The Figure of Rosalind In As You Like It

Abstract

Even if the play strains the bounds of probability, no magic has been worked in it before this scene. It therefore seems that Shakespeare has Rosalind resolve the plot by appearing to work magic rather than by simply stripping off her disguise-particularly if, as is usually asserted, she has disguised herself only because she must find out whether Orlando really loves her. The question, then, is why Rosalind's strange things constitute a proper end to the play. I would like to suggest that Rosalind ends the play as a magician because throughout the whole play she has made extraordinary, seemingly impossible-and thus magical-conjunctions between contrary things. Her own person is a seemingly impossible reconciliation of opposites. The magic she performs brings contrarieties together and harmonizes them. The strange things she does, then, are not incidental to the play, but rather a logical development from what she has been doing all along. Although there has been comparatively little analysis of the figure of Rosalind herself, a good deal has been made of the opposites in the play. The conclusion usually drawn is that one or another in a given pair of the play's opposites is the version we are finally to accept. Since the major opposition in As You Like It is generally understood to involve and idealism, therefore, critics tend to view Shakespeare as ultimately choosing either idealism or realism and then subordinating its opposite. The more usual-and perhaps more old-fashioned-view of the play has skeptical, melancholy, or sensual realism disappear by incorporation into a less extravagant final version of the play's depiction of romantic, honorable, loveat-first-sight idealism. For example, although he spends some time showing how one character's point of view contradicts or corrects another's, Harold Jenkins concludes his discussion of the play as follows: