 Ramakrishna Palli (Mission Palli),
Sonarpur, Calcutta 700 150 ::: TEL: 2434-1406
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01. Fusion of the Sub-plots and the Main Plot in As You Like It
‘As You Like It’, says Anne Barton, ‘ derives much of its classical stability and poise from the
fact that its plot barely exits.’ And the play, as Hazlitt says, ‘is a comedy of conversation and
character but not of action’. J.C.Smith reiterates Hazlitt’s view when he says that ‘the play is in
form a comedy of dialogue rather than a comedy of incident’. All the statements are correct in as
much as they do not rule out the existence in the play of a plot altogether. Anne Barton states that
a plot barely exists and Hazlitt and Smith stress the charm of the dialogue in comparison to
action. So neither Barton nor Hazlitt or Smith speaks of the absence of a plot in the play.
Practically, As You Like It is Shakespeare’s dramatic experiment of a different kind. Although
the world as a whole has a few irritants of palace politics noticed and hinted at in the first few
scenes, it is a world of song, feast and dance in the idyllic environment of the Forest of Arden
beyond the circumference of the court. But there is no doubt that there is a plot and Shakespeare
weaves a complex pattern in this play by stringing together several plots – one main and the
others subordinate.
The main plot of the play is knit around Rosalind-Orlando love-affair. Theirs is the love at
first sight – ‘Whoever loved that loved not at first sight ?’ (III.v.80-81) quoted by Phebe from
Marlowe’s Hero and Leander – and similar love at first sight springs up between Celia and
Oliver, not the usurper but a man whose arms fall before he enters Arden. Rosalind has to flee the
court under the command of Duke Frederick and Celia, her constant cousin, follows her. They
land up in the Forest of Arden where Orlando too, accompanied by Adam, escapes. What follows
is a charming comedy full of lovers’ sighs and songs and poetry though not of woes owing to
deprivation. The Arden does not provide shelter to those who plan revenge in exile; it is a place
which makes them ignore and even forget the treachery meted out, for example to the senior
Duke and Orlando in the palace. Love and goodness dominate their hearts as they discover
greater joy in the ferine environs despite its winter and rough weather. The only condition is that
one should shun ambition and love to lie in the sun, singing a merry note unto the sweet birds’
throats. Interestingly, food is not scarce and life is not shorn of minimal comfort. Once living is
secured, love and philosophy take over.
Shakespeare would not allow love at first sight end in disaster. In that case, it would not be
love but infatuation. When Shakespeare speaks of love, he means it; and he takes all steps to
ensure that it succeeds leading to a happy union. Therefore he engages at the first instance
Rosalind and Orlando in testing the sincerity of their love. In the wrestling match Rosalind’s pity
for Orlando might be infatuation, but that it love remains to be tested. This test takes place in the
Forest of Arden.
Love is the core theme in As You Like It. Not only love at first sight, but love in its various
manifestations. ‘Love’, says S. A. Brooke, ‘lives in many forms in As You Like It. The principal
thread is the love between Rosalind and Orlando, but other threads are intertwined in the forms
of union between Celia and Oliver, Touchstone and Audrey, and Silvius and Phebe.

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Orlando opens the play with a long speech addressed to Adam in which he stresses the nature of
a gentleman, one of the play’s important theme. As the son of Sir Rowland de Boys, Orlando is a
gentleman by birth but he has been deprived of education by his brother Oliver who possesses his
late father’s lands but little of his father’s gentlemanliness. Oliver even wants Orlando killed by
Charles because he is jealous of him. Orlando has many virtues. As Oliver says, he is ‘indeed so
much in the heart of the world, and especially of my own people, who best know him, that I am
altogether misprized. (I.i.163-5) Another theme is introduced in the play when Charles tells
Oliver that the outlawed Duke Senior and his loyal supporters have gone into the Forest of Arden,
‘and fleet the time carelessly as they did in the golden world’.(I.i.116-7)The golden world refers
to the period of time thousands of years ago when people did not have to earn a living, and
people spent time singing, dancing and writing poetry. The first scene thus starts off one of the
two central actions of the complex plot. It also introduces the three themes : the nature of a
gentleman; the envy that is provoked by goodness and the golden world of the pastoral
convention.
The second scene introduces the second main action of the play. Rosalind is unhappy because
her father has been banished while she has been kept back to give company to Celia, the daughter
of the usurping Duke Frederick. Rosalind is usually gay and witty, not because she is light-
hearted and carefree but because she has courage and can hide her sorrows. Rosalind’s remarks to
and about Orlando reveal how quickly she is falling in love. At the end of the scene, Orlando too
admits to himself that he is overcome with a new emotion. He says:
What passion hangs these weights upon my tongue ?
I cannot speak to her, yet she urg’d conference. (I.ii.246-7)
Orlando demonstrates his physical strength in the wrestling match, yet when he refuses to be
dissuaded from the contest by Rosalind and Celia, he does it politely. Frederick orders Rosalind’s
banishment for he feels the same jealousy as Oliver did: He tells Celia
Thou art a fool; she robs thee of thy name,
And thou wilt show more bright and seem more virtuous
When she is gone. (I.iii.78-80)
Soon Rosalind and Celia leave the court in disguise, and their destination is the Forest of Arden.
If the first Act of the play is an Act of dispersal, the second Act is set in the Forest of Arden
( although Scene II takes place at court and Scene III outside Oliver’s house) where Duke Senior
finds country life much superior to life in the ‘envious court’.(II.i.4) The scene II tells us that
Rosalind and Celia have been successful in running away from the court with Touchstone. In
Scene III, Adams takes up the theme of envy as he pines that Orlando’s virtues are ‘sanctified
and holy traitors’ to him, and as he offers his savings to Orlando, the latter expresses his
admiration of Adam’s ‘constant service’ that existed in the antique world but ‘are not the fashion
these times’. The references to the Golden world by Adams and to the antique world by
Orlando prepare us for the pastoral world that we shall be soon into. Scene IV takes place in
the Forest of Arden where Rosalind, now Ganymede, meets Silvius, a character drawn from
literature but not from life, cherishing poetic dream of love. In Scene V, We see Jaques again, but
he is relaxed, as if he were ‘off-duty’. In the next scene, Orlando meets Duke Senior during his
search for food. Duke reproves Orlando for his unmannerly behaviour, and the mood of the play
changes. But soon they are tied in a bond of amity.

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The third Act opens with a surprise for us. It is odd to hear Duke Frederick rebuke Oliver for his
lack of brotherly affection which is precisely Duke Frederick’s fault as well. This scene prepares
us for the end of the play where Frederick after undergoing a change of heart in Arden returns
the title to his brother. In Scene II, the comedy is at height. Corin and Touchsrone resume the
debate on the relative merits of court life and country life. Touchstone is definitely superior to
Corin. Orlando’s brief appearance at the beginning as the poetic lover, obsessed with his
mistress’s beauty, prepares us for the comedy when Rosalind and Celia read out the poems he has
hung upon the trees. Rosalind exposes her essential femininity though she now masks herself.
Dost thou think though I am caparisoned like a man, I have a doublet
And hose in my disposition? (III.ii.191-92)
At the end of the scene her anxiety that Orlando ‘would call me Rosalind’ (III.ii.412) betrays how
deeply she is in love with him.
Another aspect of love is seen in Scene III when Touchstone attempts to marry Audrey. This is
comedy of another sort, the very opposite of Orlando’s idealistic emotion. Audrey has never
heard the word ‘poetic’ before, and Touchstone wants to be married in this improper fashion so
that
‘not being well married, it will be a good excuse for me hereafter to leave my
wife.’(III.iii.83-84)
This peculiar type of wooing by Touchstone is a burlesque of the romantic love affair of Rosalind
and Orlando.In the fourth scene, Rosalind appears as a woman in love. Celia teases her, and
makes fun of Orlando, but real love like Rosalind’s is not afraid of being laughed at. The fifth
scene presents Silvius, a lover only found in poetry, one who is wholly devoted to his mistress
despite her cruelty. Phebe , as she examines the poem of Silvius, behaves like the conventional
cruel mistress. Rosalind makes this clear in her speech (III.v.35-64), and it is a fitting punishment
for Phebe that she herself falls in love with Ganymede, who will never return her love.
The fourth Act takes the comedy even higher when Orlando, playing the part of a romantic
lover, pleads with Rosalind who, as Ganymede, adopts an amusingly cynical attitude to love. But
after Orlando leaves the stage, Rosalind speaks of her love:
O coz, coz, coz, my pretty little coz, that thou didst know how many fathom deep I am in
love ! (IV.i.192-3).
Time passes, with a song in the next scene. The comedy is renewed when Silvis brings a letter to
Rosalind from Phebe – a letter in which she makes use of the same poetic devices that she had
scorned in Act III, Scene V. While it bears testimony to Silvius’s unselfish love for Phebe as he
carries the letter of his beloved for the man of her heart, Rosalind despises him because love has
turned him into a ‘tame snake’. A more serious note is introduced by Oliver, telling of his rescue
by Orlando from death. Orlando makes use of generosity, because Arden is a romantic world
where there is no enemy but only winter and rough weather, to avenge the wrong done to him by
his brother.
But kindness, nobler ever than revenge,
And nature, stronger than his just occasion,
Made him give battle to the lioness. (IV.iii.128-30)

