Celia speaks to the healing powers of love in her introductory scene with Rosalind in which she implores her cousin to allow "the full weight" of her love to push aside Rosalind's unhappy thoughts. As soon as Rosalind takes to Arden, she displays her own copious knowledge of the ways of love. Disguised as Ganymede, she tutors Orlando in how to be a more attentive and caring lover, councils Silvius against prostrating himself for the sake of the all too human Phoebe, and scolds Phoebe for her arrogance in playing the shepherds disdainful love object. When Rosalind famously insists that "men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love", she argues against the notion that love concerns the perfect, mythical or unattainable. Unlike Jacques and touchstone, both of whom have keen eyes on biting tongues trained on the follies of romance, Rosalind does not mean to disparage love. On the contrary, she seeks to teach a version of love that not only can survive in the real world, but can bring delight as well. By the end of the play, having successfully orchestrated four marriages and ensured a happy and peaceful return of a more just government, Rosalind proves that love is a source of incomparable delight.
In 'As You Like It', Shakespeare dispenses with the time consuming and often hard won processes involved in change. The characters do not struggle to become more compliant, their changes are instantaneous, Oliver, for instance, learns to love both his brother Orlando and a disguised Celia within moments of setting foot in the forest. Furthermore, the vengeful and ambitious Duke Fredrick abandons all thoughts of fratricide after a single conversation with a religious old man. Certainly, these transformations have much to do with the restoration, almost magical effects of life in the forest, but the consequences of the changes also matter in the real world: the government that rules the French duchy, for example, will be more just under the rightful ruler, Duke Senior, while the class structures inherent in court life promise to be somewhat less rigid after the courtiers sojourn in the forest. These social reforms are a clear improvement and result from the more private reforms of the plays characters. 'As You Like It' not only insists that people can and do change, but also celebrates their ability to change for the better.
In addition, 'As You Like It' establishes the city/country division on which the pastoral mood depends. In act one scene one, Orlando rails against the injustices of life with Oliver and complains that he 'knows no wise remedy how to avoid it'. Later in that scene, as Charles relates the whereabouts of Duke Senior and his followers, the remedy is clear. "In the forest of Arden ………….many young gentlemen…………fleet the time carelessly, as they did in the golden world". Indeed, much healing is done in the forest, the lovesick are coupled with their lovers and the appropriate Duke returns to his throne, but Shakespeare reminds us that life in Arden is a temporary affair. As the characters prepare to return to life at court, the play doesn't praise country over city or vice versa, but instead suggests a delicate and necessary balance between the two. The simplicity of the forest provides shelter from the strains of the court, but it also creases the need for urban style and sophistication: one would not do, or even matter, without the other.
Moreover, the play abounds in banishment. Some characters have been forcibly removed or threatened from their homes, such as Duke Senior, Rosalind and Orlando. Some have voluntarily abandoned their position out of a sense of rightness, such as senior's loyal band of lords, Celia, and the noble servant Adam. It is, then, rather remarkable that the play ends with the four marriages, a ceremony that unites individuals into couples and ushers these couples into the community. The community that sings and dances its way through Arden at the close of act five, scene six, is the same community that will return to the dukedom in order to rule and be ruled. This event, where the poor dance in the company of royalty, suggests a perfect place with perfect social and political systems, where wrongs can be righted and hurts healed. The sense of restoration with which the play ends depends, upon the formation of a community of exiles in politics and love coming together to soothe their various wounds.
Throughout the play, Shakespeare uses signals in order to represent abstract ideas or concepts for example; the poems that Orlando nails to the tree of Arden are a testament to his love for Rosalind. In comparing her to romantic heroins of classical literature. Orlando takes his place among a long line of poets who regard the love object as a bit of earthbound perfection. Much to the amusement of Rosalind, Celia, Touchstone, Orlando's efforts are far less accomplished than, say, Ovid's, and so bring into sharp focus the silliness of which all lovers are guilty. Orlando's "tedious homilies of love" stand as a reminder of the wide gap that exists between the fancies of literature and the kind of love that exists in the real world.
