A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare

by James Shapiro

  Thus Rosalind of many parts

  By heavenly synod was devised

  Of many faces, eyes, and hearts

  To have the touches dearest prized.

  Heaven would that she these gifts should have,

  And I to live and die her slave.

  (3.2.147–52)

  Rosalind can stand no more of it: “Oh, most gentle Jupiter, what tedious homily of love have you wearied your parishioners withal” (3.2.153–54). She also can’t resist pointing out the lines’ metrical flaws: “Some of them had in them more feet than the verses would bear” (3.2.163–64). By mid-play, Shakespeare stacks the deck against his lovers, the distance between this artificial poetry and genuine intimacy seemingly unbridgeable. In a comedy otherwise lacking much conflict—there are no rival suitors or angry fathers here to divide the lovers—this is the obstacle that must be overcome.

  SHAKESPEARE TOOK THE PLOT OF AS YOU LIKE IT FROM THOMAS LODGE’S prose romance Rosalind. In the late 1580s, Lodge had signed on for a profiteering voyage to the Canary Islands, taking along for idle hours a copy of a fourteenth-century poem called “The Tale of Gamylon,” thought at the time to be by Chaucer. In 1590, Lodge published a greatly revised version, transforming an all-male outlaw story into a pastoral romance laced with Petrarchan lyrics. Rosalind was so popular that it went through three more editions by the time Shakespeare gave it his full attention in 1599. We don’t know which edition he used, but given the extent of his indebtedness he must have owned or borrowed a copy. Part of Rosalind’s appeal a decade after its publication was nostalgic: it was a product of a golden moment in Elizabethan history, the period following England’s great triumph over the Spanish Armada in 1588.

  The nostalgia exercised its hold on Shakespeare as well. Like many of the other sources Shakespeare turned to this year, Rosalind dates from around the time that he moved to London and began writing. A decade into his career, as his work begins to turn in new directions, Shakespeare needed to take his bearings. He found himself reflecting back to that time when he had first fully immersed himself in the literary culture, measuring how much had changed, what kind of writing was no longer possible.

  For the past decade, Elizabethan playwrights in search of stories to turn into plays had passed Rosalind by; it didn’t seem to have enough plot to sustain a comedy. Not even Lodge, who was a competent playwright, tried his hand at dramatizing it. Though flimsy, Rosalind’s narrative stretched just far enough for Shakespeare’s needs. He borrows wholesale the story of how the lovers end up in the woods as well as the subplot of political usurpation and restoration that frames Lodge’s work. And he retains all of the main characters, though he changes a few names (including that of Lodge’s hero, Rosader, to Orlando).

  Shakespeare intuitively saw what Lodge failed to develop. Part of the problem was that Rosalind was sorely lacking in irony and humor. And while the material was all there, opportunity after opportunity had been squandered. Lodge had the wonderful idea of Rosalind cross-dressing as a young man named Ganymede (with all the suggestive homoerotic associations that went with the name of Jove’s beloved cupbearer) and, in this guise, flirtatiously role-play with the man she loves: “I will represent Rosalind and thou shalt be as thou art, Rosader.” But in Lodge this mostly serves as an excuse for the two to launch into poetic duets like “The Wooing Eclogue Betwixt Rosalind and Rosader.” Lodge also invents the lovers’ mock marriage, with Rosalind still disguised as a man. But from Shakespeare’s perspective, Lodge failed to see how much more could have been done with this and other extraordinarily rich scenarios. Why other dramatists didn’t recognize this potential says a good deal about Shakespeare’s particular gifts as reviser as well as about his deep understanding of how comedy worked. It also suggests that there was some truth to Robert Greene’s jealous attack on Shakespeare in 1592, when he warned his fellow playwrights to beware of this young rival, an “upstart crow, beautified with our feathers.” He saw how easily Shakespeare could ransack others’ styles, making those he imitated feel passed by.

  As Shakespeare cast his eye over Lodge’s story, he saw to what good use he could put bad poetry. The kind of unquestioned adoration of Petrarchism that defines Rosalind—so fashionable when it was written in the 1580s—was overripe. There’s a particularly excruciating poem in Lodge called “Rosalind’s Description,” a Petrarchan anatomy from head to foot, including tone-deaf lines about her breasts, or “paps”:

  Her paps are centers of delight,

  Her paps are orbs of heavenly frame,

  Where nature molds the dew of light,

  To perfection with the same,

  Heigh ho, would she were mine.

