My progress:
Shakespeare Reading Project
Henry VI, parts 1, 2, 3 and Richard III
Two Gentlemen of Verona
The Taming of the Shrew
Titus Andronicus
The Comedy of Errors
Love’s Labour’s Lost
Romeo & Juliet
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Richard II
King John
The Merchant of Venice
Henry IV, Part 1
Henry IV, Part 2
The Merry Wives of Windsor
Much Ado About Nothing
Henry V
Julius Caesar

As You Like It

Many years ago, when I was living in Philadelphia, my boyfriend and I went to go see an outdoor production of As You Like It, put on by a new theatre company. I have thought all these years that it was the Arden Theatre Company – early on in their existence (they are still going strong!), but I haven’t found any evidence of the production, and I have looked. I took no photos at the time. The memory is so vivid I can even remember blocking, who was where, the costumes. The play was put on outside in an open space near the seaport – not a green park, but a wide open walkway, a promenade, if you will. There were metal bleachers set up, like you’d find in a high school gym. Maybe they had a platform, some bushes, a curtain … but for the most part they were running around on the pavement. No “support” of elaborate production design or lighting design. They had to generate the event solely on the power of make-believe. It was a hot sticky summer night, people were out having ice cream, taking walks, sitting outside having drinks … all around us as the play was going on. The actors were not miked. They had to project like the good old days.

That production of As You Like It is one of the purest examples in my own experience of the magic and weird alchemy of theatre. Who knows why one production “hits’ and another one may be fine, but just unmemorable? I think all of the details I described – the open air, the busy promenade, everything going on AROUND the production … is why it felt like something very special was happening. Theatre not separate from the world.

In Midsummer Night’s Dream, Quince lectures the theatre troupe about how they have to figure out a way to bring “the moonlight into a chamber”, i.e. create the illusion of moonlight for the play. You could be doing the play in broad daylight and you still need to bring moonlight into the chamber. I’ve always thought “bringing moonlight into a chamber” is the perfect metaphor for creating art, particularly of the theatrical kind. (I wrote about this long long ago in my piece on Richard Linklater’s “Before” trilogy.)

The cast of As You Like It, putting on their play in the midst of a busy social summer night, brought moonlight into the chamber. Make-believe but also authentic.

I still remember the actress playing Celia, and I wish I knew her name so I could list it here. She wore a pink sundress, a big floppy sun hat, sunglasses, a real girl’s girl, Paris Hilton in the woods, being “icked” out by bugs and dirt and mess. I remember the way this actress staggered through the imaginary “woods”, imaginary branches hitting her in the face, her dress being caught up in imaginary branches – nothing was actually there but she made us see it – and she was whimpering and flustered, like Kate Capshaw in Temple of Doom. So funny and specific.

A long time ago, I remember an acting teacher telling us, “In the right hands, Celia is a co-lead. She’s as good a role as Rosalind.” Everyone wants to be Rosalind, but do not sleep on Celia! You can tell this when you read it, but this production really SHOWED it to me. The Celia in it was SO funny, the perfect girl-pal, straight-talking and yet ultra-femme. As Rosalind flails about in love, swooning and peppering her with questions, Celia remains calm, basically deadpanning at Rosalind- “I’m waiting for you to stop screaming so I can continue on with my story.” She says another half-sentence and Rosalind flips out again and Celia has to reprimand her again. Celia really is a co-lead.

Another thing I remember: the night was so hot, and there was some worry a storm was going to come. The sky looked very ominous. There was a low rumble of thunder in the air. In the scene where Rosalind is banished, the Duke bellows out the punishment, and right at that moment a massive whoosh of COLD wind sliced through the humidity, sending the curtains and canopy fluttering – and the wind arrived just as Rosalind fell to her knees, crying out, “Where am I supposed to go?” Everything happened at the same time, the rumble of thunder, the sudden roar of wind, and Rosalind’s banishment: Nature itself cooperated with the production, inextricably part of what was happening onstage. On cue, even! Like it was a deliberate sound/light effect! The pathetic fallacy happened naturally. The actress faced the storm. Moonlight was definitely in the chamber!

The moment will stay with me forever!

I always think of As You Like It as a “romp”, and it is – but … Joy is no laughing matter! There is no point to the play beyond its own ideas and the playful context Shakespeare set up for these ideas’ exploration. Everything in the play is a pretext for the ideas. Rosalind getting banished is handled in a cursory manner because it doesn’t matter how she gets to the forest, what matters is she gets there. Same thing with Orlando and his evil big brother Oliver – the conflict is barely explained, but it doesn’t matter because we need to get them both into the forest. And etc. Jaques is melancholy for no reason – which he admits – but he himself is a pretext for the contrast he provides. Don John was also motiveless, but he embodies the darkness infusing the screwball of Much Ado. Jaques just sits in the forest being melancholy for no reason. Same with Oliver’s meanness – so clearly established – and then eradicated in his 180-degree instantaneous transformation when he sees Celia (can’t blame him. I’m half in love with Celia myself).

The forest itself is a pretext, and it makes no literal sense: there are palm trees AND there’s winter. There are lions (a lion in winter?) We’re not in England anymore. We’re not … anywhere, really. We’re stepping onto Propsero’s magic island years before The Tempest was written!

The only thing that’s really real here is playing around with love – and not just fulfilled love, or the pursuit of love, a march to the altar, although these are all at play, but it’s more about the idea and philosophy of love. Scene after scene after scene, nobody talks about anything other than love. There are multiple pairs: Orlando and Rosalind, Silvius and Phoebe, Touchstone and Audrey, Celia and Oliver: no two loves are alike! This is a big change from the interchangeable lovers in Midsummer. In As You Like It, love is tailored to the individual. What works for Phoebe will not work for Celia, and etc. The overall hopeful message: We get to choose how we want to love, who we want to love. But we need to understand love first. Within this context, gender-bending plays a much deeper role than it does in other plays featuring women dressing up as men. Rosalind supposedly dresses up for “protection” out in the forest – where her banished father, let’s not forget, has set up his alternate court. The Forest of Arden is clearly not dangerous: Rosalind is surrounded by friends. But still … she maintains the disguise. The clothes free her playfulness, but it’s play with awareness beneath it. It’s not escapism: it’s an avenue to deeper realizations. Viola needs her camouflage. Rosalind really doesn’t. Rosalind is hesitant – until the very end! – to put on womens’ clothes, and the play – if I recall correctly – ends with her still in men’s clothes, but blissfully married.

