“Truly the lady fathers herself.”
Much Ado About Nothing, I.i.98
Three plays from the middle of Shakespeare’s career depict daughters whose fathers are absent. In The Merchant of Venice and Twelfth Night, the fathers have recently died. In As You Like It, Duke Senior has been usurped by his villainous brother and banished to the Forest of Arden. Since the mothers are presumably long dead—none is even mentioned—the daughters are, for all practical purposes, orphans. At the plays’ outset, each faces a crisis during which she must fend for herself in the world. Portia is compelled to conduct the contest that will determine her future husband, Viola believes that she has lost her only brother in a shipwreck that has landed her on a strange island, and Rosalind is banished from court on the whim of her malevolent uncle. In all, as Viola’s brother Sebastian says of his own ill fate, the heroines’ “stars shine darkly over [them]” (II.i.3–4). But that factor ends up being sauce for the comedy and spur to the young women’s courage. None spends long indulging in self-pity. Quick-witted and resourceful, they deal with their sudden vulnerability by taking on, quite literally, the guise of their absent fathers. All dress as young men and enter a male arena—the law court, the duke’s privy chambers, the greenwood. There they defeat older, more experienced men in trials of wit and will and win, as ultimate reward, the husbands they desire.
Each woman is bold in pursuit of her beloved. The main purpose of her disguise is to gain access to his company and win his favor. Ironically, the cross-dressing makes each attractive to other women or, in the case of Portia, to other men as well. Perhaps Shakespeare is suggesting the charismatic nature of androgyny, as Marjorie Garber argues. Or perhaps he is implying simply that the best judges of what makes men attractive are women. It is not that the women become manly, in either appearance or attitude. Other characters are always remarking on how girlish and refined each of the “boys” looks. And they do not exhibit physical prowess: Rosalind faints at the mention of Orlando’s wound, and Viola, the one woman who is forced to defend her honor with a sword, is brought to shame and danger and must be rescued by a stalwart male. A sure mark of the comic genre is that such coincidences occur in the nick of time. Another sign is the absurdity of the basic premise: that a person can switch genders and even those closest to them will not see through the disguise.
Yet for all the improbability of the basic situation, the psychology rings true: having been nurtured and valued by a strong parent, the daughter has the resources to cope with adversity. The father may be absent, but his influence continues to guide and sustain her. In all three of the comedies, his role is that of mentor, providing the daughter with standards for judging others and approbation for asserting her will. The ultimate proof and reward is her choice of husband. In each case, the daughter chooses a man her father would approve of. In fact, Duke Senior, the one surviving father, openly expresses that approval. As different as these daughter and father pairs are from one another, they reflect the conditions that Shakespeare implied are essential to healthy parenting: personal integrity and respect for children as individuals. These men may lack the supernatural resources of Prospero, but they share his capacity for loving his daughter and for showing her by example the means to earthly happiness.
Portia’s late father is the most authoritarian of this group, literally designating the limits of her choice. She is described in the cast list as “an heiress,” and the first references to her confirm the enormous wealth of her legacy. The enamored Bassanio describes her as “a lady richly left,” whose “sunny locks” are like a “golden fleece” that attracts “many Jasons” (I.i.161–72). The metaphor, for all its pretty classical trappings, implies the disadvantage of Portia’s state: she is a prize, and the motives of any suitor for her hand must necessarily be suspect. In his will, her father took pains to favor those worthy of her. Gradually, the terms of his bequest are revealed. He has set up a “lottery of [her] destiny” (II.i.15) with very strict rules: a suitor must choose among three “caskets,” the winning one containing Portia’s picture. Should he fail, he must comply with three conditions: to keep the results secret, to forswear marriage to any other, and “immediately to leave [Portia] and begone” (II.ix.15).
In her first appearance, Portia chafes at these hard terms, by which she “may neither choose who [she] would nor refuse who [she] dislike[s]” (I.ii.22–23). Thus, she says, is “the will of a living daughter curbed by the will of a dead father” (ll. 23–24). Her pun on “will” (both legacy and inclination) had still other meanings in Shakespeare’s day. It meant not only “fervent longing” but sexual desire, and also the genitalia, male and female [In Sonnets 135 and 136, for example, Shakespeare puns on these bawdy meanings]. Portia is “weary” of these restrictions—this is her first word to Nerissa, her maid and confidante. She is bored and restless in her gilded cage, resentful that her father has “hedged [her] by his wit” (I.i.18) and longing to break out of her enforced passivity. At the same time, she feels honor bound to “perform [her] father’s will” (I.ii.85–86), and she does not gainsay Nerissa’s defense of him:
Your father was ever virtuous, and holy men at their death have good inspiration. Therefore the lott’ry that he hath devised … whereof who chooses his meaning chooses you will no doubt never be chosen by any rightly but one who you shall rightly love [ll. 26–31].