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When Oliver addresses Ganymede : “ Be of good cheer, youth. You a man ! You lack a man’s
heart. (IV.iii.164), Oliver may be naïve, but the audience appreciates the irony in the words as
they expose what Rosalind really is.
In the last Act all issues are resolved to the satisfaction of all including the audience. In Scene II,
all the lovers get together. The first Act was an act of dispersal; the last Act is the occasion of
union. Surprisingly, Oliver and Celia too join the band of lovers, because he and Celia, on very
short acquaintance, have developed a mutual fondness. Orlando’s heart is not wounded with the
claws of a lion, but ‘wounded it is with eyes of a lady.’ (V.ii.19-24) Silvius speaks for all the
lovers when he begins a fine definition of love. The others join him. Touchstone and Audrey are
absent from the meeting, but as they have heard of the wedding-day Touchstone tells Audrey
Tomorrow is the joyful day, Audrey. Tomorrow will we be married. (V.iii.1)
The final scene evokes a mixture of laughter and tears – tears, not of sorrow but of happiness.
Rosalind and Celia, out of disguise, appear with Hymen, the classical god of marriage. There
have been many references to the Greek gods and goddesses throughout the play, so it is
appropriate that Hymen appears now. The magical atmosphere of the Forest of Arden provides
happiness to all within its bounds, and even a bad character, Oliver, has been transformed into a
good man. With the arrival of Jaques de Bois, we learn what has happened to the other wicked
character, the usurping Duke Frederick. In contact with an old religious man on the outskirts of
the forest and ‘after some question with him’, he too has been converted.
The achievement of the play, as we look back from Rosalind’s Epilogue, is simply not creation of
an ideal world where the good characters regain their lost happiness and bad characters repent of
their wickedness and reform their lives. Indeed, this is what the play achieves, but As You Like
It is greater than its plot. The plot provided Shakespeare with a framework inside which he could
arrange themes, points of view, and contrasting attitudes. The final triumph of the play is in the
fusion; in the reconciliation of so many different aspects with malice towards none and charity for
all so that none dominates at the expense of the others. Only melancholy and ingrained pessimism
is rejected, but that too with no rancour. The various interests occur and recur through the five
Acts until at the end they, like the characters, have some kind of unity within the play’s plot
structure and ‘Atone together’. (V.iv.108) ‘Atone’ means ‘to achieve unity or concord’.
Shakespeare plies up (entwines / interweaves) all the threads into a single whole with such finesse
that none can be separated without damaging the total structure drastically.
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02. The Forest of Arden
The Forest of Arden in Shakespeare’s As You Like It does not only provide a simple idyllic
atmosphere, far from the madding crowd, where all issues of ‘ignoble strife’ of the courtly life
dissolve automatically under the influence of its magic spell, but it plays a role, an effective role,
by contrast and distinctiveness. It would be incorrect to stress that the forest is just a foil to the
court of Frederick or of Oliver. It is a foil to the palaces no doubt, lacking in avaricious intrigues,
but it is a character which has its own distinction. Love is there and there is vanity. Shakespeare
has not made his forest unbelievable by making it a Utopia as opposed to the Dystopia which the
courtly life is. The Forest of Arden is firmly based on earth, the very place which shelters courts
and palaces, and at the same time, of necessity, does not keep itself from the human contact.
Shakespeare leads a whole troop, who were born and who grew in the city, to the Forest of
Arden. As a matter of fact, this transit from the court to Arden links up the forest with the human
society and this concept is strengthened by the fact that the exiles do not go to live there forever.
The only difference is that whereas the city is dominated by man and therefore by the virtues
and vices (vices more than virtues) that men cultivate, the forest, except for its winter and rough
weather, has no other enemy as it is, despite its being a place of human habitation, a place
dominated by the pristine glory of nature. This is a place which nurtures shepherds and sheep,
both remarkable for their innocence, hosts holy men who value peace in preference to power and
pelf, has beasts who live true to their nature. Arden’s lions are natural lions, not tame and timid
like mewing cats, and a lioness would not spare a chance of feast on Oliver. While maintaining its
essential idyllic nature, the forest has all the naturalness that reality demands it should have. Even
the court is well aware of its existence, and so when Frederick is told that the Senior Duke along
with his retinue has fled to the Forest of Arden, it does not become difficult for him to recognize
where the senior Duke has been to. In fact, As You Like It is a palace-to-forest-to-palace story
in which Arden acts as the purgatorio or reformatory, to use a term of modern criminology. It is
not a paradiso because Shakespeare does not want it to be so and because in that case the
journey to the dreamland would have been impossible. The very characters that make the palace
an inferno turn back to the city to make it a saner and more healthy place to live in.
There has been much debate as to the locale of the forest of Arden. The chief portion of Lodge’s
Rosalynde, a novel, takes place in “the forrest of Arden” in France. The Ardennes was the
woody country about Namur, Liege, and Luxembourg, watered by the Meuse. It was a favourite
haunt for the lovers of field-sports. In the midst of the forest was a little chapel, dedicated to
Saint Hubert, the patron saint of hunters, with a shrine to which people went on pilgrimage. As
You Like It also mentions the existence of a ‘chapel’ (III,3.39) in the Forest of Arden which
provides shelter to the religious recluses. (III.2.315 , V.4.156). Spenser also speaks of ‘famous
Ardeyn’ in Pastorall Elegie on Sir Philip Sidney. Shakespeare selects the name for the forest for
several reasons one of which is the name of his mother, Mary Arden. The other reason is that his
family had been seated in and about the forest country of Warwickshire for many generations.
Shakespeare intends to refer to this forest of Warwickshire to make it easily recognizable by the
English audience. Moreover, two of the names in As You Like It have distinctly Warwickshire

associations – Sir Roland de Boys and Orlando. The name of Sir Roland de Boys is taken from
an old but extinct family of Leicestershire and Warwickshire, headed by Sir Ernald or Arnold
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de Boys. Arnold is transposed to Roland, and a little re-arrangement of the letters in the name
gives us the name of Orlando. Secondly, the manor of Weston-in-Arden was held by Sir Ernald
de Boys for four generations, and each lord successively was known as Sir Ernald de Bosco or de
Boys. The name ‘Jaques’ also belongs to Warwickshire.
Again, it is argued by Furness that Shakespeare’s inspiration came from Drayton’s Forest of
Arden of Warwickshire which he speaks about in Thirteenth Song of Poly-olbion . Drayton
paints the beauty and expanse of the Forest , the troops of deer that roam (in) its laws and glades,
the hunting-scenes that wake its echoes, and the ‘homely cells’ of “old religious men” (III.2.315”
who have taken asylum in its dim circles (V.4.34) for rest. Thus the Forest of Arden of
Shakespeare’s As You Like It is no forest in far-away France but the enchanted ground of their
own homeland. The name also appears in Robinhood in which the forest is known as Sherwood.
Thus the motive behind Shakespeare’s selection of the name for the forest is to evoke the charm
of the wood and its magic spell.
The Forest of Arden does not accommodate ingratitude, jealousy, avarice, lust for power, and
usurpation followed by deprivation that vitiate the atmosphere of the court and the city. The
senior Duke has been deprived of his rights by his younger brother, Frederick and so has Orlando
been neglected by his elder brother, Oliver. Jealousy so inflames Frederick that he orders
expulsion of Rosalind for she would overshadow his daughter, Celia . But even in the midst of
inequities, there is love which is prepared to share the sufferings of the affected partner. So Celia
decides to leave the court with Rosalind and escapes into the forest of Arden.
Arden is an idyllic world, the archetype of which is seen in the pastoral works since very early
time. It is primarily a land inhabited by deer, sheep and shepherds and shepherdesses , though not
without a ferocious lioness. The forest life, as it is supposed to be, is hard because of the winter
and rough weather, but here peace abounds. The Duke finds tongues in trees, books in the
running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything. So impressed is Amiens that he
would not have a different kind of life at all events. Really, there is enough to learn from nature.
The trees speak and would speak of love symbolically, the brooks symbolize the flow of life
through adversities and the stones signify patience. The Duke discovers this because his heart
rings in tune with nature’s innocence. Touchstone’s assessment is different. To him the ferine life
is peaceful but lonely, pleasing but tedious, frugal and wholesome but fails to provide luxuries
and comfort. Touchstone’s evaluation is practical, as he cannot do away with his liking for the
courtly life altogether because he has not been a direct victim of deprivation and jealousy.
Arden becomes sweeter as Rosalind and Celia enter the place. This is because before stepping
into the forest of Arden, they cast away their feeling of deprivation. They do not, as the senior
Duke and Orlando do not, come to the forest of Arden to hatch or help the victims of deprivation
hatch conspiracy for revenge upon the wrong-doers. They come with a gay heart and enjoy the
life in amorous sports and end up finding matches. The forest assumes a romantic hue with love-
tossed Orlando writing doggerels and hanging them on the trees and carving the name of
Rosalind on the bark of the trees. Rosalind silently enjoys the rants of Orlando and while she
prepares herself for the final union , she also uses the chance to test the sincerity of Orlando’s
feeling for her.