What is prioritized in As You Like It is play, not for plays’ sake, but play with a purpose. Incidentally, this, of course, is a metaphor for theatre itself.

Im her great “Love is merely a madness” speech, Rosalind shows a vast knowledge of love which she has achieved only through observation. She’s not a seasoned woman like Beatrice. Rosalind knows how she wants to be treated, she sees around her how wives are treated as compared to sweethearts, and she wants no part of marriage’s limitations. Orlando writes terrible love poetry with total confidence. He is a wrestler with a sad family backstory. Picture Emilio Estevez’s wreslter in The Breakfast Club, or any ’80s high school movie: the jock falls in love with the A-student President of the Drama Club smart girl. Orlando has to come into his own. You hear a lot that Orlando is boring compared to Rosalind. (To be fair, everyone is boring compared to Rosalind.) But Orlando’s journey from hopeless adolescent to lover with a purpose is huge, and in the right hands it is tremendously effective. When Orlando says, “I can live no longer by thinking” … I mean …

He’s sick of games. He wants the real thing. He’s ready.

Rosalind loves him from the start but sees he needs to grow up. He needs to stop idealizing her and writing sentimental bad poems. What will happen when he is confronted with the real her? She couldn’t tolerate being treated like some precious love object. She wants to be a PAL, and so she eases him into this by playing around, by making Orlando fall in love with Ganymede, her boy-disguise. The forest of Arden makes it make sense.

You get the sense that when Rosalind and Orlando and Celia and Oliver return to court, they will not just re-join society they will transform it.

This is the hope As You Like It expresses. Bringing the Forest of Arden back with us into society is a doomed idea, perhaps, but worth fighting for.

I could go on and on, but let me just list some of my scattered observations after this latest re-reading. (I probably know this play best of all of Shakespeare’s plays.)

Christopher Marlowe:
Multiple references to Christopher Marlowe, he’s even quoted directly (the “love at first sight” line from his “Hero and Leander”). There’s also a line about a “reckoning in a small room”, which is – maybe? – a reference to the way Marlowe was killed, supposedly in a drunken fight while settling a tavern bill (a “reckoning”). The reality is more complicated – Marlowe was stabbed by Ingram Frizer, a member of Sir Francis Walsingham’s secret service – and Marlowe had worked as a secret agent.

“Sans”:
I’ve been tracking Shakespeare’s use of the word “sans” through this reading project. I think the first time it shows up in the amusing exchange between Berowne and Rosaline in Love’s Labour’s Lost:

BEROWNE:
My love to thee is sound, sans crack or flaw.
ROSALINE:
Sans ‘sans‘, I pray you.

There’s another use of “sans” in King John, when Faulconbridge: “Come, come, sans compliment, what news abroad?”

The context is always: “Stop being fancy. Stop embellishing. Say what you mean.” Or, more bluntly, “What, English isn’t good enough for you?”

And here comes the biggest “sans” user in the Shakespearean canon: Jaques ends his famous “all the world’s a stage” monologue with a bleak description of man at the end of his life: he is “Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything ” etc. Jaques’ speech is well-known by everybody, similar to Polonius’ “To thine ownself be true” speech, both of which are often quoted out of context, as if they are meme-worthy quotes directly from Shakespeare himself, instead of being spoken by specific characters in specific contexts. With these well-known quotes, though … consider the source!! Polonius is a walking-talking word-salad maker. He speaks in cliches. “To thine own self be true” are the ramblings of a man who has never had an original thought and who loves to hear himself talk. ALSO: these words of advice to his son are lovely and helpful but let’s not forget: Laertes goes off on his journey and Polonius has so little trust his son will follow the advice, he sends spies after Laertes, to report back on whether or not Laertes is drinking, gambling, whoring around. Jaques’ context, too, is a little different than an easily quoted meme and “Sans” is the giveaway. Jaques is in love with himself and his pose. He thinks he’s better than other people, particularly the ones who prioritize joy and possibility. Of COURSE he would use the word “sans”. Also, hilariously – which I remember being capitalized on in the production I saw – literally right after Jaques proclaims old men as being “sans teeth, sans everything”, who arrives on stage but Oliver and the old man Adam, who is CLEARLY not “sans everything”. Adam is old, but he describes his phase of life as “my age is as a lusty winter”. He’s lusty! Also: his name is ADAM, for God’s sake. He’s in the forest too! You know Shakespeare undercut Jaques’ generalization about old age on purpose.

“IF”.
The word “if” so predominates in the final scene it’s almost a verbal tic. Touchstone goes off on “If” explicitly, and Rosalind uses “if” repeatedly, setting up all the different potential paths for everyone onstage. “If” is the word of creation. It’s “as if”. Stanislavsky called it the “magic if”: “What would it be like IF …” Also, if someone asks “what would it be like IF” … the answer could be “As you like it”, implying generosity and co-creation. “If” is the launch pad for all creative work, especially acting. Rosalind is many things, as one of Orland’s poems observes: she is made up of “many parts”. “Parts” also means “roles”, because she – like Hamlet – is above everything else an actor.

And finally: As You Like It, as far can be determined, came right before Hamlet. Shakespeare might have been working on the two plays at the same time. The similarities are striking. Hamlet seems to take place in an almost entirely abstract space, the interior of a man’s mind. As You Like It takes place in an equally abstract place, a philosophical space dominated solely by ideas. Both plays display an almost unnerving virtuosity. We’re in totally new ground now.

