Frye, writing during Hollywood’s golden age, saw an unbroken line from the classics to Shakespeare to modern romantic comedy: “The average movie of today is a rigidly conventionalized New Comedy proceeding toward an act which, like death in Greek tragedy, takes place offstage, and is symbolized by the final embrace.”

The union of the lovers brings “a renewed sense of social integration,” expressed by some kind of festival at the climax of the play—a marriage, a dance, or a feast. The union often also involves social mobility: it certainly does here, as Orlando, the youngest son of a gentleman, finds himself bound to the daughter of a duke. All right-thinking people come over to the side of the lovers, but there are others “who are in some kind of mental bondage, who are helplessly driven by ruling passions, neurotic compulsions, social rituals, and selfishness.” Malvolio in Twelfth Night, Don John in Much Ado About Nothing, Shylock in The Merchant of Venice: Shakespearean comedy frequently includes a party pooper, a figure who refuses to be assimilated into the harmony. Jaques is of this company.

Frye’s “The Argument of Comedy” pinpoints a pervasive structure: “the action of the comedy begins in a world represented as a normal world, moves into the green world, goes into a metamorphosis there in which the comic resolution is achieved, and returns to the normal world.” But for Shakespeare, the green world, the forest and its fairies, is no less real than the court. Frye, again, sums it up brilliantly:

This world of fairies, dreams, disembodied souls, and pastoral lovers may not be a “real” world, but, if not, there is something equally illusory in the stumbling and blinded follies of the “normal” world, of Theseus’ Athens with its idiotic marriage law, of Duke Frederick and his melancholy tyranny [in As You Like It], of Leontes and his mad jealousy [in The Winter’s Tale], of the Court Party with their plots and intrigues. The famous speech of Prospero [in The Tempest] about the dream nature of reality applies equally to Milan and the enchanted island. We spend our lives partly in a waking world we call normal and partly in a dream world which we create out of our own desires. Shakespeare endows both worlds with equal imaginative power, brings them opposite one another, and makes each world seem unreal when seen by the light of the other.*

Many of Shakespeare’s plays keep up a constant shuttle between symbolically opposed locations—Venice and Belmont, Rome and Egypt, Sicilian court and Bohemian country—but As You Like It moves all the major players to Arden as swiftly as possible. Once there, the scenes run together fluently. There is no clock ticking in the forest, no sense of time being marked by the scene breaks. Initially, however, there are two discernible imaginary locations: the farm and the cave, Corin’s world of agricultural labor and the deep forest where the duke and his men play at being Robin Hood. Orlando and Jaques drift between the two, whereas Rosalind/Ganymede and Celia/Aliena are not allowed to penetrate too far into the deep forest. Their reunion with the duke must be withheld for the climax.

ALIENA AND GANYMEDE

Crucially, this play belongs to the girls, who come to Arden because it is a place where they can try on new identities. Celia disguises herself as “Aliena,” suggesting the idea of the immigrant, the resident “alien” who always feels like an outsider. And Rosalind switches gender to become “Ganymede.” Shakespeare’s original audience would have been acutely aware of the connotations of this assumed name. The original Ganymede was a young male abducted by Jove in classical mythology. In Shakespeare’s time, the figure was synonymous with pederastic desire, as explained in a dictionary of the period: “Ganymede: the name of a Trojan boy, whom Jupiter so loved (say the poets) as he took him up to Heaven, and made him his Cup-bearer. Hence any boy that is loved for carnal abuse, or is hired to be used contrary to nature to commit the detestable sin of sodomy, is called a Ganymede; an Ingle.” The same dictionary’s definition of “ingle” is “a youth kept or accompanied for sodomy.” The forest is the supremely natural place. By locating the playful wooing of Orlando and “Ganymede” in this setting, Shakespeare asks his audience to imagine the possibility that same-sex desire may not, after all, be “contrary to nature.”

The place of “banishment” turns out to be the home of “liberty”—free from the constraints of court hierarchy and customary deference, Arden is where you can play at being someone different and find out who you really are. It’s where you learn to live alongside people who come from very different backgrounds from your own. And where, in the end, you all come together for a big party in celebration of multiple mixed marriages that cut across the traditional social order.

As You Like It is Shakespeare’s most elegant play. At its climax Rosalind calls the cast into a circle, the figure of perfection, and resolves the plot with the assistance of Hymen, god of marriage. Whereas most of the other comedies are shadowed by death, this one offers four weddings and no funeral. The part of Rosalind is the longest and most joyous female role in the complete works. It would have been extraordinarily demanding for the boy actor who first performed it, though made a little easier by the fact that Rosalind spends so much of the time dressed as a boy.

Shakespeare moves quickly from the multiple marriages to the closing dance. He introduces the magical “conversion” of bad Frederick in place of the battle between the forces of good and evil that occurs at the end of Lodge’s story, and he focuses on the realization of erotic desire rather than the questions of social advancement that preoccupied Lodge. The play omits the apportioning of rewards with which Rosalynd ended. In the novel, the figure who corresponds to Silvius becomes “lord over all the forest of Arden,” Corin is made master of the Celia-figure’s flock, and loyal retainer Adam improbably becomes captain of the king’s guard.

There is a curious stage direction when the women first arrive in Arden: “Enter Rosalind for Ganymede, Celia for Aliena, and Clown alias Touchstone” (Act 2 Scene 4). Does alias mean that Touchstone has also taken on a disguised identity? It has been suggested that he would have begun the play in the long plain coat of the “natural” (simpleton), then exchanged this for the “motley” of the professional fool when he escapes from the court with the women. But there is no sense of his verbal style changing or of disguise being a means of self-discovery, as it is so profoundly for Rosalind when she plays the role of Ganymede; Touchstone appears always to have been a touchstone, a master of retort that reveals other people’s foolishness.