Arden is a traditional pastoral ground, sheltering Corin, Silvius and Phebe. The love-affair
between Silvius and Phebe is another aspect of the central theme of the play which is love.
Silvius loves Phebe passionately, but Phebe is a vane maiden who does not respond
favourably to
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Silvius. Instead, she falls in love with Rosalind-turned-Ganymede for his superior station in life.
Ultimately, for obvious reason, she cannot find her match in Ganymede and has to accept Silvius.
Touchstone-Audrey affair creates a breach in the positively romantic atmosphere of the Arden or
of the play. Touchstone would marry Audrey in a manner that it would be easier for him to desert
his wife according to his whim. Shakespeare introduces this subplot to prevent Arden from
degenerating into Alice’s wonderland. Human beings are of diverse nature, and love has diverse
manifestations in different couples. While Rosalind-Orlando is highly romantic and sparking,
Phebe-Silvius episode showing the vanity of the shepherdess is a burlesque of the main plot.
Toucstone-Audrey episode is a parody of the relationship of Rosalind-Orlando episode, and
Celia’s passion for Oliver, another aspect of love at first sight, is a short-cut approach in
comparison to Rosalind’s union with Orlando. These diversities make Forest of Arden a part of
the earth, not a Utopia.
The Forest of Arden in As You Like It leads, in the main, the romantic love-affairs to success.
But Arden is not a nook for the romantic lovers alone where while one heaves sighs of
languishment, the other enjoys it tight-lipped. Alongside Touchstone-Audrey affair which is a
foil to the affair of Orlando and Rosalind, there is the Celia-Oliver episode which demonstrates
the predominance of passion. Theirs too is a love at first sight, but ‘there was never anything so
sudden but with the fight of two rams, and Caesar’s thrasonical brag of vini vidi vici : for your
(Orlando’s) brother and my sister,” Rosalind tells Orlando, “ no sooner met, but they looked; no
sooner looked but they loved; no sooner sighed but they asked one another the reason; no sooner
knew the reason but they sought the remedy…” (V.II.34-42). The suddenness serves two
purposes: first, the play had to be ended and the long stage of courtship was not permitted;
secondly, it serves to depict another aspect of love, demonstrating Shakespeare’s
comprehensiveness of vision. Again, it serves as the foil to the Orland-Rosalind affair. It shows
that that trees have not only have tongues but they also have the wood.
Again, the Forest of Arden brings out the witty Rosalind in the otherwise sentimental lover.
“Come,” she tells Orlando, “woo me, woo me; for now I am in holiday humour, and like enough
to consent.” Her wit is displayed in her interactions with Orlando when she says, for example,
that men have loved from time to time, and worms have eaten them up. None of them have ever
died for the sake of love, she adds. Rosalind does not utter the words flippantly, but with quasi-
seriousness in order to deflate the swollen and seemingly unearthly love of Orlando. She wants to
test through this fling whether Orlando is prepared to make sacrifices to ensure that the marriage
would work. Rosalind’s wit which lay latent in the court springs up like fresh leaves in the sylvan
environs of the forest .
The Forest of Arden finally works as the alchemy in transforming baseness into nobleness. It is
in the forest that Oliver shakes off his villainy that motivated him to oust his brother from the
court and disinherit him. If not so transformed, he would not have been worthy of the hand of
Celia who is a good and noble maiden preferring hardships in the forest to the comforts of the
palace away from the company of her cousin, Rosalind. A similar transformation takes place in
Duke Frederick who came to remove the senior Duke from his path forever. But his murderous
soul changes in contact with a holy man and he wishes to spend the rest of his life in the forest as

a hermit. Thus the malice which set the ball rolling in the court withers in Arden’s air and, purged
of the vice, the usurpers play to the tune that Arden sings. While the air of Arden is filled with
amity, love and concord, it is not altogether free from human actions that can be interpreted as
cruel. Deer-hunting is a pastime and a way of getting good venison. Snakes are not without
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venom and the lioness would not spare a chance for a good meal with human flesh. Had these
elements not been introduced, Arden would have been a strange land, a land of fantasy and
dream, located not on earth but floating in the air. Shakespeare did never wish it be so.
In As You Like It as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the countryside is the opposite of the
court. Like the wood outside Athens, the Forest of Arden is a good example of what Northorp
Eyre called ‘the green world’. However, the wood to which Rosalind, Celia and escape is of a
very different nature from that in which the Athenian lovers of the Dream find themselves. The
wood of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is, on the one hand, a leafy deer park only three mile
outside Athens, where Duke Theseus goes hunting on his wedding morning, and to which the
artisans of the city could conveniently repair for rehearsals of their play. On the other hand, it is
the perilous domain of Oberon and Titania – an alien place and one ruled by spirits. For the
Athenians who stray there on a midsummer night, it represents a subconscious world where the
realities of everyday awareness are subverted, and the rational mind is acted upon by forces
beyond its understanding.
The Forest of Arden is a different matter, both geographically and symbolically. Farther from
civilization than the wood of Dream, it contains sufficient pasture land to sustain herds of sheep
and goats, and is farmed by Corin’s master until he sells his farm to ‘Ganymede’ and ‘Aliena’. It
represents not a psychological subconscious but an arena in which new roles can be tried out,
where lords act as foresters and Rosalind in the guise of a young man can play the courtship
games with Orlando. Another point to note is that while the wood outside Athens is anonymous,
it is Forest of Arden in As You Like It. This makes the Forest of Arden both mundane and
exotic simultaneously. The forest’s name has also the echo of Eden, the garden of the golden age
before the fall of Adam, to which Elizabethan pastoral literature makes continual references. “The
Forest of Arden exists not just somewhere between England and France, but somewhere
between the material and the ideal, between reality and illusion.”
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03. Treatment of Sources in As You Like It
The idea of As You Like It is considered by critics to have been borrowed by Shakespeare from
Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde, Euphues’ Golden Legacie which Lodge wrote during a voyage to
the Canary Islands and which was published in 1590. As You Like It was staged in 1599, nine
years after the publication of Lodge’s novel and Shakespeare found enough time to read the
novel and think over the idea of dramatizing the story, of course in his own way. Rosalynde is a
primitive type of novel, similar in its pastoral character to Sidney’s Arcadia and imitates the
pretty but affected style of Lyly’s Euphues. But as is the way of Shakespeare, while he
borrowed the idea, he made it original by contributing to it the hue of his poetic genius.
Shakespeare’s variation from the source material is evident in his creation of three characters,
altogether new. They are Jaques, Touchstone and Audrey. They do not have their prototypes in
Rosalynde. Again, several names like those of Rosader, Saladin, Alinda, Montaus are
changed to Orlando, Oliver, Celia and Silvius respectively. While in the novel, the rival Dukes
are not relations, Shakespeare makes them siblings in order to introduce similarity to the
relationship between Oliver and Orlando. In the novel, Rosalynde is not Alinda’s cousin, though
her banishment is narrated by Lodge. She is Rosalynde’s friend. Again, while in Lodge, Rosalind
is disguised as a page to Alinda, in As You Like It they are sent by Shakespeare to the Forest of
Arden as brother and sister. This alteration makes their living together in the forest more
probable. On the other hand, while Celia’s sudden infatuation for Oliver shocks our sense of
probability, Lodge, probably in a better way, offers an acceptable explanation for it. In the novel,
Saladin (Oliver) gallantly saves her and her friend from a band of robbers who are just about to
overcome their champion Rosader (Orlando). Shakespeare omits this episode as he does not want
to disturb the pristine innocence of Arden by introducing discordant human elements.
Shakespeare’s Arden is a place where the immigrants ‘fleet the time carelessly as they did in the
golden world’. In Rosalynde Saladin after being saved by Rosader from a lion, not a lioness,
takes his saviour as a stranger and confides into him the whole story of his cruelty to Rosader in
a tone of bitter repentance. Shakespeare avoids the note of mistaken identity as that would create
unnecessary confusion and would demand prolongation of the plot which would be necessary to
lead the chaos to a happy resolution. While in Rosalynde, Rosader plays as important a role as
Rosalynde, Shakespeare gives the heroine the lead role. Again, Lodge does not take the
characters to the Forest of Arden as hastily as Shakespeare does ; he elaborately deal with the
disputes and reconciliation of the two brothers, the expulsion of Saladin from the castle and his
return with the sheriff in a leisurely fashion. In Rosalynde, the usurping Duke is vanquished and
killed in a battle by his opponent, but Shakespeare makes Frederick undergo a change of heart in
contact with a holy hermit. Shakepeare omits the bloody battle for he does not want Arden to be
stained by blood as much as he believes that the influence of a holy man is mightier than a sword.