Quotes on the play

“In the early plays, the low or comic characters — Shylock as well as Launcelot Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice, for example — speak prose. An intellectual character like Falstaff speaks prose, in contrast to a passionate character like Hotspur, who speaks verse. In As You Like It, contrary to tradition, both the hero and heroine spoke prose. In Twelfth Night, Viola speaks verse at court and prose to herself, and the characters in the play who are false or have no sense of humor speak verse. Those who are wiser and have some self-knowledge speak prose. In the tragedies Shakespeare develops an extremely fertile prose style for the tragic characters. Hamlet speaks both verse and prose. He speaks verse to himself, in his soliloquies, and in speeches of violence to others, as in the scene with his mother. He otherwise speaks prose to other people … In Antony and Cleopatra, the boring characters use prose, the rounded characters, verse.”
— W.H. Auden, 1947 lecture

“Rosalind is the normative center in Shakespeare: good will, charm, the innocence of language at its most intelligent, benignity that refuses power over other selves. Hamlet, in a history or a comedy, would have delighted in Falstaff and Rosalind. But he has been placed in a poem unlimited masking as revenge tragedy, where his isolation is absolute.”
— Harold Bloom, Hamlet: Poem Unlimited

“This, to me, is one of the wonders and enigmas: is there no end, no bottom to Shakespearean resonances? It is like Rosalind’s declaration of her fathomless affection in As You Like It: it ‘hath an unknown bottom like the Bay of Portugal.'”
— Ron Rosenbaum, The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascoes, Palace Coups

“I was never so berhymed since Pythagoras time, that I was an Irish rat.”
“Rosalind is a very learned Lady. She alludes to the Pythagorean doctrine which teaches that souls transmigrate from one animal to another, and relates that in his time she was an Irish rat, and by some metrical charm was rhymed to death. The power of killing rats with rhyme Donne mentions in his satires, and Temple in his treatises. Dr. Gray has produced a similar passage from Randolph
— My Poets
shall with a saytire steeped in vinegar
Rhyme this to death, as they do rats in Ireland.”
— Samuel Johnson, Johnson on Shakespeare

“I wish that Shakespeare had not told us of the death of Falstaff in Henry V but instead had carried Sir John off to the forest of Arden, to exchange wit with Rosalind in As You Like It. Though he incarnates freedom Falstaff’s liberty is not absolute, like Rosalind’s. As audience, we are given no perspective more privileged than Rosalind’s own, whereas we can see Prince Hal’s Machiavel-like qualities more clearly than Falstaff bear to do …”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“Unlike Viola, Rosalind is borderline. She could go either way.”
— Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson

“The great villains — Iago, Edmund, Macbeth — invent Western nihilism, and each is an abyss in himself. Lear and his godson Edgar are studies so profound in human torment and endurance that they carry biblical resonances in a pre-Christian, pagan play. But Falstaff, Rosalind, Hamlet, and Cleopatra are something apart in world literature.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“For by way of Rosalind, in whom wit begins to transcend itself, Shakespeare takes a long stride in the direction of those great tragic heroines whose central endowment is love rather than wit. Beatrice can talk, but the play is nearing its end before we have full evidence that she can act and love as well as talk. But Rosalind can act and love from the beginning and her wit is exercised mainly in the service of love and not for its own sake. Just where between Beatrice and Desdemona Rosalind comes in it would be hard to say. But the point is that she does come between them.”
–Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“The beautiful boy belongs to the sonnets and must remain there. He cannot enter the plays. Rosalind is the beautiful boy reimagined in social terms. References to homosexuality are rare in Shakespeare’s plays. There may be sexual overtones to Iago’s behavior in Othello and Leantes’ in The Winter’s Tale or to Antonio’s devotion to Sebastian in Twelfth Night and Patroclus’ to Achilles in Troilus and Cressida. A beautiful boy in the plays would seem shallow and small. In Shakespeare’s drama, the only Ganymede is a woman.”
— Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson

“I will scarce think you have swam in a Gondola.”
“That is, been at Venice, the seat at the time of all licentiousness, where the young English gentleman wasted their fortunes, debased their morals, and sometimes lost their religion. The fashion of travelling which prevailed very much in our author’s time, was considered by the wiser men as one of the principal causes of corrupt manners.”
— Samuel Johnson, Johnson on Shakespeare

“It is the most ideal of any of this author’s plays. It is a pastoral drama in which the interest arises more out of the sentiments and characters than out of the actions or situations. It is not what is done, but what is said, that claims our attention.”
— William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays

“The wit runs riot in idleness, like a spoiled child that is never sent to school. Caprice is and Fancy reign and revel here, and stern necessity is banished to the court. The mild sentiments of humanity are strengthened with thought and leisure; the echo of the cares and noise of the world strikes upon the era of those ‘who have felt them knowingly’, softened by time and distance. ‘They hear the tumult, and are still.’ The very air of the place seems to breathe a spirit of philosophical poetry; to stir the thoughts, to touch the heart with pity, as the drowsy forest rustles to the sighing gale. Never was there such beautiful moralizing, equally free from pedantry or petulance.”
— William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays

“[Rosalind’s] tongue runs the faster to conceal the pressure at her heart.”
— William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays

I adore that.

“[Touchstone] is … a mixture of the ancient cynic philosopher with the modern buffoon, and turns folly into wit, and wit into folly. He is equally an enemy to the prejudices of opinion.”
— William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays

“The coda to Shakespeare’s exorcism of Marlowe is neither in Hotspur, who nevertheless is a glorious satire on the Marlovian stance, or in Ancient Pistol’s ranting parodies of Tamburlaine. With superb irony, Shakespeare crowds As You Like It, least Marlovian of plays, with allusions to Marlowe, all of them decidedly out of context. Overtly, the allusions are to Marlowe’s lyric, ‘The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,’ or to his unfinished Hero and Leander, an Ovidian epyllion. But pragmatically they concern Marlowe’s death, and center on the rancid clown Touchstone’s wonderful sentence:
When a man’s verso cannot be understood, nor a man’s good wit seconded with the forward chid, unerstanding, it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room.
The audience could hear in this Barabas’ ‘Infinite riches in a little room,’ and also a reference to Marlowe’s murder.”
— Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence

“[Rosalind and Celia’s] friendship is an all-in-all of gender, a solace for that motherlessness which Shakespeare curiously imposes on his maidens, leaving them defenseless in Hamlet and Othello.”
— Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson

“There is hardly any of Shakespeare’s plays that contains a greater number of phrases that have become in a manner proverbial. If we were to give all the striking passages, we should give half the play.”
— William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays

Truth.