  The word seem to have lodged in Shakespeare’s memory and had already inspired Bottom’s part—as the lover Pyramus—in a send-up of romantic fluff in the play within a play in A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

  Come, tears, confound,

  Out, sword, and wound

  The pap of Pyramus;

  Ay, that left pap,

  Where heart doth hop.

  (5.1.291–95)

  Lodge’s story—with its cross-dressed heroine, its mix of high and low, and its movement from city to country and back again—already contained many of the basic ingredients of Shakespearean comedy. And its minimal plot was elastic enough to allow Shakespeare to complicate the play’s movement without damaging its basic choreography. To that end, Shakespeare crowds it with a larger cast of characters, including the melancholy Jaques, the clownish fool Touchstone, and the rustics, William and Audrey. The story line follows a series of seemingly random encounters in the woods: Rosalind and Orlando run into Jaques, who in turn confronts Touchstone, who challenges William and woos Audrey, and so on. Their brief encounters turn into sparring matches in which everything from the philosophical to the mundane is debated, as characters from court and country find themselves drawn to and mystified by each other. There’s a lot more talk than action. By the end, the lovers are coupled up and political threats removed. Lodge’s story ends in three weddings; Shakespeare can’t resist adding a fourth.

  About the only words Shakespeare takes virtually unchanged from Rosalind come from its preface, where Lodge tells his readers, “If you like it, so; and yet I will be yours in duty, if you be mine in favor.” Shortened and thoroughly transformed in its implications, it worked nicely as a title: As You Like It. The words encapsulate what Shakespeare is up to here, seemingly offering the audience just the kind of conventional story they went to the playhouse to see, yet at the same time expanding the horizons of what they thought they were looking for in a comedy.

  THAT SHAKESPEARE WAS ABLE TO CREATE A PLAY WITH SO COMMANDING and complicated a female lead is a tribute to the qualities of the nameless young actor for whom he wrote Rosalind’s part. Shakespeare had so much confidence in this young man’s ability that he gave him over a quarter of the play’s lines. Not even Cleopatra would speak as much. This was unprecedented and may not have pleased his experienced fellow sharers, used to playing the leading roles themselves. As You Like It turns on what happens when the high-spirited Rosalind, disguised as “Ganymede,” decides to speak to Orlando “like a saucy lackey and under that habit play the knave with him” (3.2.291–93). Shakespeare’s other cross-dressed heroines all change back into women’s clothing at the first opportunity. We would expect Rosalind to shed her doublet and hose once secure in the knowledge of Orlando’s love for her. But she won’t until Orlando’s education and transformation are complete. To that end, the first thing that she does as Ganymede is offer Orlando advice about love:

  There is a man haunts the forest that abuses our young plants with carving “Rosalind” on their barks, hangs odes upon hawthorns and elegies on brambles, all, forsooth, defying the name of Rosalind. If I could meet that fancy-monger, I would give him some good counsel.

  (3.2.351–56)

  The tone is both teasing and critical. “Defying”—that is, demeaning “the name of Rosalind”—is a
bit harsh and unexpected (so much so that the troubled editor of the 1632 Second Folio changes it to “deifying”), but it also sets the tone for Rosalind’s attack on Orlando’s conventional view of love. Breaking from Lodge’s model here, Shakespeare has Rosalind propose to cure Orlando of what ails him. The two, she suggests, should role-play the part of lovers, and she invents a precedent in which she had successfully done so with another man so deeply in love:

  He was to imagine me his love, his mistress; and I set him every day to woo me. At which time would I, being but a moonish youth, grieve, be effeminate, changeable, longing and liking, proud, fantastical, apish, shallow, inconstant, full of tears, full of smiles; for every passion something and for no passion truly anything, as boys and women are for the most part cattle of this color; would now like him, now loathe him; then entertain him, then foreswear him; now weep for him, then spit at him; that I drave my suitor from his mad humor of love….

  (3.2.396–407)

  Orlando agrees to the game, and it’s the last we hear of his poems. To succeed, Rosalind must lie to Orlando about who she is and what she’s up to. As a woman playing a man playing a woman (played by a young male actor), Rosalind steadily chips away at Orlando’s conventional responses. By act 4, scene 1, the once-silent Orlando is bantering with “Ganymede” in a punning exchange that underscores how much has changed. They now speak a shared language, their witty dialogue barely concealing a subtext that explores how they imagine what life would be like with each other. She insists that she won’t be a silenced wife, and Orlando makes clear that he’ll value her on her terms: close “the doors upon a woman’s wit,” Rosalind suggests, “and it will out at the casement; shut that, and ’twill out at the keyhole.” To which Orlando replies, at once playful and earnest, “A man that had a wife with such a wit, he might say, ‘Wit, whither wilt?’” (4.1.153–58). It’s a start.