“Shakespeare does not allow any cloud to dim his the serene horizon, and as Prospero felt
repentance is a better cure than revenge.” – Verity.
Another possible source is The Tale of Gamelyn which is supposed to have provided material
to Lodge for his Rosalynde. “This old work was at one time ascribed to Chaucer and classed as
2
The Cook’s Tale among The Canterbury Tales, “ but is now considered to be written in the
middle of the 14th
century. Although the Tale is not included in the extant original (black-letter)
editions of Chaucer, it was not printed , as evidences show, till the beginning of the 18th
century.
But if it was known to Lodge through MS, it is also possible that it might have been known to
Shakespeare. Still, resemblances are rare to suggest more than trivial relationship of
Shakespeare’s play with The Cook’s Tale or The Tale of Gamelyn. Moreover, Lodge was
indebted to the Tale for just the early part of his Rosalynde. The Tale of Gamelyn tells the story
of Gamelyn (who is Rosader in Rosalynde and Orlando in As You Like It) “ the youngest son of
a dead knight who has favoured him in his will, but who is maltreated by his elder brother’s
servants. After defeating a mighty champion in a wrestling match, he falls again, through
treachery, into his brother’s power, and would have been starved to death had he not been
delivered by Adam Spenser, his father’s old servant, the very type of the devoted Teutonic
retainer. With their good oaken staves they cudgel the elder brother and a body of Churchmen
whom he was feasting in his hall, and they serve similarly a company of four and twenty young
men sent by the sheriff to capture them. They the ride off to the forest, where they join a company
of merry outlaws of whom Gamelyn becomes king. He is indicted by his elder brother, who is
sheriff; but he turns the tables upon him, and hangs sheriff, judge, and jury. In spite of this he
makes his peace with the king, who creates him ‘chief justice of all his free forest’ ”. – F S
Boas : Shakespeare and his Predecessors. Page 329. And we are told briefly that he marries a
‘wife both fair and good.” Thus excepting the first part, Lodge’s Rosalynde does not bear much
resemblance to The Tale of Gamelyn, and the rest, rather the major part of the novel is Lodge’s
own invention. Lodge may have drawn idea from some Italian novel, but there is not evidence to
this effect. ( Furness) Hence it is only in three or four introductory scenes that As You Like It
bears some similarity with the pseudo-Chaucerian Tale. From the point where Orlando joins the
exiled Duke and his band (II.7.) the play parts company with the Tale. Thus even if it is assumed
that that The Tale of Gamelyn was known to Shakespeare, critics, for legitimate reasons,
consider Rosalynde, Euphues’ Golden Legacie as the real source of the subject-matter of As
You Like It.
One thing we must remember in this connection. Although we can trace some source for
Shakespeare’s plays, we must by no means be unaware of the originality of Shakespeare. Even a
scholar while watching the play on the stage would hardly remember that the play is in imitation
of some source existing elsewhere. Shakespeare’s genius is so overpowering and his dramatic
craftsmanship is so potent that like an alchemist he can turn a trivial idea found on the wayside
into a king’s crown bedecked with jewels. “The humour and wit, poetry, pathos and tragic
intensity, deft manipulation of the plot and underplot and varied relief are Shakespeare’s own gift
, never the inspiration of another.” A comparison of As You Like It with Lodge’s Rosalynde
and The Tale of Gamelyn supposedly written by Chaucer would bear testimony to this reality.
Had not this been so, had he been just a dramatiser of sources, the less Shakespeare would be he.
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RESIDENCE: 395 Ramakrishna Palli (Mission Palli)
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04. The Theme of Love at First sight
It is strange that Shakespeare puts in the lips of Phebe the keynote of As You Like It :
“Whoever loved that loved not at first sight?”, words quoted from Marlowe’s Hero and
Leander. This theme recurs in Twelfth Night as well, for Olivia falls in love with Viola-turned-
Cesario at first sight, rejecting his long suitor Orsino, and no sooner Viola has knowledge that
Orsino is still a bachelor than she decides that she would be his wife. In Twelfth Night while
Viola’s love at first sight meets with success, Olivia’s is not, for she does not exactly get the
hand of the person she chose to be her husband. There is reason for the resolution of the tangle to
take that course, for Shakespeare cures two affected persons of self-deception before they are led
to tie the knot. The Duke is more in love with love than he is with Olivia, and that is why as soon
as he discovers that Viola is a woman and that Oilivia is engaged to Sebastian, he accepts Viola,
whose rubious lips he discovers to be sweeter than Diana’s and whose ‘pipe’ he discovers to be
like an organ, as his ‘fancy’s queen and her master’s mistress,’ and begins to call Olivia ‘sweet
sister’. In As You Like It, there are four pairs of lovers, Orlando-Rosalind, Touchstone-Audrey,
Silvius-Phebe, and finally Oliver-Celia. Among them, three pairs – Rosalind and Orlando, Oliver
and Celia, and Touchstone and Audrey – are lovers at first sight, and their union is the
confirmation of love at first sight. Phebe’s love for Ganymede with whom she falls in love at first
sight does not meet with success, for Shakespeare would not allow the vanity in a shepherdess to
win. While Rosalind and Celia and Orlando and Oliver and the whole pack transported from the
court to Arden behave innocently in tune with the innocent atmosphere of the forest, the
shepherdess who is supposed to embody innocence supremely is affected with vanity. She is
cured of that through the exposition of the real identity of Ganymede and is forced to accept
Silvius whom meanwhile Rosalind has ragged out of his effeminacy. Even then, the play
basically deals with the theme of love, and love at first sight though this genre of human emotion
is dealt with in its variegated forms. Man is diverse by nature, and equally diverse is man’s
attitude to love. Shakespeare has cracked the question in some way in As You Like It.
Although Phebe quotes Marlowe to express her attitude to love, she is not Shakespeare’s
instrument to lead love at first sight to fruition. This love materializes in the relationship
between Orlando and Rosalind. Rosalind falls in love with Orlando the very moment she has a
look at him, and Orlando too falls in love with Rosalind at first sight. This love, though at first
sight, is not a sudden infatuation, for Rosalind and Orlando both have one thing in common –
they are the victims of deprivation and cruelty issuing from avarice and ingratitude. Rosalind’s
father has been unlawfully deprived of his dukedom by his younger brother, Frederick, and
Orlando, too, as Rosalind comes to know a little later, has been denied the education and the
fortune his father had bequeathed him by his elder brother, Oliver. Thus although they fall in love
at first sight, there already exists a common bond between the two. Shakespeare takes them both

away from the city to the forest of Arden to let their love to be full abloom. But Shakespeare does
not make the Orlando-Rosalind love-affair race to the marriage portal, for marriage, Shakespeare
lets us know in many places, has to be based on the solid foundation where cheap emotion would
hardly have any role to sustain it. So their love, first of all, has to pass through a test, and
secondly it should find consummation in a situation when the time would not longer be ‘out of
2
joint’. Rosalind who was depressed in the court and who needed to be constantly comforted by
Celia becomes the leading figure in the forest of Arden. The court depressed her, but the forest
sets her essentially witty and jovial nature free. Although the gold is Celia’s, it is she who decides
purchasing Silvius’s sheepcote and the farm. Again it is she who discovers Orlando and on the
plea of giving him the ‘love-cure’ enjoys the wooing by him. The more she is wooed, the deeper
she goes down in love. The wooing scenes prove that Orlando is sincere, and is ready to accept
Rosalind at the cost of kingdoms. The way Shakespeare leads the couple to the final union is
remarkably appreciable. The duke having been discovered, the pall of gloom that hung upon the
heart of Rosalind is withdrawn, and before taking the marriage vow, she receives the blessings of
her father. Thus Orlando-Rosalind love-affair which sprouted at first sight on the part of both,
passing through the trial by circumstances, turns rock-solid, and only then they tie the knot.
Rosalind does not rush to marry as, while she desires a happy marriage, she also loves to be in
love and enjoy the pre-marital romance. So she ‘plays a cat-and-mouse game with Orlando’.
The Oliver-Celia affair is also a case of love at first sight, but apparently that is hastily led to
marriage. Rosalind describes the affair in a beautiful, though humorous, way : “There was never
anything so sudden , but the fight of two rams, and Caesar’s thrasonical brag of “I came, saw,
and overcame”. For your brother and my sister no sooner met, but they looked; no sooner looked,
but they loved; no sooner loved, but they sighed, but no sooner they sighed, but they asked one
another the reason; and no sooner knew the reason, but they sought the remedy. … They are in
the very wrath of love, and they will together; clubs cannot part them.” (V.2.28-40) And Orlando
declares that “they shall be married tomorrow.” This intelligence spurs Rosalind to have their
marriage solemnised too the same day. The fact is that Rosalind-Orlando love-affair needed a
long time till to end in marriage. They had to bear the pain that was still gory in their heart;
secondly, Rosalind being a practical, witty, and intelligent woman could not rightly take the
doggerels of Orlando as the expression of serious love. But Rosalind-Orland affair having been
settled, and Oliver’s transformation having been understood by Celia who knows the whole
background, there is no need to delay the marriage for the sake of the flavour of courtship. And
so they too are married to happily live hereafter in the palace of Oliver who would get his share.
The Touchstone-Audrey affair by contrast brings out the sweetness of Orlando-Rosalind affair,
and in a way that between Celia and Oliver. He parodies romantic love recounting how one night
he took his sword for a rival and broke it by striking it upon a stone. He also recounts how he
liked the cow’s udder as Jane Smile , whom he loved earlier, milked the animal with her hands.
Actually Touchstone cannot be in romantic love for he does not have the appropriate mind-set for
that purpose. That he is made of a stony metal is evident when he parodies Orlando’s ‘No jewel
is like Rosalind’ with his “Sweetest nut has sourest rind, / Such a nut is Rosalind”. Touchstone is
a real fool as while trying laugh at Orlando’s poetry he utters the truth – Rosalind in the guise of
boy has a very sweet heart. He considers himself to be superior to Audrey, an Ovid in the midst
of Goths. He would marry Audrey because he needs a woman to fondle. He also makes a clean
breast of the fact that he would forsake Audrey when his appetite is cloyed. But even Touchstone
cannot help throwing compliments at Audrey by saying that rich honesty dwells like a miser in a
poor house just as a pearl dwells inside a foul oyster. Touchstone is no less a romantic lover.
He chooses to marry Audrey for he discovers in her rich honesty. To him she is a pearl although