“By hastening to the end of his work Shakespeare suppressed the dialogue between the usurper and the hermit, and lost an opportunity of exhibiting a moral lesson in which he might have found matter worthy of his highest powers.”
— Samuel Johnson, Johnson on Shakespeare

“The comedy seems to balance like a bubble on a point of thin space; yet space in its neighborhood has not worn thin, and the bubble is as tough as eternity, it does not break.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

Beautifully said.

“As You Like It is so charming a comedy that in order to enjoy it we need not think about it at all. But if we do think about it we become aware of intellectual operations noiselessly and expertly performed … We see an idea anatomized until there is nothing left of it save its original mystery … And all of this is done without visible effort.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“Whatever it took to write As You Like It was among other things mental, and the exact like of it, as well as the exact degree, has never been seen in literature again.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“For Rosalind and Viola adopt male clothing in crisis, but Viola’s predicament is grimmer. She’s orphaned and shipwrecked … Both heroines choose sexually ambiguous alter egos. Viola is Cesario, a eunuch … Rosalind is brasher than Viola from the start … Viola, with her frail court rapier, makes a girlish and delicate boy at best. She is timid and easily terrorized. Rosalind relishes trouble and even creates it … When Olivia falls in love with her, Viola feels compassion … Rosalind is incapable of compassion where her own direct interest is at stake.”
— Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson

“As You Like It is a criticism of the pastoral sentiment. It is not satire; its examination is conducted without prejudice. For once in the world a proposition is approached from all its sides.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

Criticism not satire is a fine distinction and I’m digging it.

“The doctrine of the golden age has been as much created as destroyed. We know there is nothing in it, and we know that everything is in it. We perceive how silly it is and we shall never be able to do without it. We comprehend the long failure of cynicism to undo sentiment. Here there is neither sentiment nor cynicism; there is understanding. An idea is left hanging in free air, without contamination or support.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

Mark Van Doren is new to me but he consistently astonishes me, not just with his insights but with the beauty of his writing. “the long failure of cynicism to undo sentiment …”

“[Rosalind’s] criticism of love and cuckoo-land is unremitting, yet she has not annihilated them. Rather, she has preserved them by removing the flaws of their softness. That is the duty of criticism.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

Again … wow.

“[Rosalind], not Jaques, is the philosopher of the play. Here is the only mind that never rests.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“The comick dialogue is very sprightly, with less mixture of low buffoonery than in some other plays; and the graver part is elegant and harmonious.”
— Samuel Johnson, Johnson on Shakespeare

“[As You Like It] is very sophisticated, and only adults can understand what it is about.”
— W.H. Auden, 1947 lecture

“The Fourth Epoch gives all the graces and facilities of a genius in full possession and habitual exercise of power, and peculiarly of the feminine, the lady’s character (The Tempest, As You Like It, The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night).
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Order of Shakespeare’s Plays”, lecture

“Of all Shakespeare’s plays, As You Like It is the greatest paean to civilization and to the nature of a civilized man and woman. It is dominated by Rosalind, a triumph of civilization, who, like the play itself, fully embodies man’s capacity, in Pascal’s words, ‘to deny, to believe, and to doubt well.'”
— W.H. Auden, 1947 lecture

“To Shakespeare, melancholy is a symptom … He dissects the cases of two such men, Richard II and Antonio at length, two others, Jaques and Orsino, more briefly, and gives us a glimpse into the melancholy stage of still another, Brutus. Melancholy, he concludes, is a sign that a man is living or trying to live a miscast, partial, or obstructed life … Richard II was a poetic soul attempting to enact a royal role. Antonio was a man made for better things who dedicated his ife to trade … Jacques was a philosophic nature that had wasted itself insensuality, Orsino an artistically gifted person who led an idle life. Brutus stifled his melancholy in action.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1

“We begin in an orchard, a cultivated garden, and the first name we hear is Adam.”
— W.H. Auden, 1947 lecture

“Jaques remains in the country. Like Shylock, he won’t join the dance, like Hamlet, his involvement with society is unhappy, like Caliban he is unassimilable.”
— W.H. Auden, 1947 lecture

“In no other comedy of Shakespeare’s is the heroine so all-important … [Rosalind] makes the play almost as completely as Hamlet does Hamlet.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare: Volume 1

“One way of taking Jaques is to think of him as a picture, duly attenuated, of what Shakespeare himself might have become if he had let experience sour or embitter him.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare: Volume 1

!!!!!

“When I read the commentators on Touchstone, I rub my eyes. You would think to hear most of them that he is a seriously wise and witty man and that Shakespeare so considered him. Touchstone, if you insist, is making a fool of this rustic simpleton, William. It is another William who is making a fool of Touchstone.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare: Volume 1

“‘A touchstone’ says the dictionary, is ‘a black siliceous stone used to test the purity of gold and silver by the streak left on the stone when rubbed by the metal.’ Not precious itself, it reveals preciousness in what touches it. That seems to be precisely the function assigned to Touchstone in this play, so perhaps its author knew what he was doing when he named him.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare: Volume 1

“Viola is melancholy, recessive, but Rosalind is exuberant and egotistical, with a flamboyant instinct for center stage. The difference is clearest at play’s end. Viola falls into long silence, keeping the joy of reunion to herself. Her decorous self-removal in the opposite of Rosalind’s lordly capture of the finale of As You Like It.
— Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson

“… in her versatility, her balance of body, mind, and spirit, Rosalind reminds us of no less a figure than Hamlet himself, the uncontaminated Hamlet. As there is a woman within the Prince of Denmark, so there is a man within this Duke’s daughter, but never at the sacrifice of her dominant feminine nature.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare: Volume 1

“[Rosalind] attracts everything that comes within her sphere and sheds a radiance over it. She is the pure gold that needs no touchstone.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare: Volume 1

I mean, DUDE.

