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The Foolish Delights of Love
As You Like It spoofs many of the ridiculous conventions of poetry and literature dealing with love, such as the idea that love is a disease that brings suffering and torment to the lover, or the assumption that the male lover is the slave or servant of his mistress. These ideas are central features of the courtly love tradition, which greatly influenced European literature for hundreds of years before Shakespeare’s time. In As You Like It, characters lament the suffering caused by their love, but these laments are all too generic to be convincing. When Orlando pens painfully conventional love poems that conform to the notion that he should “live and die [Rosalind’s] slave” (3.2.156), Rosalind and Touchstone ridicule his foolish sentimentality. Even Silvius, the untutored shepherd, assumes the role of the tortured lover, asking his beloved Phoebe to notice “the wounds invisible / That love’s keen arrows make” (3.5.32–33).
Yet for all its foolishness, romantic love may also be a force for happiness and even fulfillment. Celia speaks to the curative powers of love in her introductory scene with Rosalind, in which she implores her cousin to allow “the full weight” of her love to push aside Rosalind’s unhappy thoughts (1.2.7–8). As soon as Rosalind takes to Arden, she displays her own copious knowledge of the ways of love. Disguised as Ganymede, she tutors Orlando in how to be a more attentive and caring lover, counsels Silvius against worshipping the all-too-human Phoebe, and scolds Phoebe for her arrogance in playing the shepherd’s disdainful love object. When Rosalind famously insists that “[m]en have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love,” she argues against the notion that love concerns the perfect, mythic, or unattainable (4.1.112–13). Unlike Jaques and Touchstone, both of whom have keen eyes and biting tongues trained on the follies of romance, Rosalind doesn’t completely disparage love. On the contrary, she teaches a version of love that not only can survive in the real world, but which can also bring delight.
Read more about the theme of love in one of Shakespeare’s tragedies, Romeo and Juliet.
The Malleability of the Human Experience
In act 2, scene 7, Jaques philosophizes on the stages in the life of “man.” That is, a man passes from infancy into boyhood; he then becomes a lover, a soldier, and a wise civic leader; and then, year by year, becomes a bit more foolish until he is returned to his “second childishness and mere oblivion” (2.7.173). Jaques’s speech remains an eloquent commentary on how quickly and thoroughly human beings can change, and, indeed, do change in As You Like It. Whether physically, emotionally, or spiritually, those who enter the Forest of Arden are often remarkably different when they leave. The most dramatic and unmistakable change, of course, occurs when Rosalind assumes the disguise of Ganymede. Through her extended charade dressed as a young man, Rosalind demonstrates how vulnerable to change men and women truly are. Orlando, for instance, is putty in her hands. Even more impressive is her ability to manipulate Phoebe’s affections, which at the play’s end shift suddenly from Ganymede to the once-despised Silvius.
In As You Like It, Shakespeare dispenses with the time-consuming and often hard-won processes involved in change. The characters do not struggle to become more pliant; rather, their changes are instantaneous. Oliver, for instance, learns to love both his brother Orlando and a disguised Celia within moments of setting foot in the forest. Furthermore, the vengeful and ambitious Duke Frederick abandons all thoughts of fratricide after a single conversation with a religious hermit. Certainly, these transformations have much to do with the restorative, almost magical effects of life in the forest. Yet the consequences of the changes also matter in the real world: the government that rules the French duchy, for example, will be more just under the rightful rule of Duke Senior, while the class structures inherent in court life promise to be somewhat less rigid after the courtiers sojourn in the forest. These social reforms are a clear improvement, and they result from the more private reforms of the play’s characters. As You Like It not only insists that people can and do change; it also celebrates their ability to change for the better.
City Life versus Country Life
Pastoral literature thrives on the contrast between life in the city and life in the country. Often, it suggests that the oppressions of the city can be remedied by a trip into the country’s therapeutic woods and fields, and that a person’s sense of balance and rightness can be restored by conversations with uncorrupted shepherds and shepherdesses. This type of restoration, in turn, enables one to return to the city a better person, capable of making the most of urban life. Although Shakespeare tests the bounds of these conventions—his shepherdess Audrey, for instance, is neither articulate nor pure—he begins As You Like It by establishing the city/country dichotomy on which the pastoral mood depends. In act 1, scene 1, Orlando rails against the injustices of life under Oliver and complains that he “know[s] no wise remedy how to avoid it” (1.1.24–25). Later in that scene, as Charles relates the whereabouts of Duke Senior and his followers, the remedy is clear: “in the Forest of Arden,” where “many young gentlemen . . . fleet the time carelessly, as they did in the golden world” (1.1.113–18). In other words, Arden offers an idealized space of pastoral retreat.
Yet the townsfolk’s sojourn in Arden can only be temporary. As a symbolic and even fantastical space that unites the classical ideal of Arcadia and the biblical ideal of Eden, Arden cannot function as a forever home for the city’s exiles. The forest may offer the opportunity to suspend the normative rules of society and to experiment in matters of class statue, gender identity, and romance, and this suspension does indeed transform many characters for the better. However, the play’s erstwhile emphasis on the need for a reasonable balance between extremes insists that the city dwellers must necessarily return to where they came from, leaving the shepherds and hermits to carry on with their rustic country lives. In this way, Shakespeare avoids privileging either the city or the country, but instead insists on a delicate and necessary balance between the two. The rustic simplicity of the forest provides shelter from the strains of the court, but it also creates the need for urban style and sophistication: one would not do, or even matter, without the other.