In fact, the play reinforces the wisdom of his means. The contest brings the outside world to isolated Belmont, provides a stage on which Portia can demonstrate her gifts, foils unsuitable candidates, and ultimately yields her the suitor of her dreams.
Although Portia is frustrated by her situation, she is far from broken. In a society where the feminine model, as expressed by the chauvinistic Gratiano, is silent acquiescence, Portia is confident, witty, and resourceful. She has the strength not only to dominate the domestic sphere, as gracious hostess and desirable bride, but also to prevail in the traditionally male provinces of jurisprudence and finance. She wins every contest of wit, and she both adapts and surpasses the credo held by the men in her world. In short, Portia is no easy prize. Bassanio must not only win the contest, he must learn to deserve the woman he has won. Portia, in turn, must strive to overcome all adversaries in order to secure his love. Those include not only her other suitors and Shylock, the rapacious lender of Bassanio’s courtship expenses, but, less obviously, his too-devoted friend, Antonio. In all these situations, the “will” of Portia’s father works to assure that she will be “chosen rightly” by a man whom she can “rightly love.”
As the play opens, Portia is already in love with Bassanio, a “scholar and soldier” who first courted her “in her father’s time” (I.ii.103–04). Left to her own devices, she would simply seek him out. She is “weary” of her other suitors, whom she mocks to Nerissa for every fault from stupidity to drunkenness. She longs to ignore her father’s “will” and pursue her own, as she tells Nerissa in a wry proverb: to act the “hare” that is “madness the youth” and “skip o’er the meshes of good counsel the cripple” (ll. 19–20). But Shakespeare has shown us just enough of Bassanio to suggest that that impulsive course would be a mistake.
In some ways, he is worthy of Portia: he is handsome, gallant, and smitten with her. In a word, he is charming. But under that fair surface lurk some dark elements. Bassanio has “great debts” as a result, he admits candidly, of a “prodigal” lifestyle (I.i.128–29). He hopes to restore his fortunes with the rich marriage—the capture of the “golden fleece,” a practical motive but hardly a noble one. To achieve his ends, Bassanio needs “means” to purchase clothes, gifts, and transport to “furnish [him] to Belmont, to fair Portia” (ll. 173, 182). He turns for funds to the friend to whom he is already deeply in debt, the rich merchant Antonio. Rather than upbraid the prodigal young man, Antonio agrees with alacrity: “My purse, my person, my extremest means / Lie all unlocked to your occasions” (ll. 138–39). The metaphor has a sexual innuendo, which Antonio echoes later when he protests against the practice of taking interest for loans: “When did friendship take / A breed of barren metal of his friend?” (my italics, I.iii.129–30). Antonio, in Solanio’s words, “only loves the world for him [Bassanio]” (II.viii.50). He puts his offer in hyperbolic terms: “You do me now more wrong / In making question of my uttermost / Than if you had made waste of all I have” (I.i.155–57). These sentiments go beyond generosity to self-abasement, particularly since Antonio is short on liquid capital and must borrow the required sum. But Bassanio hears only what he wants to hear—that Antonio will supply the money—and dashes off to prepare for his departure.
It is not that Bassanio is ungenerous himself. Later, he will use some of Antonio’s capital to provide “rare new liveries” for his servant Launcelot Gobbo (II.ii.101). He also has high standards of decorum. When the obstreperous Gratiano offers to accompany him, Bassanio warns him that he must curb his “bold … voice” and “wild behavior” so that he himself will not be misjudged in Belmont and “lose [his] hopes” (ll. 67–75). Still, for all his boyish charm, as Bassanio leaves for Belmont, his motives are mixed and his personal history spotty. Meanwhile, the contest has been teaching Portia—and us—the importance of looking beneath the surface to discover true value.