“As You Like It regularly uses the device of the pastoral debate to create unlikely twinnings Jaques loves himself, Orlando loves ‘Rosalind,’ whoever he thinks that personage might be.”
— Majorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“[The play’s title] is yet another one of those Shakespearean comic titles that seem to be throwaway lines (like Much Ado About Nothing, or like the subtitle of Twelfth Night – What You Will). As You Like It implies if wishes really did come true. It presents a fantasyland, in other words, under the sign of the hypothetical — and the great mistress of the hypothetical in this play is, of course, Rosalind.”
— Majorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“For Rosalind, ‘as you like it’ is part of the essential transforming nature of love, which the play is striving to delimit and discover. Her crescendo of ‘if’s in the final scenes is a crucial statement about the nature of love, which turns out, unsurprisingly, to be closely linked to the nature of theatre and theatrical illusion … Rosalind’s ‘if’s carry over into her epilogue, where she is the very incarnation of if, and plays once more on the familiar fact that boy actors played the parts of women … ‘If I were a woman …'”
— Majorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“Shakespeare develops Hamlet from a number of earlier characters who are in differing ways proto-Hamlets. Richard II is a child, full of self-pity, who acts theatrically, but who is not, like Hamlet, conscious theatrically, but who is not, like Hamlet, conscious of acting. Falstaff is like Hamlet, an intellectual character and the work of an artist who is becoming aware of his full powers, but he is not conscious of himself in the way Hamlet is. When Falstaff does become conscious of himself, he dies, almost suicidally. Brutus anticipates Hamlet by being, in a sense, his opposite. Hamlet is destroyed by his imagination. Brutus is destroyed by repressing his imagination, like the Stoic he is. He tries to exclude possibility. The nearest to Hamlet is Jaques, who remains unexplained and can take no part in the action.”
— W.H. Auden, 1947 lecture

“As we have seen repeatedly, language is the index of full humanity in Shakespeare. When characters cease to speak, or cannot bring themselves to do so, they seal themselves off from society, whether in contexts that are palpably dangerous (the taciturnity of Don John in Much Ado, Iago’s ultimate vow of silence in Othello), or inadvertently so (the inaudible Hero in Much Ado About Nothing; the muffled Claudio, symbolically ‘dead’ till he unmuffles himself and speaks in Measure for Measure). Orlando’s failure of language in love (‘I cannot speak to her’), however adorably adolescent, is in part a sign that he does not yet understand what it is to be a lover.”
— Majorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

On Oliver’s speech (“Farewell, good Charles”)

“This has always appeared to me one of the most unShakespearean speeches in all the genuine works of our poet; yet I should be nothing surprised and greatly pleased, to find it hereafter a fresh beauty, as has so often happened to me with other supposed defects of great men.”
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, lecture on As You Like It, 1810

“‘Ganymede’, like the changeling boy in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, is what we could call a phantasmatic placeholder. He, or she, is that with which people fall in love … no one wins Ganymede at the close … A boy actor playing a woman dressed as a boy, and demanding to be called ‘Rosalind,’ Ganymede is necessary to falling in love. We could almost say that Ganymede is love in As You Like It, or in the world of ‘as you like it’. Ganymede is that which escapes — the extra something, or something missing, that is the ‘overestimation of the object’ associated with falling in love.”
— Majorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“Silvius is a kind of Orlando to excess.”
— Majorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“The popularity of Rosalind is due to three main causes. First, she only speaks blank verse for a few minutes. Second, she only wears a skirt for a few minutes (and the dismal effect of the change at the end to the wedding dress ought to convert the stupidest champion of petticoats to rational dress). Third, she makes love to the man instead of waiting for the man to make love to her — a piece of natural history which has kept Shakespeare’s heroines alive, whilst generations of properly governessed young ladies taught to say ‘No’ three times at least, have miserably perished.”
— George Bernard Shaw, 1896

He annoys me sometimes but he’s not wrong here.

“About 300 years ago, William Shakespeare, not knowing what to do with his characters, turned them out to play in the woods, let a girl masquerade as a boy and amused himself with speculating on the effect of feminine curiosity freed for an hour from feminine dignity. He did it very well, but he could do something else. And the popular romances of today cannot do anything else. Shakespeare took care to explain in the play itself that he did not think that life should be one prolonged picnic. Nor would he have thought that feminine life should be one prolonged piece of private theatricals. But Rosalind, who was then unconventional for an hour, is now the convention of an epoch. She was then on a holiday; she is now very hardworked indeed. She has to act in every play, novel or short story, and always in the same old pert prose. Perhaps she is even afraid to be herself: certainly Celia is now afraid to be herself.”
— G.K. Chesteron, 1932

“Rosalind is unique in Shakespeare, perhaps indeed in Western drama, because it is so difficult to achieve a perspective upon her that she herself does not anticipate or share.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“As You Like It is Shakespeare’s sweetest-tempered play; there is Twelfth Night, but in that play everyone except the superb clown Feste is a zany. Orlando, a youthful Hercules, is certainly not Rosalind’s human equal, but he is considerably saner than Twelfth Night‘s loony Orsino, while Rosalind and Celia would be exemplary in any company, and in wisdom and wit are goddesses compared with those charming screwballs Viola and Olivia.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“Rosalind’s role was the best preparation for the revised Hamlet of 1600-1601, where wit achieves an apotheosis and becomes a kind of negative transcendence.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“Rosalind’s high good fortune — which exalts her over Falstaff, Hamlet, and Cleoatra — is to stand at the center of a play in which no authentic harm can come to anyone.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“As You Like It directly precedes Hamlet, while Twelfth Night follows directly after it, and Hamlet made another Rosalind unlikely for Shakespeare…As You Like It is poised before the great tragedies.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“[Rosalind] shares with Falstaff the educator’s rule; Hamlet diagnoses everyone he encounters, and is too impatient to teach them. Rosalind and Falstaff both augment and enhance life, but Hamlet is the gateway through which supernal powers, many of them negative, enter as intimations of immortality.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“I have been urging us to see Rosalind in sequence, between Falstaff and Hamlet, just as witty and wise but trapped neither in history with Falstaff nor in tragedy with Hamlet.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“[Rosalind’s] amiable triumphalism prefigures Prospero’s … though Rosalind’s mastery is a wholly natural magic.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“Touchstone, despite so many of the critics, and the performance tradition, is truly rancid, in contrast to Jaques … Touchstone fascinates (and repels) because of his knowingness … He is what Falstaff proudly (and accurately) insists the fat knight is not: a double man.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“Touchstone delivers Shakespeare’s ultimate exorcism of the spirit of Christopher Marlowe who haunts a play wholly alien to his savage genius.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“As the director and ‘busy actor’ in her own ‘play’, and the Epilogue in Shakespeare’s, Rosalind becomes in a sense a figure for the playwright himself, a character whose consciousness extends in subtle ways beyond the boundaries of the drama.”
— Edward I. Barry