Another symbol that adds interpretive emphases within the play would be the slain deer scene in act four, Jaques and other lords in Duke Seniors party kill a deer. Jaques proposes to 'set the deer's horns upon head for a branch of victory'. To an Elizabethan audience, however, the slain deer would have signalled more than an accomplished archer. As the song that follows the lord's return to camp makes clear, the deer placed atop the hunters head is a symbol of adultery, commonly represented by a man with horns on the top of his head. Allusions to the adulterated man run through out the play, betraying one of the dominant anxieties of that age, that women are sexually uncontrollable, and pointing out the division between ideal and imperfect love.
Additionally, Rosalind's choice of alternative identities is significant. Ganymede is the cupbearer and beloved of Jove and is a standard symbol of homosexual love. In the context of the play her choice of an alter ego contributes to a range of sexual possibilities.
Like many of Shakespeare's plays and poems, 'As You Like It' explores a variety of different kinds of love between members of the same sex. Celia and Rosalind, for instance, are extremely close friends, almost sisters, and the profound intimacy of their relationship seems at more intense than that of ordinary friends. Indeed, Celia's words in act one scene two and three echo the protestations of lovers. But to assume that Celia or Rosalind possesses a sexual identity as clearly defined as our modern understandings of heterosexual or homosexual would be able to work against the play's celebration of a range of intimacies and sexual possibilities.
The other kind of homoeroticism within the play arises from Rosalind's cross dressing. Everybody, male and female, seems to love Ganymede, the beautiful boy who looks like a woman because he is really Rosalind in disguise. The name Rosalind chooses for her alter ego, Ganymede, traditionally belongs to a beautiful boy who became one of Jove's lovers, and the name carries strong homosexual connotations. Even though Orlando is supposed to be in love with Rosalind, he seems to enjoy the idea of acting out his romance with a beautiful young boy, Ganymede, almost as if a boy who looks like the women he loves is even more appealing than the women herself. Phoebe, too, is more attracted to the feminine Ganymede than to the real male, Silvius.
In drawing on the motif of homoeroticism, 'As You Like It' is influenced by the pastoral tradition, which typically contains elements of same sex love. In the Forest of Arden, as in pastoral literature, homoerotic relationships are not necessarily opposing to heterosexual couplings, as modern readers tend to assume. Instead, homosexual and heterosexual love exists on a range across which, as the title of the play suggests, one can move as one likes.
"Now, my co-mates and brother in exile,
Hath not old custom made this life more sweet?
That that of painted pomp? Are not these woods
More free from peril that the envious court?
Here feel we not the penalty of Adam,
The seasons' difference, as the icy fang
And churlish chiding of the winter's wind,
Which when it bites and blows upon my body
Even till I shrink with cold, I smile, and say
'This is no flattery. These are counsellors
That feelingly persuade me what I am.'
Sweet are the uses of adversity
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;
And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermon in stones, and good in everything. (II.i.1-17)
These lines, spoken by Duke Senior upon his introduction in Act two, scene one, establish the pastoral mode of the play. With great economy, Shakespeare draws a dividing line between the "painted pomp" of court, with pearls great enough to drive the Duke and his followers in to exile, and the safe and restorative Forest of Arden (II.i.3). The woods are romanticised as they typically are in pastoral literature, and the mood is set for the remainder of the play. Although pearls may present themselves, they remain distant, and, in the end, there truly is "good in everything" (II.i.17). This passage, more than any other in the play, presents the conceits of the pastoral mode. Here, the corruptions of life at court are left behind in order to learn the simple and valuable lessons of the country. Shakespeare highlights the educational, edifying, and enlightening nature of this foray into the woods by employing language that invokes the class room, the library, and the church: in the trees, brooks, and stones surrounding him, the duke finds tongues, books and sermons. As is his won't, Shakespeare goes on to complicate the literary conventions upon which he depends. His shepherds and shepherdesses, for instance, ultimately prove too lovesick or dim-witted to dole out the kind of wisdom the pastoral form demands of them, but for now Shakespeare merely sets up the opposition between city and country that provides the necessary tension to drive his story forward.