These lessons, and the wisdom behind the lottery, are conveyed at the expense of Portia’s other suitors. The egotistical Prince of Morocco believes that “blind Fortune” (II.i.36) determines the outcome, and prays that “some god direct [his] judgment” (II.vii.13). Portia, who finds him repellent, is tactful and politic. She invites him to dinner before he makes his “hazard” and, in his presence, acts the gracious hostess. She knows both how to please and how to keep an undesirable suitor at arm’s length. She reminds Morocco that the choice is out of her hands: she may not be “solely led” by the preference of “a maiden’s eyes” (II.i13–14)—implying that, if she could be, those eyes would favor him. The prince misses both the double meaning and the warning and uses his own “eyes” to judge by surface beauty. His choice, the gold casket, contains a death’s head and the play’s central caution: “All that glisters is not gold” (II.vii.65).
The second suitor, the Prince of Arragon, takes himself as the standard of value—“I will assume desert”—and chooses the silver casket. This time a fool’s head—his own—confronts the failed suitor. After his dismayed departure, Portia comments wryly on such “fools” who “have the wisdom by their wit to lose” (II.ix.79–80). But she does not remark that, for all his disappointment, Arragon, like Morocco, has left amicably. His last words are: “Sweet, adieu. I’ll keep my oath” (l. 76). The field has been left free for Bassanio. Portia, meanwhile, is unscathed and in charge. For all its stern strictures, the lottery is working in her best interests.
But Bassanio must still win, and be won. He fulfills Portia’s every fantasy. In the enraptured words of Nerissa, he is “Lord Love” (II.ix.100), and Portia is giddy with desire. When he arrives at last, she makes a clumsy attempt at being subtle: “There’s something tells me, but it is not love, / I would not lose you” (III.ii.4–5). Soon, although she chides herself for “speak[ing] too long,” she is telling him outright that his eyes “have o’erlooked and divided me; / One half of me is yours, the other half is yours” (ll. 22, 15–17). She catches herself in this nonsensical arithmetic, but she does not take back the declaration. Like most of Shakespeare’s daughters, Portia is bold in pursuit of her man. Still, she will not disregard the terms of her father’s will. As she tells Bassanio: “I could teach you / How to choose right, but then I am forsworn. / So I will never be” (ll. 10–12). More than personal integrity is motivating Portia. On some level, she believes in the efficacy of the test. Pointing to the three caskets, she says: “I am locked in one of them; / If you do love me, you will find me out” (ll. 40–41). Having risked so much pride in admitting her love, she does not want to be lightly won. Nor does she want a husband whose values are at odds with her father’s.
But Portia is nothing if not politic. In this trial, as in the literal one to come, she proves a brilliant manipulator of men and events, adept at both embracing and evading the patriarchal system. She is not above craftily bettering the odds in Bassanio’s favor. Playing the neutral onlooker, she orders the members of her court to “stand all aloof,” and she addresses him as “Hercules” braving a solitary “fray” (III.ii.60–62). But, while he contemplates his choice, she also gives the directive “Let music sound.” The music is vocal, and the song contains several hints about the right answer. The first three lines are a triplet whose final word—“bred,” “head,” and “nourishèd”—rhymes with “lead,” the metal of the winning casket. More important, the subject of the song is a warning against “fancy”—infatuation—which comes from “the eyes,” rather than “the heart,” and quickly ends. The chorus sounds “fancy’s knell”—the death toll of superficial and transient physical attraction. Bassanio’s reaction indicates that he has listened well. “So,” he says as the last notes fade, and goes on to expatiate against the deceptiveness of “outward shows” and “seeming truth” (ll. 73–101). In the end, he chooses the casket made of “meagre lead” (l. 104); it contains Portia’s picture and a scroll commending the man “that chose not by the view” (l. 131). In fact, Bassanio’s choice does depend partly on “the view.” He pays tribute once again to Portia’s enchanting eyes and the “golden mesh” of her hair. Shakespeare never denies the vital role that sexual attraction plays in love. But at least it is the “outside” of the lady herself, not of her dowry, which Bassanio admires. He has, in Portia’s words, fulfilled the terms of her father’s will and earned the right to become “her lord, her governor, her king,” ruling over “this house, these servants, and this same myself” (ll. 165–70).
