Paul Haspel's Reviews > As You Like It

As you know, William Shakespeare could write any kind of play his dramatic company might need, and he wrote all sorts of plays exceptionally well. A light, frothy comedy? Check. A grim tragedy that plumbs the depths of the human capacity for suffering? Sure thing. A history play written to capitalize on a politically aware audience's interest in the leaders of an earlier time? No worries. Therefore, it should be no surprise that, at about the same time at which Shakespeare wrote his immortal tragedy Hamlet, he also wrote one of his most pleasant and unfailingly pleasing comedies, As You Like It. That’s just how it goes, I suppose, when you’re the playwright who can do it all.

Set for the most part in the vaguely French “Forest of Arden,” As You Like It shows Shakespeare mixing stories of nobles and commoners in a way that is characteristic of his comedies. The plotlines are so many, and flow so thick and fast together, that I think numbering them may help. Ergo:

1. Orlando, the younger son of a deceased nobleman, has been robbed of his rightful inheritance by his older brother Oliver – who, for reasons even Oliver himself does not understand, has conceived a bitter hatred for his virtuous younger brother.

2. Another instance of fraternal discord: At the local ducal court, Duke Frederick has taken over the dukedom, and has exiled his older brother, Duke Senior (yes, the older brother's name is Duke Senior, “Duke Older” – I am not making this up).

3. In spite of all this family feuding, cousins Rosalind (daughter of the deposed Duke Senior) and Celia (daughter of the usurping Duke Frederick) are truly close, and utterly loyal to one another.

4. And oh, yes: Orlando and Rosalind fall in love at first sight.

By various means, all of these characters make their way to the Forest of Arden. Orlando has done so because his loyal servant Adam has warned him that older brother Oliver’s hatred of Orlando is becoming homicidal. Rosalind, who says of her unhappy situation that "I show more mirth than I am mistress of," is suddenly banished from court by Duke Frederick, and Celia loyally accompanies her beloved cousin into exile. As Viola in Twelfth Night pretended to be a young man named "Cesario," so Rosalind takes on the guise of a young boy called "Ganymede," knowing that two young women traveling alone in the wilderness would not be safe, as “Beauty provoketh thieves sooner than gold.” And, as in Twelfth Night, Rosalind’s taking of this manlike disguise provides opportunities for some gender-bending comic antics.

In the Forest of Arden, the exiles find that the banished Duke Senior and his retainers “fleet the time carelessly as they did in the golden world.” Duke Senior is philosophical about his banishment, saying, “Sweet are the uses of adversity,” and asserting the joys of the simple, Arcadian life: “And this our life, exempt from public haunt,/Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,/Sermons in stones, and good in everything.” Only “the melancholy Jaques” questions the suitability of the party’s helping themselves to the forest’s resources in order to sustain their pastoral lifestyle.

Jaques is one of the most interesting characters in As You Like It. He is the one who delivers the play’s most famous lines: “All the world’s a stage,/And all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances,/And one man in his time plays many parts,/His acts being seven ages.” Jaques’ cynical recounting of the Seven Ages of Man – infant, schoolboy, lover, soldier, justice, “pantaloon” (foolish old man), and “second childishness” – is a famous enough passage that a stained-glass window depicting the Seven Ages adorns a wall of the main reading room at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. And Jaques, with his misanthropic musings, makes one wonder if this melancholy man might be speaking for Shakespeare himself.

After all, Shakespeare himself was a writer for the working day; he had to write commercially viable plays if he was to maintain what at times must have seemed a precarious livelihood. No doubt he sometimes had cause to say, as Rosalind says at one point in the play, “O, how full of briers is this working-day world!” Knowing that, as part of the conventions of this sort of comedy, he must provide a wise fool, and must give him all sorts of wise-fool things to say, one can easily imagine Shakespeare looking at a particularly apt bit of wise-fool raillery he has just set down and saying to himself, as Celia says in Act I, “Well said! That was laid on with a trowel.”

And, knowing as Shakespeare did that this kind of comedy, like the romantic-comedy films of today, simply must end happily, I can’t help wondering if Shakespeare might have smiled grimly as he set down these lines of Rosalind’s, in reply to Orlando’s declaration that he is dying of love for Rosalind – “Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.” Is that sort of cynicism regarding the grandiose declamations of lovers closer to Shakespeare’s actual state of mind than the happy denouement dictated by the stage conventions of the time? It is an interesting possibility.

The “meta” quality of As You Like It is further emphasized by some elements of the play’s resolution. When Hymen, the classical god of marriage, shows up at play's end to sort things out and resolve the plot's many complications, it is a quite literal example of deus ex machina. And if you thought a double wedding was a good way to end a rom-com, check out the quadruple wedding that concludes As You Like It:

1. Orlando and Rosalind (of course);

2. Orlando’s reformed older brother Oliver and Rosalind’s faithful cousin Celia;

3. the love-struck shepherd Silvius and his once-disdainful ladylove Phoebe; and

4. the “wise-fool” clown Touchstone with the “country wench” Audrey (“a poor virgin, sir, an ill-favored thing, but mine own”).

Can a rom-com be too all-get-out happy? Shakespeare in As You Like It almost seems to be daring us to say so. “Go ahead, sirrah. Make thou mine day.”