  If their game is to succeed it must be reciprocal. It’s not just Rosalind who must disguise what she knows; Orlando must also suppress simple truths. Paradoxically, the only way Shakespeare can show that Orlando has matured in his understanding of love is to show him masking what he’s learned, having him playing and lying in love, learning to appreciate Rosalind’s deception. Much depends, then, on when it dawns on Orlando that “Ganymede” is actually Rosalind. Modern productions often miss Shakespeare’s signals and as a result don’t allow Orlando to discover the truth until it’s far too late. In doing so they turn Orlando into a cloddish figure, unworthy of Rosalind’s affections (in George Bernard Shaw’s words, a “safely stupid and totally unobservant young man”). Other productions have him conspiratorially wink and nod at playgoers too early on to let them know that he hasn’t been taken in by Rosalind’s deception, thereby reverting to the cynicism of the unrevised “When My Love Swears.” But when it works right, it works beautifully: “I know she knows”: Orlando comes to know that “Ganymede” is Rosalind pretending to be a man playing a woman; and we know he knows she knows he knows it.

  But when, exactly, do we know it? Much of the pleasure of tragedy depends upon our ignorance, our failure to see what’s coming. The greater the shock, the more intense the tragic experience. When Shakespeare had King Lear enter with Cordelia dead in his arms, he caught his audience by surprise, all the more so because those familiar with his sources expected Cordelia to live. Comedy is pleasurable because we’re told what’s coming, know better than the characters themselves about who is disguised, about lost and separated twins, and about who is really in love with whom. Armed with this knowledge, there are few things more satisfying than watching a well-orchestrated comedy unfold, anticipating the moment at the end when the characters discover what we already know. But in As You Like It, Shakespeare bends the rules, creating situations where we can no longer be as confident as we’d like to be about what characters know, even who they really are. We’re forced to question our judgment and go back, as the play progresses, and replay a good deal of the action—especially about when it is that we are sure that Orlando knows that “Ganymede” is his Rosalind.

  My own guess—and Shakespeare sets things up so that it can only be a guess—is that the first inkling we have that Orlando sees through her disguise comes when Rosalind playfully asks for his hand and tells Celia to “be the priest and marry us” (4.1.116–17). It’s a lot more obvious in performance, where, once Orlando takes her hand in his own, the physical reality of who she is becomes palpable to him, clear enough for him to turn to Celia and agree to what Rosalind (as “Ganymede”) has said: “Pray thee marry us.” Their game has gone too far for Celia’s comfort. Playgoers at the Globe knew that Celia was being asked to participate in a “handfast” or legally binding betrothal, and at first she adamantly refuses: “I cannot say the words.” She won’t be implicated in this contract, and if truth be told, she’s more than a little in love with Rosalind herself. But Rosalind insists: “You must begin, ‘Will you, Orlando—.’ ” Celia at last gives in, reciting the familiar words: “Will you, Orlando, have to wife this Rosalind?” Orlando’s reply, in the future tense—“I will”—fails to satisfy Rosalind, who immediately asks: “But when?” Once more, Orlando hedges on his commitment, responding, “Why now, as fast as she can marry us.” This won’t do for Rosalind. Shakespeare’s contemporaries knew the difference between saying “I do” and “I will” (Elizabethan lawyers called the first sponsalia per verba de praesenti, the latter, less binding, because it only commits to a marriage at some unspecified future time, sponsalia per verba de futuro). Rosalind persists—she wants to know where he stands: “Then you must say, ‘I take thee, Rosalind, for wife.’ ” Orlando knows what he is doing, understands the difference between the playful and the real, and, hand in hand, repeats the words that bind him to her: “I take thee, Rosalind, for wife” (4.1.120–29). This is the closest Shakespeare would ever come to staging an espousal. Though a Friar had appeared at the end of Much Ado, like Friar Lawrence in Romeo and Juliet, he must urge the lovers to join him offstage—“to the chapel let us presently” (5.4.70)—to perform the rite. Insofar as holy sacraments, including that of matrimony, could not be performed in the theater, Elizabethan audiences would have found the espousal scene in As You Like It, where contractual words are spoken, especially powerful. For Rosalind and Orlando, there could be no turning back.