For all these submissive words, however, Portia remains very much in charge. She speaks the words of the “coronation” ceremony and sets the conditions of the marriage. Bassanio is “bereft of all words” (III.ii.175), the passive role traditionally relegated to the woman. In a further reversal of the usual betrothal rite, it is Portia who gives him a ring symbolizing their union. She specifies that he must never “part from, lose, or give away” the token, “lest it presage the ruin of [his] love” (ll. 172–73).
The lovers have no sooner accepted joyous congratulations, compounded by the happy news that Nerissa and Gratiano have also made a match, than word comes from Venice that will put Portia to much harder tests of her mettle. Bassanio’s mentor, the merchant Antonio, has lost his ships and is now subject to the terms of the usurer Shylock’s bond. Bassanio is devastated by this news, rendered helpless with anxiety and guilt. Portia, in contrast, reacts to the crisis with vigor and imagination. First she requires that Bassanio read her the letter that has caused him to blanch and tremble. “I am half yourself,” she declares staunchly, and thus insists on bearing half his grief. Portia immediately offers not only to pay “the petty debt” (III.ii.307), which is far beyond the impecunious Bassanio’s means, but to double or treble the sum, and orders him away to carry out her wishes. Before he leaves, however, he must “go with [her] to church and call [her] wife” (l. 303). She will forego the honeymoon, and she and Nerissa “will live as maids and widows” (l. 310) until the grooms return. Lorenzo, who has brought the letter, praises her generous forbearance as “godlike amity” (III.iv.3). But Portia has sound practical grounds for her actions. As she tells Bassanio, she will not let him “lie by [her] side” with “an unquiet soul” (III.ii.305–06). A marriage founded on the suffering of his “dearest friend” would be doomed to fail. She will not have Bassanio until he is free to focus exclusively on her. She concludes with a wry pun: “Since you are dear bought [i. e., expensive], I will love you dear [deeply]” (l. 313). Bassanio may be the nominal “king,” but Portia is the one giving commands and assigning values.
Nor is Portia content to play a passive waiting role while Bassanio is away. Her quick brain begins inventing a scheme for rescuing Antonio. She lies easily about going off with Nerissa to a monastery “to live in prayer and contemplation” (III.iv.28)—the traditional woman’s role in a crisis. (That is the course planned for Ophelia, Hero, and Juliet, for example.) Once Portia has sent the men on their way, she begins making arrangements like the gifted leader she is. She puts Lorenzo in charge of her estate, sends to her cousin, the legal scholar Dr. Bellario, for “notes” and “garments,” and orders her coach to take her and Nerissa to the ferry for Venice. She reveals to Nerissa only that they will soon join their husbands “accoutered like young men” (l. 63). This chance to break out of her enforced passivity fills Portia with mischievous elation. She delights in the details of the androgynous disguise, the chance to “speak between the change of man and boy,” and “turn two mincing steps / Into a manly stride” (ll. 66–68). When Nerissa exclaims, “What, shall we turn to men?” (l. 78), Portia gives a bawdy retort. She promises to tell her “all [the] whole device” en route, and so creates suspense about her plan, both for her gentlewoman and for us. What is not in question is Portia’s nerve. Given a chance to enter the male arena, she takes up the challenge with alacrity.
Portia has long been commended—or condemned—for her thorough defeat of Shylock. She carries out the scheme brilliantly. Has she gotten her knowledge of law from her father? Is her cousin Bellario a relative on the paternal side? We never find out. Her triumph is the more impressive because the Venetian men, privileged sophisticates at the hub of the power structure, are completely thwarted by the recalcitrant Jew. They are used to playing by their own rules, the Christian gentleman’s credo, and their approach is to try to coerce Shylock into conforming to it. The Duke of Venice tries first to coax and then to bully him into dropping his suit. He asserts that “the world” and he, too, think that the bond is a mere bluff, a practical joke. He then portrays Antonio as an innocent victim, and pleads with Shylock to “glanc[e] an eye of pity on his losses” (IV.i.27). But the Duke is well aware of the “lodged hate” (l. 60) that Shylock bears the merchant. He knows, too, the bigotry and abuse that have caused such deep enmity. Evidence of that maltreatment comes immediately. The Duke insults Shylock, comparing him to such malevolent pagans as “Turks and Tartars” and ending what began as a plea for mercy with a threat: “We all expect a gentle answer, Jew” (l. 34). The admonition is the more demeaning for its punning glance at Shylock’s religion (gentle / gentile). This approach seems calculated to provoke rage and defiance. Can the Duke really hope to change Shylock’s mind, or is he so driven by arrogance that he loses sight of his goals?
