Themes in As You Like It

Orlando describes his situation in Act 1 Scene 1 in terms of what he is being denied. His brother Oliver keeps him at home with no education and no prospects — "stalling of an ox" applied to a man of gentle birth. The court of Duke Frederick is more openly hostile: by Act 1 Scene 3, Rosalind has been banished on pain of death. Nobody in this play chooses to go to the Forest of Arden. It is where the court's violence sends you.

Duke Senior has been in Arden long enough to have built a philosophy around it. "Sweet are the uses of adversity, / Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, / Wears yet a precious jewel in her head." He finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones. The forest is read as a text and found instructive. This is a man making the best of exile, and Shakespeare allows the performance to be partly convincing and partly willed.

Touchstone enters Arden and sees it differently. When Corin asks him how he likes the shepherd's life in Act 3 Scene 2, Touchstone's answer is: "In respect of itself, it is a good life; but in respect that it is a shepherd's life, it is naught." Every quality of the forest has its equal disadvantage. He is the play's resident sceptic about pastoral idealism, and Shakespeare uses him to make sure the audience does not take the forest entirely at face value.

The forest's resolution of the play's problems is selective. Orlando is reunited with his father's loyal servant Adam and eventually with Rosalind. Rosalind manages four marriages before the end of Act 5. The usurping Duke Frederick has a religious conversion off-stage and surrenders power. Jacques de Boys arrives in Act 5 Scene 4 to report this in a single speech. It happens at the play's margin because the actual interest of the play is in what the forest does to people, not in the political resolution.

Jaques refuses to leave at the end. He stays behind in Arden with the converted Frederick, finding more to understand there than returning to the court would offer. He has been the most vocal critic of court values throughout the play, and the forest's version of freedom suits him more honestly. This is Shakespeare's acknowledgment that the pastoral ideal works best for people who genuinely do not want power.

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Rosalind's first idea when she and Celia decide to escape is practical and immediate: "Were it not better, / Because that I am more than common tall, / That I did suit me all points like a man?" She will be Ganymede. Celia will be Aliena. They will invent new people and become them. By Act 3, Rosalind is playing Ganymede playing Rosalind in a mock-courtship with Orlando, and the number of layers of performance in operation at any moment is genuinely hard to count.

The seven ages speech in Act 2 Scene 7 — "All the world's a stage, / And all the men and women merely players" — is the play's most explicit statement about life as performance. Jaques delivers it immediately after the ragged Orlando has burst in demanding food at sword-point, and his abstract philosophy about the seven ages of man sits oddly against the urgency of the moment around it. Shakespeare puts the grand observation inside a scene of practical crisis, which is itself a comment on how such speeches work.

Touchstone performs a version of courtly wit for an audience of shepherds and exiles who have no way of knowing whether what they are hearing is clever or not. He is a professional fool — a man paid to be funny — which means his identity is a professional product rather than a natural one. When he and Audrey are married in Act 5 Scene 4, it is performed by Sir Oliver Martext in a ceremony Jaques interrupts by suggesting it is improper. The most artificial character in the play is also the only one marrying for something other than love.

Orlando's love poetry is the play's most visible performance failure. He pins verses to trees across Arden declaring his feelings, and the verses, as Touchstone observes with some care in Act 3 Scene 2, are very bad. The sentiment is real but the performance is poor. When Rosalind finally drops the Ganymede persona in Act 5 Scene 4 and appears as herself, the simplicity of it — after four acts of games and disguise — is deliberate. What is genuine turns out to be quieter than what was performed.

The epilogue, spoken by Rosalind, steps fully outside the play's frame. She addresses the audience directly, notes that she is not in the conventional sense a woman (boys played women's roles in Shakespeare's theatre), and invites applause based on the audience's feelings about members of their own sex. The identity work of the play does not stop at the last scene.

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Orlando enters the forest nailing bad love poems to trees. He wants to carve Rosalind's name in the bark of every one. He is, Rosalind/Ganymede tells him in Act 3 Scene 2, showing none of the traditional signs of being in love — no hollow cheeks, no untrimmed beard, no distracted manner. He looks distressingly well. Her diagnosis is kind but accurate: the performance of love is not always the same as the thing itself.

The play runs four love plots simultaneously, and each illuminates a different variety of romantic absurdity. Orlando pursues Rosalind while speaking to her every day disguised as someone else, and does not notice. Silvius pursues Phebe with a devotion so complete it has become independent of whether she returns it. Phebe falls in love with Ganymede, who is Rosalind in disguise, despite Ganymede telling her directly that she should take Silvius. Touchstone marries Audrey for reasons he does not clearly explain. His clearest explanation is that wedlock is a natural appetite: "as pigeons bill, so wedlock would be nibbling." This is not a declaration of love.