“Viola is melancholy recessive, but Rosalind is exuberant and egotistical, with a flamboyant instinct for center stage. The difference is clearest at play’s end. Viola falls into long silence, keeping the joy of reunion to herself. Her decorous self-removal is the opposite of Rosalind’s lordly capture of the finale of As You Like It.”
— Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson

“In As You Like It, Shakespeare reduces the Renaissance prestige of male authority to maximize his heroine’s princely potency … Her maleness is glamorously half-female.”
— Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson

“[Rosalind and Celia’s] friendship is an all-of-all of gender, a solace for that motherlessness which Shakespeare curiously imposes on his maidens, leaving them defenseless in Hamlet and Othello.”
— Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson

“Until our century, a respectable woman kept her eyes modestly averted. Shakespeare legitimizes the bold mobility of the female eye and identifies it with imagination. Rosalind’s eye is truly perceptive: it both sees and understands.”
— Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson

“The comedy as a whole is far more interested in doing justice to the complexity of the argument than in prescribing correct choices.”
— Anne Barton, Riverside Shakespeare

“Life is at its best imperfect, even in Arden, but Rosalind suggests that there are ways of living it well and to some purpose, despite the pessimism of Jaques. This is why she matters so much in the play, and why the resolution of the plot, such as it is, placed almost entirely in her hands.”
— Anne Barton, Riverside Shakespeare

“Pastoral is a complex and enduring form, not because it is escapist, but because it is basically tough: it is a way of testing both the self and the assumptions of ordinary, urban society.”
— Anne Barton, Riverside Shakespeare

“What matters to [Touchstone] is a denial of the single, objective nature of reality: the reality believed in by men like Corin who never questions either the values implied by these attitudes or the words used to express them. Corin is finally silenced by Touchstone’s ‘courtly’ wit. He is not, however, exactly defeated. He and the fool simply represent antithetical ways of looking at the world. Corin’s simplicity is obviously limited, but then so is the willful complication of Touchstone’s verbal kingdom.”
— Anne Barton, Riverside Shakespeare

“These melancholy certainties which Jaques so admires are platitudes of the most obvious kind. Even without the Duke’s barbed reminder that Jacques’ own libertine past scarcely qualifies him to scourge Vice in others, it would be hard to see what value a satirist could have who relied upon moralizings so dusty.”
— Anne Barton, Riverside Shakespeare

“Throughout As You Like It, Jaques has functioned less as the representative of a valid point of view than as a measure of the essential sanity and balance of those characters who stand closer than he to the center of the play.”
— Anne Barton, Riverside Shakespeare

“Yet it would be a mistake to think of As You Like It only as a fairy-tale. The Comedy is essentially serious, concerned to examine the nature of people, emotions, and ideas.”
— Anne Barton, Riverside Shakespeare

Quotes from the play

 

CELIA:
Therefore, my sweet Rose, my dear Rose, be merry.
ROSALIND:
From henceforth, I will, coz, and devise sports.
— I.ii.22-25

CELIA:
Let us sit and mock the good huswife Fortune from her wheel, that her gifts may henceforth be bestow’d equally.
ROSALIND:
I would we could do so; for her benefits one mightily misplac’d and the beautiful blind woman doth most mistaken in her gifts to women.
CELIA:
‘Tis true, for those that she makes fair she scarce makes honest, and those that she makes honest she makes very ill-favorably.
ROSALIND:
Nay, now thou goest from Fortune’s office to Nature’s. Fortune reigns in gifts of the world, not in the lineaments of Nature.
— I.ii.31-42

LE BEAU:
How shall I answer you?
ROSALIND:
As wit and fortune will.
TOUCHSTONE:
Or as the Destinies decrees.
CELIA:
Well said — that was laid on with a trowel.
— I.ii.102-105

See what I mean about Celia?

Only in the world I fill up a place, which may be better supplied when I have made it empty.
— ORLANDO, I.ii.191-192

CELIA:
But is all this for your father?
ROSALIND:
No, some of it is for my child’s father. O how full of briers is this working-day world!
— I.iii.10-12

“O how full of briers is this working-day world” is one of my favorite lines in the play. And “my child’s father” … scandalous! There’s lots of speculation it’s a misprint, because God forbid Rosalind – who is already madly in love – projects forward to when Orlando will be her husband and … sex-partner.

If we walk not in the trodden paths, our very petticoats will snatch them!
— CELIA, I.iii.14-15

Treason is not interested, my lord,
Or if we did derive it from our friends,
What’s that to me? my father was no traitor.
— ROSALIND, I.iii.61-63

You tell ’em, Rosalind, and you tell ’em in VERSE.

If she be a traitor,
Why, so am I. We still have slept together,
Rose at an instant, learn’d, play’d, eat together,
And wheresoe’er we went, like Juno’s swans.
Still we nt coupled and inseparable.
— CELIA, I.iii.72-76

And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.
— DUKE SENIOR, the banished duke, II.i.15-17

Therefore my age is as a lusty winter,
Frosty, but kindly.
— ADAM, II.iii.52-53

Isn’t that nicely said?

SILVIUS:
O Corin, that thou knew’st how I do love her!
CORIN:
I partly guess, for I have lov’d ere now.
SILVIUS
No, Corin, being old, thou canst not guess,
Though in thy youth thou wast as true a lover
As ever sighed upon a midnight pillow.
But if thy love were ever like to mine—
As sure I think did never man love so—
How many actions most ridiculous
Hast thou been drawn to by thy fantasy?
CORIN:
Into a thousand that I have forgotten.
— II.iv.24-32

“It is ten o’clock.
Thus we may see,” quoth he, “how the world wags.
‘Tis but an hour ago since it was nince,
And after ne hour more ’twill be elevent,
And so from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe,
And then from hour to hour, we rot and rot,
And thereby hangs a tale.”
— JAQUES, II.vii.22-28

And I did laugh sans intermission
An hour by his dial.
— JAQUES, II.vii.32-33

Again with the “sans”.