he parodied Orlando’s calling Rosalind a jewel. The fact is that he parodied Orlando because he
had not then fallen in love, and when he was in love with Jane Smile, he was no less frantic than
Orlando. And as he is now going to accept Audrey as his bed-partner, he finds in her heart a
pearl. Thus Touchstone too belongs to the troop of romantic lovers. Had he not been so, he would
have suffered expulsion in the hands of Shakespeare, and for that matter by the Forest of Arden.
3
The Silvius-Phebe episode is another aspect of love, we can say, at first sight. Phebe continues to
repulse Silvius in the same way as Olivia of Twelfth Night repulses the love of Orsino and yet
like Orsino, who engaged Viola-turned-Cesario to woo the Countess on his behalf, she engages
Silvius to carry a billet-doux to Ganymede. Still there is certainly no doubt that Phebe too has a
taste of love at first sight. We are not aware of the history of the growth of love between Silvius
and Phebe; maybe on the part of Silvius it was a love at first sight, or it was a love that sprouted
with no scope for alternative choice. Still Slivius’s adoration of Phebe is real and sincere although
Phebe does not find him to be attractive enough to fall in love with him at the first sight.
Shakespeare deals with the situation in a humorous way, and often turns the attitude of Phebe to
ridicule. But there is never expressed any ill-feeling towards the shepherdess as the very spirit of
the play would not accommodate it. Heart cares little for station in life in choosing its lord or
lady, and we have seen in Twelfth Night that while Olivia rejects the suit of the Duke, she falls
over head and ears in love with his page. So to say that Phebe is vane in rejecting the love of a
shepherd and aspiring for the hand of Ganymede is fallacious, as her heart simply does not
respond to Silvius. Her heart is yearning for Ganymede : “(If this be so), why blame you me to
love you ?” Rosalind also appreciates Phebe’s gesture as she says : “I will love you if I can”. But
God not willing Phebe cannot have her desire fulfilled. Still, at long last, when she discovers that
she cannot have Ganymede as her husband for the obvious reason, ( If sight and shape be true, /
Why then, my love adieu!” V.4.119-120) she stretches her hand towards Silvius as, after all, she
must have a husband,(Hymen: You to his love must accord, Or have a woman to your lord”
and if she must have a husband , it is better to accept one who sheds tears and heaves sighs for
her while she does so Ganymede; who is ‘all made of faith and service’ for her although she
bears these feelings for Ganymede, who is ‘ made of fantasy, / All made of passion, and all made
of wishes / All adoration, duty and observance, / All purity, all trial, all observance’ for Phebe
while she is all that for Ganymede. Rosalind finds enough proof that Silvius is faithful, and so
when the final union of the lovers takes place, Phebe readily agrees to marry Silvius : “I will not
eat my word, now thou art mine; / Thy faith my fancy to thee doth combine.” And Jaques too
blesses Silvius ‘to a long and well-deserved bed.” Rosalind-Orlando affair has many sparkling
moments, but Silvius-Phebe-Ganymede episode has no fewer. It is indeed the most complicated
subplot, but is led to a happy end to the satisfaction of all.
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RESIDENCE : 395 Ramakrishna Palli ( Mission Palli),
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05. As You Like It as a Romantic Comedy
Comedy as a literary genre differs from Tragedy in that while a tragedy presents the spectacle of
the fall (practically death in the hands of the opponent) of the hero or the heroine, a comedy ends
happily for him or her. Tragedy handles an action that is serious but comedy is based on a
story that aims at amusing us. While the term ‘comedy’ or ‘tragedy’ customarily is applied to the
stage plays or the motion pictures, as Abrams comments, the comic form also occurs in prose
fiction and narrative poetry. The Greek exponent of this genre is Aristophanes , the author of The
Frogs.
Comedy is as old as the tragedy, and even Aristotle deals with the genre in his Poetics. In course
of time, the genre has passed through an evolutionary process, and English comedy gives us
certain variations – Satiric Comedy, Comedy of Manners , Comedy of Humours, Sentimental
Comedy and Anti-sentimental Comedy. Satiric Comedy attacks the follies of man which are
almost synonymous with crimes, and the laughter that is produced is harsh and lacks geniality.
Ben Jonson’s Volpone is a comedy of this type. In Comedy of Manners ( Restoration
Comedy) the follies and foible of the human beings, particularly of the aristocracy, are ridiculed,
but the follies that are dealt with in such comedies are not as vicious as those handled in Satiric
Comedies. The comic reflects itself in wit and ready repartees, in the ‘verbal fencing match.’ The
best example of Comedy of Manners is William Congreve’s The Way of the World and
William Wycherley’s The Country Wife, although the form was introduced by Shakespeare in
Love’s Labour Lost and Much Ado about Nothing. A middle class reaction against
Restoration Comedy which dealt mainly with indecent elements and used indecorous language
led to the introduction of Sentimental Comedy. This form was practiced by Steele in his The
Tender Husband (1705), and The conscious Lovers (1722), Hugh Kelley in his False
Delicacy, Richard Cumberland in his The Fashionable Lover, Edward Moore in his The
Foundling (1748).In the latter part of the 18th
century, however, a strong reaction was evident
against sentimental Comedy for its emphasis on tears rather than on laughter, and Goldsmith
came out with his She Stoops to Conquer and Sheridan with his The Rivals and A School for
Scandal which are known as Anti-sentimental Comedies which redeemed gaiety but carefully
avoided indecency. The Comedy of Manners that lapsed in the early 19th
century was revived by
skilful dramatists like A.W.Pinero, and Oscar Wilde who came up with his The Importance of
Being Earnest (1895) followed by Shaw and others. The Comedy of Humours was launched by
Ben Jonson . This comedy was based on the imbalance in the physiological nature of man which
was supposed to remain normal if there was balance in the four primary fluids – blood, phlegm,
choler or yellow bile and black bile (melancholy). Any imbalance in the status of the fluids would
lead to an eccentricity in human behaviour. Every Man in his Humour by Ben Jonson is a
comedy of this type. A Romantic comedy is characterized by genial humour, decency and good
taste, and its chief foundation is romance or love. Lodge’s Rosalynde (1590) which was the

chief source of As You Like It served as the model of this type of comedy. The love-affair does
not run smoothly, but the hazards are overcome ultimately, leading to the happy union of the
lovers. Often, as in As You Like It and A Midsummer Night’s Dream , the locale is shifted to a
‘green world’ as Northorp Frye remarks in his The Anatomy of Criticism (1957).The world is
2
one of song, feast and dance, of high hilarity and genial laughter, often burdened with sadness as
much as with irresponsible carousal.
Shakespeare’s As You Like It is a romantic comedy par excellence. It is based on the main
theme of love at first sight between Rosalind and Orlando whose romancing forms the major
attraction of the play. As the city in which both the hero and the heroine suffer ill-treatment in the
hands of avaricious usurpers, the pair is transported to a wood called The Forest of Arden. In the
city, they felt love but their hearts were hard-pressed. Once in the Forest of Arden, the lid of
repression is taken off and they engage in ‘cat-and-mouse game’. While both are deeply in love
and want to get united, the union is delayed as Rosalind loves to be in love in order to taste to her
heart’s content the taste of romance. In the mock-wooing scene which Rosalind arranges for
Orlando to cure him of his love, Rosalind slides further down in love: “ Come, woo me, woo me ;
for now I am in a holiday humour and like enough to consent.” After Orlando leaves, Rosalind
speaks to Celia of her effusion of love : “ O coz, coz, coz, my pretty little coz, that thou didst
know how may fathoms deep I am in love.” Rosalind delays in exposing her real identity for the
time is not yet ripe. She waits for the right hour, and the right hour comes when she comes to
know the whereabouts of her father, and her friend Celia finds a suitable partner. When she
comes to learn that Celia and Oliver will tie knot the next day, she too feels that the hour has
come for her too. Meanwhile both the usurpers have undergone radical changes in their mind-set.
Oliver having been rescued by his own brother, Orlando, from the jaws of a lioness readily
confides his penitence into the ears of the very person he had subjected to ill-treatment. So there
is no obstacle in the way of Celia uniting with him. Marvellous is the description of Rosalind of
the love-affair between Oliver and Celia. “ There was never anything so sudden but the fight of
two rams and Caesar’s thrasonical (from Thraso, the boaster, in Terence’s Eunuch) brag of “I
came, saw, and overcame’; for your brother and my sister no sooner met than they looked; no
sooner looked by they loved ; no sooner loved but they sighed; no sooner sighed but they asked
one another the reason; no sooner knew the reason but they sought the remedy and in these
degrees have they made a pairs of stairs to marriage, which they will climb incontinent
(indiscreet), or else be incontinent before marriage. They are in the very wrath of love, and they
will together; clubs cannot part them.” (V.ii.34-42). So the next day, they are united. Rosalind
holds the hand of Orlando after receiving her father’s blessings; Celia too receives the blessings
of the senior duke and her father, by now a man who would prefer living like a hermit in the
forest.
The Silvius-Phebe under-plot also contributes to the romantic character of the play. Silvius, a
hapless swain,”wasting in despair”, loves Phebe, a typical “Arcadian coquette”, a shepherdess,
but Phebe repulses him. But her fancy catches fire at the sight of Ganymede, and she woos him
to her best. Even she engages Silvius to carry her billet-doux to Ganymede. This reminds us of
Viola carrying the errand of the person she loves to Olivia and wooing her very faithfully on her
master’s behalf. Ultimately, for the obvious reason that Ganymede cannot marry a woman, she
has to remain content with Silvius, whom she begins to adore for his faithfulness. Phebe: “I will
not eat my word, now thou art mine; / Thy faith my fancy to thee doth combine.” (V.iv. 148-149).
Jaques appreciates their union by saying that they may now go to a long and well-deserved bed.
The Silvius-Phebe episode not only adds a romantic touch to the play but turns it into a high
pastoral. Interestingly, Shakespeare puts in the lips of Phebe the keynote of the play: “Whoever