Rosalind is the play's main voice of irony about all this, and simultaneously its most enthusiastic romantic. Her exchange with Celia in Act 3 Scene 2 shows the combination clearly. "I would not be cured, youth," she tells Celia when asked about her love for Orlando. She understands perfectly that love is a kind of voluntary irrationality, and she has no interest in being talked out of it. What she refuses is the particular stupidity of Silvius — devotion without self-knowledge.

"We that are true lovers run into strange capers," says Touchstone in Act 2 Scene 4, immediately after describing love as a plague he is himself afflicted with. He is not sympathising with the lovers so much as placing himself inside the same universal absurdity. Even Touchstone, the play's professional cynic, is not immune. Love in As You Like It does not distinguish between the wise and the foolish.

The resolution in Act 5 Scene 4 — four couples, Hymen the god of marriage presiding, and Jacques de Boys arriving to announce the Duke's offstage conversion — is the most improbable ending in Shakespeare's comedies. Rosalind has simply told everyone they will get what they want, and then made it happen by being who she actually is. The joke buried in the resolution is that rational management of love produces the same outcome as abandoning yourself to it.

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Jaques refuses to enjoy anything. When Duke Senior's company finds a wounded deer in Act 2 Scene 1, he weeps over it and delivers a speech about human ingratitude. When Amiens sings a cheerful song in Act 2 Scene 5, Jaques produces a version that inverts its message. When Orlando bursts in demanding food at sword-point in Act 2 Scene 7, Jaques is in the middle of the seven ages speech, and he completes it before addressing the situation.

His famous speech — "All the world's a stage, / And all the men and women merely players" — describes a life that ends in "second childishness and mere oblivion, / Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything." This is not a balanced account. It is the philosophical expression of someone who has decided in advance what life looks like and then arranged the evidence to confirm it.

Duke Senior notices this in Act 2 Scene 7. He suggests that Jaques has learned his melancholy from travel and libertine experience — he has "sold" his reputation for this "most invective" humour. The implication is that Jaques's sadness is not a natural disposition but a chosen style, possibly purchased at real personal cost. Jaques does not argue with this reading. He enjoys being melancholy too much to want it explained away.

Rosalind has no patience for it. In Act 4 Scene 1, when Jaques describes his melancholy as "compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects," she calls it "a most humorous sadness." She is not simply dismissing him — she is identifying a form of sadness that is also a performance, an attitude maintained because it is more interesting than contentment. Jaques takes his melancholy too seriously to find it funny. Rosalind finds it funny because she takes it seriously.

The play does not entirely reject him. His decision at the end to stay in Arden with the converted Frederick and learn what he knows is presented without mockery. He has found someone whose experience is stranger than his own, and he wants to understand it. Frederick met a holy man and converted in the forest; Jaques, who has spent four acts converting other people's experiences into speeches, finds that interesting enough to stay for. This is the most purposeful thing Jaques does in the play. His melancholy turns out to be, underneath everything, a form of curiosity — about suffering, about what experience actually contains, about what happens to people in extremity.

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"Now, my co-mates and brothers in exile," Duke Senior begins his first speech in Act 2 Scene 1, addressing men stripped of their lands and titles. He then argues that their situation is "more sweet / Than that of painted pomp." What nature gives — cold air, the forest, plain food — is more authentic than what Fortune gives and can just as easily take back. It is the speech of a man doing his best, and the play quietly measures it against the reality he is describing.

The Fortune and Nature distinction is taken up by Rosalind and Celia in Act 1 Scene 2. "Let us sit and mock the good housewife Fortune from her wheel," Rosalind proposes. Fortune, they agree, distributes her gifts badly — beauty to the chaste and honesty to the plain-featured. Nature is a separate power, more reliable. The conversation is not quite philosophically rigorous, but it maps the play's interest in what is earned versus what is simply given.

What Orlando lacks in Act 1 is everything Fortune controls: money, position, patronage, education. What he has is what nature gave him — physical strength, which he demonstrates immediately by defeating Charles the wrestler in Act 1 Scene 2 in front of the full court. Duke Frederick's response to the victory is cold rather than admiring. Natural quality goes unrewarded by the court that controls Fortune's arrangements.

Adam offers Orlando his life savings in Act 2 Scene 3 — five hundred crowns, set aside from decades of honest service. No patron arranged it. No court sanctioned it. What he has is simply his to give.

Celia's choice at the end of Act 1 Scene 3 — voluntarily leaving the court to follow Rosalind into exile — is the play's most generous act. She gives up her status as the usurping duke's daughter and heir to follow what she calls the natural bond of friendship and love. The play treats this as an easy choice and also as the most selfless thing any character does in it.

By Act 5, the people who invested least in Fortune's arrangements have ended up with the most. Duke Senior gets his dukedom back without fighting for it. Orlando gets Rosalind. Celia gets Oliver, who has been converted by the forest. The play does not explain the mechanism, because mechanism is not the point. What it keeps returning to is the idea that what is genuinely yours — what nature made you, what you chose freely — will eventually prove sufficient.

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