  Though legally joined, their playacting and deception isn’t over. It’s not yet time for Rosalind to shed her disguise or for Orlando to admit what he knows. Orlando is not perfect, though, and he lets his guard slip once or twice. The first time occurs in act 5, scene 2, when “Ganymede” enters and Orlando tells his brother Oliver “here comes my Rosalind” rather than “here comes Ganymede.” Oliver, who had seen Rosalind faint when he brought her news of Orlando’s fight with a lion, also sees through her disguise, for when “Ganymede” says to him, “God save you brother,” he replies, “And you fair sister” (5.2.18). A few lines later, the game is up, pushed as far as it can be when Rosalind, as “Ganymede,” asks Orlando whether tomorrow she can “serve your turn for Rosalind,” and Orlando firmly responds to the double-edged line (since “serve your turn” means to satisfy sexually as well as to act as substitute): “I can live no longer by thinking” (5.2.49). She’s ready to lie with him and he with her. When Rosalind formally reveals herself at the end of the play we’re denied the pleasure of a traditional recognition scene: there’s no shock on Orlando’s part, no mention that she had been “Ganymede,” just the conditional, “If there be truth in sight, you are my Rosalind” (5.4.117). Touchstone is there to remind us that the truest lovers, like the best poets, are liars: “The truest poetry is the most feigning, and lovers are given to poetry, and what they swear in poetry may be said as lovers they do feign” (3.3.17–20). It’s as good a paraphrase of the paradoxical truth of Sonnet 138—“When my love swears that she is made of truth / I do believe her though I know she lies”—and of As You Like It, as one could ask for.

  In retelling this story, Shake
speare not only overhauls Lodge, but also revisits two of his earlier amorous works, Romeo and Juliet and Love’s Labor’s Lost, both of which feature heroines named Rosalind or Rosaline (as Rosalind’s name is also sometimes spelled in the Folio text of As You Like It). Again, Shakespeare glances back as he goes forward. In both of those plays Rosalind figures as a heartbreaker, the unattainable object of a Petrarchan lover. In Romeo and Juliet she’s much talked of but never actually appears. Romeo’s commitment to a young woman we never see him with and for all we know isn’t aware of his existence is fair game for the cheerfully obscene Mercutio, who has no patience for this passionate but meaningless Petrarchan stuff:

  I conjure thee by Rosaline’s bright eyes,

  By her high forehead and her scarlet lip,

  By her fine foot, straight leg, and quivering thigh,

  And the demesnes that there adjacent lie.

  (2.1.18–21)

  To be in love with Rosaline is to “lie with love,” and it’s a fantasy Romeo abandons when he meets Juliet and discovers a love that is genuine and reciprocal.

  Rosalind—or at least her namesake—had also appeared in Love’s Labor’s Lost, where she is also the object of a young man in love, the same Berowne whose uninspired sonnet appears in The Passionate Pilgrim. In a play where both male and female lovers are so conventional that they border on the indistinguishable, Rosalind stands somewhat apart. Though she speaks in the same formal couplets as the other characters, her wit and spirit shine through, especially at the end when she playfully mocks her wooer: “That same Berowne I’ll torture ere I go…. How I would make him fawn, and beg, and seek” (5.2.60–62). The return of Rosalind in As You Like It (Shakespeare obviously is working from Lodge, but he could have changed her name as easily as he did Rosader’s) is all the more striking in a play that has so many characters who share names—inexplicably, and confusingly, Shakespeare writes parts for two Olivers and two Jaques. It’s hard to avoid the impression that this is something of a private joke on Shakespeare’s part. In a play so intimately aware of literary antecedents, there’s probably yet one more in-joke, for Rosalind had also been the name of the heartless lover (and despiser of bad poetry) in Edmund Spenser’s poetry. Spenser’s autobiographical double, Colin Clout, had complained in The Shepherd’s Calendar (1579) about how his beloved Rosalind “laughs [at] the songs, that Colin Clout doth make” (“January,” 66) and is still nursing his wounds over a decade later in Colin Clouts Come Home Again. Given a voice and a will, the Rosalind of As You Like It makes her earlier incarnations seem two-dimensional.