loved that loved not at first sight ?”, words quoted from Marlowe’s Hero and Leander. Phebe’s
love for Ganymede cannot be interpreted as ambitious for heart hardly cares for who would sit
there as the lord. This has similarity with Olivia’s love for the page of the Duke.
3
Touchstone, the critic and yet not a pessimist like Jaques, too is engaged in rustic courtship in a
manner that is contrasted with Rosalind-Orlando’s. This episode serves as a foil to the central
romance in as much as Touchstone wants to marry Audrey as it would not be difficult for him to
desert Audrey when his love is satiated. Audrey candidly declares that she is ignorant of things
“poetical”, but she means business. Just before the Tocuchstone-William encounter, she opens up
her heart saying that William who seeks her hand ‘has no interest in me in the world.” This
interest Touchstone has, and so she would have him for her husband. Touchstone tells William
point blank that as he loves Audrey, he should shun her company, and Audrey too okays
Touchstone’s view. The affair, though a little prosaic, has much to contribute to the mood of the
play. It not only amuses us but also points out that the world is not exclusively inhabited by
Roasalinds and Orlandos, but there are also Touchstones and Audreys. Shakespeare’s comic
vision is as catholic as his tragic vision, and this vision includes Touchstone and Audrey as much
as it includes Rosalind and Orlando, Celia and Oliver and Silvius and Phebe.
Two other elements contribute to the romantic spirit of the play. First, the Forest of Arden with its
pristine innocence where human vices have no scope to flourish but where love blooms best. The
forest is not inhabited by tame and timid animals, but has hungry lionesses too. But despite all,
innocence dominates, and whoever steps into this place, perchance or owing to the scheme of
things, undergoes a change of heart which melts. Thus Oliver is saved by the very person whom
he had deprived of his rights, and Frederick, in contact with a hermit, becomes deeply penitent
for having wronged the senior Duke. Thus the Forest of Arden serves as the purgatorio or the
reformatory as called in modern criminology. The wood is a safe haven for the wronged as here
there is no other enemy than winter and rough weather. The Forest practically is the central figure
uniting all and doing away with the vices that gripped the court. It does not become the
permanent abode of the exiles who are basically city-dwellers, but it reforms them, setting the
wrongs aright, and preparing them to turn the court into a saner world when they go there back.
The other elements that immensely contributes to the romantic atmosphere of the play are songs and
poems. There are six songs (49,58,88,99,103,104) in the play which are sung by Amiens, Page, Jaques and
Hymen. While all the songs enrich the romantic spirit of the play, the first one sung by Amiens and later
joined in by all indicate the mood of the play while indicating the character of the Forest of Arden. All who
can withstand the winter and rough weather, have no ambition, would love to lie in the sun, content with
what he gets for food are welcome into this sylvan world. They will have ample leisure but will have to live
in concord with nature, singing their merry note unto the sweet birds’ throat. Jaques parodying the song
with ducdame. ducdame, ducdame intensifies the amusement. The last song by Hymen, a messenger from
Heaven celebrates the reconciliation, - ‘they atone together’. “Then is there mirth in heaven / When earthly
things made even / Atone together.” Eight hands join and wedding is great Juno’s swan.” The poems of
Orlando are doggerels, and it is strange how a man who is deprived of the benefit of education can write
such poems. The only reason that can be gauged is that love can work wonders, and can even turn a
Orlando into a poet.
Thus we find that As You Like It is ultimately a gay comedy. The play begins with discord and separation,
animosity and avarice, fratricidal attempts rushing to the edge of the forest even. But the magic world of
Arden throws all heart-burning aside and engage the characters in love, romance and matchmaking. As
Shakespeare wants finer sentiment to be active in the Forest of Arden, the lead role is given to Rosalind,
and to no male character. Rosalind in the court was morose; as Ganymede she sparkles. And she carries

about her such an effulgent air that everybody coming within the fold is transformed. Rosalind is the
human configuration of the Forest of Arden and Shakespeare’s comic in As You Like It.
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S. P. Dutta, M.A.(English), ACIB (London)
RESIDENCE: 395 Ramakrishna Palli (Mission Palli)
Sonarpur, Kolkata 700 150 ::: TEL : 1434-1406
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06. Is As You Like It a comedy of dialogue rather than of action ?
Hazlitt said that “As You Like It is a pastoral comedy of conversation and character but not of
action.” Almost the same comment has been made by J.C. Smith who says that the ‘play is in
form a comedy of dialogue rather than a comedy of incident.” What impels J.C. Smith, the editor
of As You Like It (The Warwick Shakespeare) is primarily the structure of the play which, in his
opinion, is rather weak. “Two undeclared lovers meet: the lady in disguise who challenges her
lover to woo her as his mistress: their courtship is earned on masquerade till she is assured of his
affection, when she discloses herself and all ends happily.” All this, it is argued, seems to be a
predetermined sequence, and the plot lacks causality. As we prepare to pursue the course of the
play after the locale is shifted to the Forest of Arden, we are never for a moment doubtful about
the outcome of the of the love-affair between Orlando and Rosalind. We take it for granted that it
will end in a happy union when the time is ripe, and, as we see, it does end happily and, of
course, very smoothly. No obstacle appears before them to overcome except time. And time
works in their favour. Still it would be facile to comment that the play lacks action and dramatic
interest. We are not sure what will happen to Celia, and when we see her fall in love with the
transformed Oliver, it comes to us both as a shock and surprise. First, it shocks our reason. Again,
we are never sure that Phebe who Phebes Rosalind (Ganymede) will ever surrender to the arms of
Silvius readily after having failed to marry Ganymede for the obvious reason. The transformation
of Frederick is as shocking and surprising as that of Oliver. Frederick undergoes a change of heart
in contact with a hermit and performs the penance by restoring to his elder his right. Apparently,
all these appear sudden and implausible. But Shakespeare has tilled the ground ready. He does
not use the Forest of Arden as the hideout for the exiles to hatch counter-conspiracy to regain
their lost rights. On the other hand, it frees their hearts from the burden of the cares of the court,
and gives them peace. Frederick’s heart was seething in jealousy having heard that the exiles
were fleeting their time in Forest of Arden carelessly, and this created anxiety in his heart which
he wanted, subconsciously, to replace with peace. That is why, the gunpowder flashes at the
stroke of a single matchstick. Jaques de Bois, Sir Rowland’s second son, reports amidst the
nuptial festivities that Frederick, leading an expeditionary force against Duke Senior has
undergone a religious conversion and become a hermit, returning all the banished lords’
sequestered lands and restoring the dukedom to Duke Senior. Oliver comes to the forest to take
Orlando back under the command of Frederick who sends Oliver to fetch the missing Orlando,
confiscating his lands until his brother is delivered. He is reformed after being saved by a forester
from the jaws of a lion. And when he ultimately he comes to know that his saviour is none other
than his wronged brother he cannot but withdraw all his ill-feelings (he had cherished but was
trying to forget) towards him. Shakespeare does not create the Forest of Arden as the abode of the
exiles for permanent settlement; he creates it as the purgatorio or reformatory, as called in
modern criminology. He does not want the civilized society to go back to the savage (primitive)
world, but he wants a better society by cleansing the dirt in the hearts of those who spoil the

natural innocence of humanity. Thus to say that As You Like It lacks action is to pass a comment
after looking at one side of the coin.
Although the play lacks action in the sense the tragedies or comedies like The Merchant of
Venice do not, the play owes a great deal of its charm to dialogue. Once transported into the
2
Forest of Arden, the characters have little scope to act except romancing and idling away the
time, basking in the sun and singing their merry notes unto the sweet birds’ throats sitting under
the greenwood tree. The duke and his retinue get regular supply of food and provisions from the
city, and Celia and Rosalind having bought the farm and the sheepcote are happily rehabilitated
in
a cosy cottage. Orlando takes little time to find protection of the senior Duke, and after thy settle
down, they strive to settle their love-baked hearts in repose. The only thing that irks them is non-
fulfilment of love; and they engage wholeheartedly to requite it. Naturally, dialogue witty,
sparkling and vivacious walks over action. Physical prowess of Orlando and the story of his
deprivation sparked infatuation tinged with pity in the heart of Rosalind, but to turn it into love,
it required wooing, and the success of wooing depends on words.
Some of the charming passages in the play are quotable and have become quotes. Jaques’s
reflections on the seven ages of Man are an exquisite piece of philosophy combined with poetry.
Another charming dialogue we come across when Rosalind and Celia talk to Oliver :
Celia : Are you his brother ?
Rosalind : Was’t you he rescued ?
Celia : Was’t you that did so oft to contrive to kill him ?
Oliver : ‘Twas I. But ‘t is not I. ( IV.iii.135-40)
Another charming dialogue is heard when Rosalind describes the love-affair between Celia and
Oliver :
Rosalind : I thought thy heart had been wounded
with the claws of a lion .
Orlando : Wounded it is, but with the eyes of a lady.
Then,
Rosalind : There was never anything so sudden but the fight of two
rams and Caesar’s thrasonical brag of ‘I came, saw and
overcame.’; for your brother and my sister no sooner
met but they looked ; no sooner looked but they loved;
no sooner loved but they sighed; no sooner sighed
but the asked one another the reason; no sooner
knew the reason but they sought the remedy; ….
They are in the wrath of love, but they will together;
clubs cannot part them.
Again at the sight of Silvius and Phebe, Rosalind remarks : Look, here comes a lover of mine and
a lover of hers. Then goes a marvellous exchange of retorts and repartees:
Phebe : Good shepeherd, tell this youth (Ganymede) what ‘tis to love.
Silvius : It is to be all made of sighs and tears;
And so am I for Phebe.
Phebe : And I for Ganymede.
Orlando : And I for Rosalind.