ORLANDO:
I almost die for food, and let me have it.
DUKE SENIOR:
Sit down and feed, and welcome to our table.
ORLANDO:
Speak you so gently?
— II.vii.103-106

The Forest of Arden is heavenly. There’s food and people welcome you and speak gently!

If ever you have look’d on better days,
If ever been where bells have knoll’d to church,
If ever sate at any good man’s feast,
If ever from your eyelids wip’d a tear,
And know what ’tis to pity, and be pitied,
Let gentleness my strong enforcement be.
— ORLANDO, II.vii.113-118

Thou seest we are not all alone unhappy.
This wide and universal theater
Presents more woeful pageants than the scene
Wherein we play in.
— DUKE SENIOR, II.vii.136-139

This prompts the whole “all the world’s a stage” thing.

O Rosalind, these trees shall be my books,
And in their barks my thoughts I’ll character,
That every eye which in this forest looks
Shall see thy virtue witness’d everywhere.
Run, run, Orlando, carve on every tree
The fair, the chaste, and unexpressive she.
— ORLANDO, III.ii.5-10

TOUCHSTONE:
This is the very false gallop of verses. Why do you infect yourself with them?
ROSALIND:
Peace, you dull fool. I found them on a tree.
TOUCHSTONE:
Truly, the tree yields bad fruit.
— III.ii.113-116

Thus Rosalind of many parts
By heavenly synod was devised
Of many faces, eyes, and hearts
To have the touches dearest prized.
— CELIA reading Orlando’s “poem”. III.ii.149-152

Orlando’s poems are sooo funny but – as always – there’s truth in it. Rosalind DOES have “many parts”.

I was never so berhymed since Pythagoras’ time that I was an Irish rat, which I can hardly remember.
— ROSALIND, III.ii.176-177

O wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful wonderful! and yet again wonderful, and after that, out of all hooping!
— CELIA, III.ii.191-193

Imagine writing that line. I can’t.

ROSALIND:
I would thou couldst stammer, that thou might pour this conceal’d man out of thy mouth, as wine comes out of a narrow-mouth’d bottle, either too much at once, or none at all. I prithee take the cork out of thy mouth that I may drink thy tidings.
CELIA:
So you might be a man in your belly.
— III.ii.192-202

Girl talk.

What did he when thou saw’st him? What said he? How look’d he? Wherein went he? What makes he here? Did he ask for me? Where remains he? How parted he with thee? And when shalt thou see him again? Answer me in one word.
— ROSALIND, III.ii.220-224

I mean, LOOK at that.

CELIA:
I found him under a tree, like a dropp’d acorn.
ROSALIND:
It may well be called Jove’s tree, when it drops such fruit.
CELIA:
Give me audience, good madam.
ROSALIND:
Proceed.
CELIA:
There lay he, stretch’d along, like a wounded knight.
ROSALIND:
Though it be pity to see such a sight, it well becomes the ground.
CELIA:
Cry ‘holla’ to thy tongue, I prithee. It curvets unseasonably. He was furnished like a hunter.
— III.ii.234-246

JAQUES:
Rosalind is your love’s name?
ORLANDO:
Yes, just.
JAQUES:
I do not like her name.
ORLANDO:
There was no thought of pleasing you when she was christened.
— III.ii.263-267

You tell him, Orlando!

One small thing I noticed: Orlando compares Rosalind to Atalanta, and Jacques compares Orlando to Atalanta. Meant to be.

There is no clock in the forest.
— ORLANDO, III.ii.300

This shepherdess, my sister, live on the skirts of the forest, like fringe upon a petticoat.
— ROSALIND, III.ii.335-336

O knowledge ill-inhabited, worse than Jove on a thatch’d house!
— JAQUES, III.iii.10

It strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room.
— TOUCHSTONE, III.iii.14-15

RIP Marlowe.

I do not know what “poetical” is.
— AUDREY, III.iii.17

For honesty coupled to beauty is to have honey a sauce to sugar.
— TOUCHSTONE, III.iii.30

TOUCHSTONE:
To cast away honesty upon a foul slut were to put good meat into an unclean dish.
AUDREY:
I am not a slut, though I thank the gods I am foul.
— III.iii.35-39

This fellow will but join you together as they join a wainscot; then one of you will prove a shrunk panel, and like green timber warp, warp.
— JAQUES, III.iii.86-89

Such cool imagery.

Never talk to me, I will weep.
— ROSALIND, III.iv.1

Her wild mood swings are so wonderful. I’ve seen her played as a mini Amazon, all swashbuckling, but … she also collapses in agony when Orlando is five minutes late for their appointment. Poor Celia has her work cut out for her trying to calm Rosalind down.

CELIA:
Nay certainly, there is no truth in him.
ROSALIND:
Do you think so?
CELIA:
Yes, I think he is not a pick-purse nor a horse-stealer, but for his vanity in love, I do think him as concave as a cover’d goblet or a worm-eaten nut.
ROSALIND:
Not true in love>
CELIA:
Yes, when he is in — but I think he is not in.
— IV.iv.20-27

If you play Celia right, you can get a laugh on every line.

I’ll prove a busy actor in their play.
— ROSALIND, III.iv.59

‘Tis not your inky brows, your black silk hair,
Your bugle eyeballs, nor your cheek of cream
That can entame my spirits to your worship.—
— ROSALIND, III.v.57-60

She is so mean to Phoebe!

But, mistress, know yourself. Down on your knees
And thank heaven, fasting, for a good man’s love,
For I must tell you friendly in your ear,
Sell when you can; you are not for all markets.
— ROSALIND, III.v

Honestly, I think about “sell when you can; you are not for all markets” at least once or twice a week. I first read this play in college and underlined those lines. I was 19 but I somehow knew I wasn’t “for all markets” either.

