“Adapt or perish,” H. G. Wells argued, “is Nature’s inexorable imperative,” and one extolled by Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Like dextrous actors, the play’s heroes adopt new roles when circumstances require, creatively managing reversals of fortune, while its villains calcify
in jealous rigidity.
Duchess Senior (this production’s female version of the customary Duke), exiled from her own court by her usurping younger brother, Frederick, finds joy living rough in the Forest of Arden: “Sweet are the uses of adversity.” Her daughter Rosalind, Shakespeare’s most loquacious heroine,
adjusts to living in her hostile uncle’s court and, when he banishes her, adroitly assumes a male disguise to forge a new life in the forest. Then she acts the part of mystic matchmaker, knitting the other characters to their most suitable mates. Like her stoical mother, she seizes hope wherever she can find
it. It is for this reason that she is loved: by her cousin Celia, who would rather face exile than be without her; by Orlando, also escaping a tyrannical relative; and by Phebe, the unsuspecting shepherdess.
Phebe and Silvius play out the pastoral cliché of the lovelorn shepherd and his lass. Here, Shakespeare alludes to his dead rival Christopher Marlowe, who wrote a famous poem on the subject. The pastoral, most idealized by Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde,
still held sway when Shakespeare composed this comedy, using it as the chief source. The middle acts admirably decelerate the audience to the leisurely pace of the shepherd’s life.
This gentle tempo affords the characters time to talk, sing and write about love, and for the play’s two fools to sharpen their wits against one another. The melancholy Jaques (here also played by a woman) is moved by her chance encounter with the professional clown, Touchstone, to her
sole burst of enthusiasm, finding his humour enviably “dry as the remainder biscuit / After a voyage.” These two jesters’ subversive critique spices up the lyrical expressions of love in a way that is typical of the play’s point-counterpoint structure; no one view is allowed to prevail for long. Touchstone’s bawdiness
reaches its pinnacle in his parody of Orlando’s poems in praise of Rosalind. Rosalind responds in kind, with a robust earthy wit.
Shakespeare must have had immense confidence in the boy actor who embraced the challenge of playing the remarkable Rosalind, one of the most complex women in his canon. Even in the heat of love, she recognizes that the honeymoon feeling won’t last forever: “Men are April when they woo, December
when they wed. Maids are May when they are maids, but the sky changes when they are wives.” Rosalind’s male disguise permits her a rare opportunity to examine Orlando without his knowledge, ascertaining whether he has what it takes to stay the course: a marriage needs more than pretty poems to endure. She is able
to comment wryly on love without it affecting her ardour.
It is a device Shakespeare exploits again, with another versatile heroine, Viola in Twelfth Night. These women go into marriage clear-eyed about their partners’ shortcomings, not least of which, in the case of Orlando, is his propensity to write mediocre
verse. Unlike Viola, however, and Shakespeare’s many other cross-dressed heroines, Rosalind is unique in spending most of her time as a boy pretending to be a girl. This casts the spotlight on gender identity, and the degree to which it is a performance both on and off stage.
This comedy not only rewards the flexible but also suggests throughout that attitude is everything. Orlando has been denied the upbringing of a gentleman by his envious older brother, Oliver, but it has not made him cynical. His generous nature shines in his tender care of his old retainer,
Adam. Their friendship is the strongest counter-argument to the malcontent Jaques’s reductive summary of human life, the famous Seven Ages of Man speech. Far from being “sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything,” the elderly Adam has been a saviour to his young master.
Rosalind, too, roundly defends honest love, chastising Phebe for her inability to grasp it when offered: “Sell when you can,” she tells her trenchantly, “You are not for all markets.” Typical of Shakespeare’s wisest characters, Rosalind has a keen sense of carpe diem– living in the moment before it slips away. The pace in the country may be
more leisurely than that of the court, but the characters still acknowledge the march of time. As Touchstone puts it, “From hour to hour, we rot and rot.” Life is too short for Rosalind to tolerate negativity, responding to Jaques’s statement “ ’Tis good to be sad and say nothing” with “Why then, ’tis good to
be a post!”
The negative is not ignored, however. The play demonstrates that suffering cannot be escaped, even in the Edenic Forest of Arden. Icy winds blow, wild cats crouch in the foliage, and a beautiful deer must be killed for the foresters to survive. The characters are
also no strangers to heartache. The relative qualities and stamina of love bonds are probed throughout. Shakespeare, typically, presents us with myriad examples: the fracture and reconciliation of sibling love between Orlando and Oliver, and perhaps between the Duchess and her brother; the impulsive crush, which bowls
over Celia and Oliver; the hard-won union of Silvius and Phebe; the basic carnal need embodied by Touchstone and Audrey, and above all, the meeting of minds between Rosalind and Orlando.
Shakespeare also explores our rocky love affair with our environment. As You Like It is filled with songs, and most treat our relationship to Nature. Celia and Rosalind contrast Nature’s gifts to those of Fortune, who is initially unkind to the virtuous in the play.
The dialogue teems with animal images. Rosalind teases Orlando that a snail, though equally tardy, makes a better marriage prospect since the snail at least “carries his house on his head.” Touchstone, the court’s jester, waggishly discourses on country and city life, exploding the myths associated with each.
By the end, it is clear that the courtiers needed their sojourn in the wild to grow in self-awareness, a trope common to many of Shakespeare’s works.
In contrast to most of Shakespeare’s plays, the villains of As
You Like It are converted to goodness by the conclusion. Duke Frederick is transformed by a holy man he meets in the forest, and Oliver by Orlando’s magnanimity in saving his life despite the cruelty borne at his hands. The comedy’s optimism may partly explain its popularity. Its celebratory finale, in
which Hymen blesses the marriages with fecundity, in verse and song, works against Jaques’s view of human life as a series of futile stages; it is no accident that she is left out of the “couples coming to the ark,” as she puts it. Yet her decision to remain in the forest with the converted Frederick is a
humble acknowledgment that she still has much to learn. In league with the season’s general theme, all the characters arrive at a kind of victory over their worst selves. Now flexible enough to see another’s perspective, most are able to join the festive dance, reasserting social order on fairer terms.
Philippa Sheppard teaches for the Department of English at the University of Toronto.