Rosalind: And I for no woman.
The dialogue continues in the same vein for some time, and Rosalind’s enigmatic utterances are
as witty as clever. Equally brilliant is Rosalind’s comment on the attitude of Phebe towards her.
To Silvius she says: She Phebes (peeves ?) me.(Iv.iii.40)
3
Countless instances of sparkling conversation abound in the play. The conversation between
Rosalind and Celia on the gifts of Nature and Fortune, between Touchstone and Corin on the
relative merits of the court life and the country life, the duet between Orlando and Rosalind on
love and marriage, the senior Duke’s praise of the forest life, Touchstone’s discourse on the seven
degrees of life and Rosalind’s views on the follies of men in love are more than brilliant. These
dialogues bring out the nature of the characters who speak them, and in that sense they are
substitutes of incidents. Stanley Wood rightly observes: “Dialogue which presents the contrasts
between the different characters and portrays the different scenes of life is for Shakespeare’s
purpose more powerful than incidents. The dialogues are planned by Shakespeare to make the
characters bare their heart.” As J.B.Priestley says , Shakespeare shows in the drama how
language can be made enthralling to the audience who enjoy metaphors, similes and puns.
Although brilliant and sparklingly witty dialogues permeate every scene of the play, action as it is
ordinarily meant is not lacking altogether. Rather, the first part of the play is very much action-
oriented. It is reported that the senior Duke has been driven away by Frederick, the Duke’s
younger brother, and an atmosphere of tension is created around the wrestling match between
Charles and Orlando. As Orlando wins, not only Rosalind and Celia but we too are relieved of the
anxiety. Frederick’s decision to banish Rosalind as she would overshadow his own daughter too
is fraught with tension. For a moment we get puzzled as to what will happen to the young
maidens. Orlando’s journey to the Forest of Arden accompanied by Adams also contains
elements of suspense, as we do not know what will happen to the victim of misfortune. Orlando’s
desperate bid to confront the Duke over their meal is the last instance of dramatic action for the
time being. Till Rosalind and Celia buy out the estate of Silvius and settle down, we remain
anxious about the girls seeking shelter in the forest. In the last part of the play again, action
packs the drama. Oliver is banished by Frederick, and as he gets into the forest, Shakespeare
arranges him to be pounced upon by a lioness. And almost in the Bollywood style, Orlando, after
a little hesitation, saves him at the expense of blood oozing out of the wounds caused by the
lioness. Oliver’s transformation is silent but genuine, and Frederick’s transformation in contact
with the hermit is also dramatic, though the action verges on melodrama. Finally comes the
physical scene of reunion and concord. All the characters are reconciled and get what is their due.
Jaques too offers his blessings to all, though his anhedonia turns him away from the celebration.
As a matter of fact, the play, which is a comedy, is rich both in action and conversation. Owing to
their brilliance and the happy ending of the play, the witty dialogues leave a deeper impression in
our mind as we tend to forget happy incidents with the same zest as we tend to remember the
unhappy or tragic incidents. Macbeth’s lasting impression in our mind owes to the incidents ;
that of As You Like It or Twelfth Night owes to the dialogues. In a rich and powerful comedy,
conversation is the chief attraction, and even in a play like Shaw’s Arms and the Man or
Congreve’s The Way of the World, it is so. In a tragedy which depicts the spectacle of the fall of
a great man, the incidents ought to be predominant and they remain deep-seated in our mind. Of a
play which ends happily we churn in our mind the sparkling dialogues. In a comedy, particularly
in a comedy like As You Like It, if action seems to be overshadowed by dialogue, it is because
in such a play, the dialogue is the action.

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07. Discuss the role of the subplot in As You Like It.
As You Like It is one of the brilliant romantic comedies of Shakespeare, with love as its central
motif. Shakespeare has shown love in its various aspects in this play, and the different subplots
work out Shakespeare’s treatment of different aspects of love. The central story of love between
Rosalind and Orlando is sparking and effulgent, and the most remarkable point about it is that it
is the heroine, not the hero that takes the lead. Right from the moment Rosalind saw Orlando in
the wrestling match, the fountain of her love for Orlando sprang forth, and so deep was her
concern about Orlando that she did her best to dissuade Orlando from the match as she
apprehended that Charles, the royal wrestler, would kill him. When Orlando comes out victor,
Rosalind adorns him with her necklace. The necklace is the symbol suggesting that she ensnares
Orlando forever. Theirs is the love at first sight, both victims of betrayal, Rosalind by her uncle
and Orlando by his elder brother. They accept their lot gracefully and flee to the Forest of Arden
where their chief occupation is to fulfil their love. The witty heroine brings out the essential lover
in Orlando, and while in the Forest of Arden, they find their love fulfilled, they do not run
headlong into marriage unless assured of a reversal of their misfortune. Romantic is the love no
doubt, but the lovers do not live in the castles built in the air. They are Wordsworth’s skylarks
that soar high and then wing back for rest on the earth.
While the central plot of the play is woven round Rosalind and Orlando affair, there are several
subplots involving different pairs – Celia and Oliver, Touchstone and Audrey, and Silvius and
Phebe. Celia –Oliver love affair is shocking in the in the first appearance. Celia is well aware
that Oliver is a usurper who deprived his brother of his share of paternal property and who even
plotted with Frederick to get Orlando killed in the wrestling match. IN the Forest of Arden,
Oliver has undergone a change of heart owing to his brother’s kindness who had saved him from
a lioness and promised to return Orlando his due share. Now Oliver is quite an acceptable groom,
with a reformed heart and who has, though suddenly, become generous. The suddenness with
which Celia fell in love with Oliver has been wonderfully expressed by Rosalind.
Rosalind : There was never anything so sudden but the fight of two
rams and Caesar’s thrasonical brag of ‘I came, saw and
overcame.’; for your brother and my sister no sooner
met but they looked ; no sooner looked but they loved;
no sooner loved but they sighed; no sooner sighed
but the asked one another the reason; no sooner
knew the reason but they sought the remedy; ….
They are in the wrath of love, but they will together;

clubs cannot part them.
Orlando is elated at the prospect of the marriage of Celia and Oliver, but he pines for his own ill-
luck that his love is yet to meet with success. Rosalind assures him that if he loves Rosalind as
his gestures indicate, then he would be able to marry her when his brother marries Aliena. This
episode is an adornment of the play, and is neatly interwoven with the main part, as Rosalind and
2
Orlando are deeply involved in the affair. The remarkable character of the subplot is that the love-
affair takes place after Oliver’s heart is free of cruelty.
The Silvius-Phebe episode demonstrates another aspect of love, adding an element of pastoral
characteristic to the play. The episode , as in the main plot Twelfth Night, centres round a love
triangle owing to disguised identity. Silivius, a shepherd, is in love with Phebe, a shepherdess
who, like Olivia declining to accept Orsino’s love, treats Silvius with contempt and is drawn
towardss Rosalind, now known as Ganymede. Phebe tells Sivius rather harshly that once she
hated him, but as he can talk well , she would endure her company which was so long irksome to
her. Very cunningly, Phebe uses Silvius as her errand boy to carry her love letter to Rosalind,
which, she says, contains words of bitterness of her heart .Rosalind says that by her letter Phebe
Phebes (peeves) her. She chastises Silvius for his cowardice and calls him a tame snake. She
advises Silvius to convey Phebe that if she loves her, she should love him. Eventually, when
Rosalind shakes off her disguise and comes out as a beautiful woman, Phebe agrees to marry
Silivius. Here too the sub-plot is closely knit with the main plot, Rosalind playing an important
role in creating the crisis as Ganymede and finally resolving the crisis as Rosalind. The role of
Silvius carrying Phebe’s love-letter for Ganymede reminds one of Viola carrying Orsino’s letter
for Olivia.
The touchstone-Audrey episode reveals another aspect of love. Audrey is willing to marry
Touchstone because of the latter’s higher social status than that of William, a country fellow. The
marriage of Touchstone and Audrey is temporarily put off owing to Jaques’s suggestion that they
should look for a better priest to conduct the rituals. Actually, Jaques wants the pair marry along
with other pairs.Audrey is dismayed, but meanwhile Touchstone makes the path clear for her by
outwitting William by his use of rhetoric and air of superiority. Touchstone-Audrey relationship
is no romantic game; it is earthen. Touchstone needs a woman to satisfy his passion, and Audrey
needs a man for security. Touchstone even does not hesitate to say that he is keen to marry
Audrey as it would be easy for him to shun her. This affair is the mockery of the romantic love
between Orlando and Rosalind; and although it is apparent that this subplot is an incoherent
element in as much as no main character is involved in the affair, the episode is an integral part of
the play, having subtly close link with the main plot. Touchstone and Audrey affair is clandestine,
but Touchstone is much involved with the main plot as Rosalind, Orlando and Jaques are.
Moreover, Jaques’s intervention links up the episode with the whole design. The interesting part
of the episode lies in the fact that Shakespeare involves Touchstone in a clandestine love affair,
and the marriage is put off in order to surprise the other characters when they will gather in pairs
to marry.
It may appear that the introduction of the subplots has weakened the main structure of the play
that deals with the love-episode of Rosalind and reversal of misfortune.. Duke Frederick has
exiled his elder brother Senior Duke and Oliver has done the same wrong to his brother Orlando.
The Forest of Arden remaining distinct from the court has its own power to transform cruel hearts
and resolve the crises, and this transformation of hearts has been shown not only in the case of

