as You Like It..One of these is the relationship between the court fool Touchstone and a simple country girl named Audrey,

"The more pity that fools may not speak wisely what wise men do foolishly."

This quote shows that at the beginning of the play Touchstone is portrayed as a person that is thought to talk foolishly however in reality is revealing many secrets that lie embedded in the harsh and malicious court life.

However, when he leaves the court and follows the other members into the forest of Ardenne, he leaves this structured social order behind. Thus he begins a new life where he decides that the people he meets in the country are lower than him and proceeds to promote himself higher up the chain of being, and this new-found domination shows through to his relationship with the country girl Audrey.

Touchstone's relationship with Audrey seems to be born overnight and is based primarily on sex, for the elongated prose conversations that Touchstone had back at court would be lost on the simple ears of Audrey. As soon as the relationship begins there seems to be talk of marriage and Touchstone emerges as the dominating person in the relationship as Audrey is dumfounded by his courtly command of speech. This marriage is highly unreasonable from Touchstone's point of view because his breeding and overall appearance is much too superior to the simple and ugly shape of Audrey. Touchstone goes against his own words by being with Audrey and as he becomes more self-righteous his appearance of a foolish man talking wisely upends itself and he begins to act hypocritically to his own words.

"That is another simple sin in you: to bring the ewes and the rams together...and to betray a she-lamb of a twelvemonth to a crooked-pated, old, cuckoldly ram, out of all reasonable match."

This quote shows that Touchstone has become what he has recently criticised and that he is the "she-lamb" and he has forced himself onto the "cuckoldly ram" that is Audrey. This helps the reader to understand the characters as at this point in the play Touchstone has become almost hypocritical to the words that he spoke earlier on and by breaking the chain of being so quickly once he got into the country and slipping into this simple life of no romance he has gone against his old life in the court and this shows that he mustn't have had much respect for the chain of being and the romantic love as he has completely done away with them in his life in the country. Audrey is made out to be a very simple country girl who is happy to be in a relationship where the other person is almost a dictator to her and that is certainly how Touchstone is coming across in his new life out of the hustle and bustle of court.

In conclusion, Touchstone's transition from court life to country life proved to be a loophole for him to exploit and that is just what he did as he quickly did away with the chain of being and the romantic love in the court for a much more simple and 'physical' life out in the country, and changing this drastically didn't seem to bother him showing that he never had any respect for court life in the first place. His relationship with Audrey reinforced this as it was mainly compiled of sex, rather than the much more romantic court wooing. This relationship also reflected Audrey's very simple outlook on life and was perhaps the reason she was so attracted to Touchstone's complex prose. All of these points were involved in helping the reader understand these two characters, one much more complex than the other, in the play As You Like It.

By Andrew Logie