Dead shepherd, now I find they saw of might,
“Who ever lov’d that lov’d not at first sight?”
— PHOEBE, III.v.81-82

More Marlowe!

It is a pretty youth — not very pretty —
But sure he’s proud — and yet his pride becomes him.
He’ll make a proper man.
— PHOEBE, III.iv.113-115

It is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels, in which my often rumination wraps me in a most humorous sadness.
— JAQUES, IV.i.16-20

Come, woo me, woo me; for now I am in a holiday humor, and like enough to consent.
— ROSALIND, IV.i.68

One of the most beautiful examples of enthusiastic consent I can think of!

But these are all lies: men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.
— ROSALIND, IV.i.106-107

There’s a girl goes before a priest, and certainly a woman’s thought runs before her actions.
— ROSALIND, IV.i.139-140

ROSALIND:
Are you not good?
ORLANDO:
I hope so.
ROSALIND:
Why then, can one desire too much of a good thing?
— IV.i.121-123

ROSALIND:
Now tell me how long you would have her after you have possess’d her.
ORLANDO:
For ever and a day.
ROSALIND:
Say “a day” without the “ever”.
— IV.i.143-146

She is RELENTLESS.

No, no, Orlando, 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, IV.i.146-148

ROSALIND:
… The wiser, the waywarder. Make the doors upon a woman’s wit, and it will out at the casement. Shut that, and ’twill out at the keyhole. Stop that, ’twill fly with the smoke out at the chimney.
ORLANDO:
A man that had a wife with such a wit, he might say “Wit, whither wilt?”
ROSALIND:
Nay, you might keep that check for it till you met your wife’s wit going to your neighbor’s bed.
— IV.ii.162-168

ROSALIND:
O coz, coz, coz, my pretty little coz, that thou didst know how many fathom deep I am in love. But it cannot be sounded; my affection hath an unknown bottom, like the Bay of Portugal.
CELIA:
Or rather bottomless, that as fast as you pour affection in, it runs out.
— IV.ii.205-210

Celia is basically playing Ganymede to Rosalind.

I’ll go find a shadow and sigh till he come.
— ROSALIND, IV.ii.216

Soooo beautiful.

She Phoebes me.
— ROSALIND, IV.iii.39

Poor Phoebe!

JAQUES:
By my troth, I was seeking for a fool when I found you.
ORLANDO:
He is drown’d in the brook; look but in and you shall see him.
— III.ii.286-287

Orlando showing some SASS.

ORLANDO:
Fair youth, I would I could make thee believe I love.
ROSALIND:
Me believe it? You may as soon make her that you love believe it, which I warrant she is apter to do than to confess she does.
— III.ii.386-389

I am he that is so love-shak’d.
— ORLANDO, III.iii.367

By my troth, we that have good wits have much to answer for; we shall be flouting; we cannot hold.
— TOUCHSTONE, V.i.11-12

TOUCHSTONE:
Art rich?
WILLIAM:
Faith, sir, so, so.
TOUCHSTONE:
“So, so” is good, very good, very excellent good, and yet it is not, it is but so, so.
— V.i.25-28

Then learn this of me: to have is to have. For it is a figure in rhetoric that drink, being poured out of a cup into a glass, by filling the one doth empty the other. For all your writers do consent that ipse is “he.” Now, you are not ipse, for I am he.
— TOUCHSTONE, V.i.40-44

For your brother and my sister no sooner met but they look’d, no sooner look’d but they lov’d, no sooner lov’d but they sigh’d, no sooner sigh’d but they ask’d one another the reason, no sooner knew the reason but they sought the remedy; and in these degrees have they made a pair of stairs to marriage, which they will climb incontinent, or else be incontinent before marriage. They are in the very wrath of love, and they will together. Clubs cannot part them.
— ROSALIND, V.ii.31-41

But O, how bitter a thing it is to look into happiness through another man’s eyes!
— ORLANDO, V.ii.43

I can live no longer by thinking.
— ORLANDO, V.ii.50

ROSALIND:
I will weary you then no longer with idle talking. Know of me then — for now I speak to some purpose—that I know you are a gentleman of good conceit. I speak not this that you should bear a good opinion of my knowledge, insomuch I say I know you are. Neither do I labor for a greater esteem than may in some little measure draw a belief from you to do yourself good, and not to grace me. Believe then, if you please, that I can do strange things. I have, since I was three year old, conversed with a magician, most profound in his art and yet not damnable. If you do love Rosalind so near the heart as your gesture cries it out, when your brother marries Aliena shall you marry her. I know into what straits of fortune she is driven, and it is not impossible to me, if it appear not inconvenient to you, to set her before your eyes tomorrow, human as she is, and without any danger.
ORLANDO:
Speak’st thou in sober meanings?
ROSALIND:
By my life I do, which I tender dearly, though I say I am a magician. Therefore put you in your best array, bid your friends; for if you will be married tomorrow, you shall, and to Rosalind, if you will.
— V.ii.33-43

Look, here comes a lover of mine and a lover of hers.
— ROSALIND, V.iii.75

Hysterical.

There is sure another flood toward, and these couples are coming in the ark.
— JAQUES, V.iv.35-36

Countercheck Quarrelsome.
— TOUCHSTONE, V.iv.80

All these you may avoid but the lie direct, and you may avoid that too with an “if.” I knew when seven justices could not take up a quarrel, but when the parties were met themselves, one of them thought but of an “if,” as: “If you said so, then I said so.” And they shook hands and swore brothers. Your “if” is the only peacemaker: much virtue in “if.”
— TOUCHSTONE, V.iv.97-103

The magic “if”! Sooo many “If”s in the scene! Witness:

Rosalind’s “If”s:
— You say, if I bring in your Rosalind,
You will bestow her on Orlando here?
— You say you’ll marry me if I be willing?
— But if you do refuse to marry me,
You’ll give yourself to this most faithful shepherd?
— You say that you’ll have Phoebe if she will?
— you’ll marry her
If she refuse me
— I’ll have no father, if you be not he.
— I’ll have no husband, if you be not he,
— Nor ne’er wed woman, if you be not she.

You and you are sure together
As the winter to foul weather.
— HYMEN to Touchstone and Audrey, V.iv.135-136