Oliver but also in the case of Phebe. The love-affair between Orlando and Rosalind is beautiful
and has enough elements to amuse the readers, but the subplots, by contrast, heighten the charm
of their romance. Again, the subplots are not allowed to be episodic in nature; they are integrated
into the main theme to form the play an organized whole.
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08. Discuss AS YOU LIKE IT as a pastoral play.
The term ‘Pastoral’ originating from a Latin word that means ‘ pertaining to shepherds’ is a
minor but important mode of writing, which by convention, is concerned with the lives of the
shepherds who live and tend the sheep in pastures. This particular type of writing is of great
antiquity and ‘interpenetrates’ many works in classical and modern European literature. For the
most part, pastoral tends to be the idealization of shepherd life, and, by so being, creates an image
of a peaceful and uncorrupted space – a kind of pre-lapsarian world. Theocritus (circa 316 – circa
260 BC), a native of Syracuse of Sicily who wrote pastorals for the sophisticated Greeks of
Alexandria is considered the inventor of this form. Pastoral drama flourished in Italy with Tasso’s
Aminta (1581) and Guarini’s Il Pastor Fido (1585) The influence of these works is discernible
in a number of Shakespeare’s plays; also in Ben Jonson’s unfinished play The Sad Shepherd.
James Shirlet also wrote a pastoral play called The Arcadia (1640) , an adaptation of Sidney’s
work. But probably the most distinguished pastoral play in English literature was John Fletcher’s
The Faithful Shepherdess (1608). The pastoral mode has undergone changes over the centuries,
but summarily it comes to denote a nostalgia for the past, for some hypothetical state of love and
peace which has somehow been lost. The dominating idea and theme of most of the pastoral is
the search for the simple life away from the court and the town, away from corruption, war, strife,
covetousness, away from ‘getting and spending’. In a way, it reveals a yearning for the lost
innocence, for the pre-Fall paradisal life in which man existed in harmony with nature. It is thus a
form of primitivism and a potent longing for things past. (Cuddon. P 647).
The pastoralism in As You Like It has been a subject of much discussion. Although the word
‘pastoral’ ostensibly refers to the life of the rural folk and their ways of living, manners and
customs, pastoral poetry does not reflect the realities of the country life, and that from the very
beginning it had only for its referent ( a word that symbolizes something) an imaginary landscape
which was actually a projection of the poet’s fantasies, feelings and ideas. In course of time, the
word ‘pastoral’ came to be identified with an ideal space representing innocence, peace, and
philosophic contemplation and was also imagined as a place ideally suited for love and creation
of poetry. Although the pastoral world is a shepherd’s world, “the poetry of the shepherd”, as
Eleanor Terry Linton points out, “ was written by, and for the sophisticates… The shepherd
strictly speaking is never a shepherd. He is musician, a poet, a prince and a priest.”
When the Elizabethans came to write pastorals, they had before them an established tradition.
Even Sidney and Spenser followed, despite their individual talent, the convention closely. To the
poets of the time, the pastoral world meant an alternative mode of life. The shepherds that
peopled the woody countryside impersonated amorous lovers, scholar-poets and aristocrats in
exile. When the rustics were introduced, they were not the poet’s prime concerns. The primary

concerns were directed to the courtiers who, in their exile, lived like the shepherds and the
environment served as a background to the love-affairs of the shepherds and shepherdesses who
emulated the love-game of the refined men and women from the court. In As You Like It, we
see that the real inmates of the Forest of Arden, Silvius and Phebe and Corin, are marginalized;
and it is the courtly people that flock to the forest for some reason or other receive the
importance. Still it can be found that Shakespeare has departed from the ‘patoralisation’ of the
2
courtly people.
The essential character of the pastoral world of As You Like It is struck by Amiens’ song. It is a
leisurely world where there is no enemy except winter and rough weather. Here one can enjoy life
if he can sing in tune with the sweet bird’s throat. Touchstone’s comment on this life made before
Corin exposes the non-ideal character of the pastoral, although his view is strictly personal. He
considers it a good life because it is solitary, because it is in the fields and because it is a pare life.
But he hates this life, because it is a shepherd’s life. To him it is a vile life because it is private;
and it is tedious because it is not in the court. As it is a spare life, it fits his humour well, but he is
not enthusiastic about it, as there is no plenty in it. Touchstone’s comment is very important as it
does not glorify the pastoral world as a spotless space, but it exposes the real benefits that it offers
and the real discomforts that it offers an urban man. In that sense, Shakespeare deviates from the
convention by upholding the realities of the region.
The pastoral world of As You Like It is located in the Forest of Arden, but it is not a distant land,
far from the madding crowd. The interaction between the court and the forest is active, and there
are regular visitors from the court to the forest, bringing in supplies and provisions. Although it
offers books in the running brooks, and although the winter wind that blows here is not so unkind
as man’s ingratitude, there is also a lioness that would swoop upon a prey the moment she finds
it. Shakespeare takes the drama from the court to the forest in order to give peace to the betrayed,
and hence grief-stricken, souls and express his contempt for the viciousness of the courtly life,
marked by ingratitude and betrayal. But Shakespeare does not want retransformation of the city
into the jungle, as Tagore wanted in a particular context, but he wants a reformed courtly life,
saner and purged of the vile elements.
The strictly pastoral world in As You Like It has only a few inmates – Corin, Silvius and Phebe.
Corin is an old shepherd while silvius is a young shepherd and Phebe a young shepherdess. Corin
plays a crucial role as he gives Rosalind and Celia through Touchstone the information that he is
in the employ of a rich shepherd who now wishes to sell his estate. The girls decide to buy the
estate so that they may settle down and assure Corin that they would retain him. Corin, though a
lay shepherd, does not play an insignificant role. He takes Rosalind and Celia to witness a “
pageant between the pale complexion of true love and the red glow of scorn and proud disdain”.
Asked by Touchstone what his philosophy is, he says that “the more one sickens, the worse at
ease he is; and that he wants money, means and content is without three good friends; that the
property rain is to wet and fire to born; that good pasture makes fat sheep; and that a great cause
of night is the lack of the sun; that he hath learned no wit by nature nor art may complain of good
breeding or comes of a dull kindred.” (III,ii,10-15) His philosophy, Touchstone says, is one of
natural philosopher, meaning that what Corin says is simply a statement of facts and not any
philosophy at all. Thus Shakespeare exposes the difference between innocent the denizen of the
pastoral world and the affected citizen of a court that Touchstone is.
Phebe is a vane shepherdess whom Silvius loves so deeply that he passes sleepless nights. This is
because in spite his best pleading, Phebe is cold to him. Rosalind, as she hears Silvius’s

exclamation: “O Phebe, Phebe, Phebe!” feels a resurgence of her own love for Orlando, and
recognizes that Silvius’s love for Phebe is genuine. When Rosalind appears while Silvius and
Phebe are in a wordy game of love, Phebe at once falls in love with Rosalind-turned-Ganymede.
As Rosalind knows that Phebe is under an illusion about her male appearance, she scorns Phebe
for her cruelty towards Silvius who is an ardent lover and wholly devoted. The tangle that appears
following Phebe’s attraction towards Ganymede is resolved when Rosalind reveals her true
3
identity. Phebe now has no alternative to accepting Silvius for her husband as Rosalind cannot
marry a woman. Phebe’s vanity is natural for even if she a resident of the pastoral world, a young
girl is prone to be vane. “Vanity is a part of a woman’s countenance”, says Hardy about
Bathsheba in Far From the Madding Crowd. There might be two reasons – Phebe like
Rosalind plays a coquet to explore the depth of Silvius’s love or she might be on the look out for
a more handsome and agreeable guy. The second reason leads her to write a billet-doux to
Ganymede who chides Silvius for his tameness and inspires him to be bold, brave and resolute.
The pastoral world in As You Like It works as a purgatorio. A place opposite in mood to the
court, it is not only a serene world but has qualities that transform the degenerated hearts into
their normal state. Oliver is transformed, and so is Frederick. Thus Shakepeare’s pastoral world is
not only a greenery where calm prevails, it serves as a foil to the urban life. The court breeds
jealousy, avarice and treachery, but the wood annihilates them. Shakespeare transports the
characters to the pastoral world to cleanse the hearts of those who are evil-minded and give solace
to those who are wronged. Ultimately, the evil characters are reformed , and rapprochement takes
place between hostile brothers. Here lies the importance of Shakespeare’s handling of the pastoral
to which the dramatist adds a dimension in As You Like It.
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