"No, faith; die by attorney. The poor world is almost six thousand years old, and in all this time there was not any man died in his own person, videlicet, in a love-cause. Troilus had his brains dashed out with a Grecian club, yet he did what he could to die before, and he is one of the patterns of love. Leander, he would have lived many a fair year though Hero had turned nun if it had not been for a hot midsummer night, for, good youth, he went but forth to wash him in the Hellespont and, being taken with the cramp, was drowned; and the foolish chroniclers of that age found it was Hero of Sestos. But these are all lies. Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love". (IV.i.81-92)
In Act IV, scene one, Rosalind rejects Orlando's claim that he would die if Rosalind should fail to return his love. Rosalind's insistence that "[m]en have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love" is one of the most recognizable lines from the play, and perhaps the wisest (IV.i.91-92). Here, Rosalind takes on one of the most dominant understandings of romantic love, an understanding that is sustained by mythology and praised in literature, and insists on its unreality. She holds to the light the stories of Troilus and Leander, both immortal lovers, in order to expose their falsity. Men are, according to Rosalind, much more likely to die by being hit with a club or drowning than in a fatal case of heartbreak. Rosalind does not mean to deny the existence of love. On the contrary, she delights in loving Orlando. Instead, her criticism comes from an unwillingness to let affection cloud or warp her sense of reality. By casting aside the conventions of the standard-and usually tragic-romance, Rosalind advocates a kind of love that belongs and can survive in the real world that she inhabits.
"It is not the fashion to see the lady the epilogue; but it is no more unhandsome than to see the lord the prologue. If it be true that good wine needs no bush, tis true that a good play needs no epilogue. Yet to good wine they do use good bushes, and good plays prove the better by the help of good epilogues. What a case am I in then, that am neither a good epilogue nor cannot insinuate with you in the behalf of a good play! I am not furnished like a beggar, therefore to beg will not become me. My way is to conjure you; and I'll begin with the women. I charge you, O women, for the love you bear to men, to like as much of this play as please you. And I charge you, O men, for the love you bear to women-as I perceive by your simpering none of you hates them- that between you and the women the play may please. If I were a woman I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me, complexions that liked me, and breaths that I defied not. And I am sure, as many as have good beards, or good faces, or sweet breaths will for my kind offer, when I make curtsy, bid me farewell". (Epilogue, 1-19).
The Epilogue was a standard component of Elizabethan drama. In it, one actor remains onstage after the play has ended in order to ask the audience for the favor of its applause. As Rosalind herself notes, it is exceedingly odd that she has been chosen to deliver the Epilogue, as that task is usually assigned to a male character. By the time she addresses the audience directly, Rosalind has discarded her Ganymede disguise. She is, once again, a woman, and she has married a man. Although we may think that the potentially troubling play of gender has come to an end with the fall of the curtain, we must remember that women were forbidden to perform onstage in Shakespeare's England. Thus, Rosalind would have been played by a man, which further obscures the boundaries of gender and sexuality. Rosalind emerges as a man who pretends to be a woman who pretends to be a man who pretends to be a woman in order to win the love of a man. When the actor solicits the approval of the men in the audience, he says, "If I were a woman I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me"-thus returning us to the dizzying intermingling of homosexual and heterosexual affections that govern life in the Forest of Arden (Epilogue, 14-16). The theater, like Arden itself, is an escape from reality where the wonderful, sometimes overwhelming complexities of human life can be witnessed, contemplated, enjoyed, and studied.
In conclusion it is apparent through Shakespeare's 'As You Like It' that the conventions of pastoral are highlighted with more than one interpretive emphasis. The play itself, appears to be 'Pretty Pastoral, exploration of the dark recesses of the psyche and damning indictment of a power hungry urban society. All of which are highlighted throughout.