In any case, Shylock responds by flinging insults of his own, and of the crudest sort. He compares Antonio to a series of animals—a rat, a pig, a cat—and says that the plea is no more efficacious than urging some men to love bagpipes when, at their sound, they “cannot contain their urine” (IV.i.50). Clearly, he is enjoying this public duel. Cleverly, he shifts the terms of the argument from personal to political: should the Duke fail to honor the bond, he will undermine the city-state’s “charter” and “ freedom” (l. 39), showing the world “There is no force in the decrees of Venice” (l. 102). Shylock has spoken in the language of commerce and the law, and the Duke is stymied. In desperation, Gratiano demands, “Can no prayers pierce thee?” Shylock shoots back: “No, none that thou hast wit enough to make” (ll. 126–27). Deaf to the young man’s “rail[ing],” he says confidently: “I stand here for law.” He has met his adversaries on their own ground and he has won. It takes another outsider, a woman, to both embrace and undermine his terms.
Although Portia comes “furnished with [Bellario’s] opinion,” based on research into Venetian civil law, she is on her own in the conduct of the trial. To some extent, she is making things up as she goes along—gauging her opponent, probing his weaknesses, and looking for an opening gambit. She begins by confirming that “the Venetian law” is on Shylock’s side, which sends him into raptures of gratitude and self-congratulation. Then, in her famous plea, she urges him to exercise mercy, not for Antonio’s sake but for his own. Unlike the men, she is wise enough to appeal not to pity but to self-interest. Mercy benefits the giver more than the recipient, she argues, ranking him with “kings” and “God himself,” and giving him the expectation of mercy when he himself has need. When Shylock remains obdurate, Bassanio urges her to bend the law and save Antonio: “to do a great right, do a little wrong” (IV.i.214). Portia is adamant: she will not weaken the legal system by establishing a bad “precedent,” and Shylock is once more elated.
The tension in the scene is at its height. Portia has led everyone to assume that the eloquent plea for mercy was her only ploy. But just as Shylock is about to claim his bloody prize, she stops him with a word: “Tarry.” Then she lets fall her series of swashing blows, trapping Shylock in his own rhetoric. She is even more absolute in her reading of the bond than he has been. It mentions “no jot of blood”; it requires “nor … less nor more” than exactly “a pound of flesh” (IV.i.304, 323–24). Shylock quails at these exacting technicalities and offers to accept instead Bassanio’s offer of triple the monetary value. Bassanio hastens to give it to him, but Portia stops him with the cold injunction: “The Jew shall have all justice” (l. 319). Shylock then tries, and fails, to reclaim merely his “principal” (l. 334). But Portia has a worse penalty in store: as an “alien” plotting the death of a “citizen,” Venetian law prescribes that he be deprived of all his goods and of his very life. Obviously, Portia has had this backup threat ready should Shylock have thrown caution to the winds and chosen revenge. She feels no scruples about using his outsider’s status against him. In fact, the “mercy” that she forces him to beg of the Duke contains little of the compassion that she has preached. It includes the conditions that Shylock bequeath half his fortune to the daughter who has betrayed him and her new Christian husband, and, hardest of all, that he convert immediately to Christianity.
Some commentators have argued that from the Christian point of view, Portia is showing Shylock mercy, by saving his infidel’s soul. But the effect on him is not relief but devastation. Usually voluble, he says almost nothing. The bare line “I am not well” expresses his despair. That reading was reinforced in Olivier’s 1970 production by a heart-rending cry from the wings after his exit. Our own feelings are conflicted. Shylock has been victimized, but, in revenge, he would exact cold-blooded murder. For all our understanding of the persecution that has warped him, we do not want to see him turn Antonio into a sacrificial animal before our eyes. We may not approve of Portia’s ruthlessness, but we do see that it is the only means of countering Shylock’s. Callow and untried as she is, she outplays the male cosmopolites at every turn. As Bellario’s letter of introduction promised, seldom has there been “so young a body with so old a head” (IV.i.161–62).
Crucial as this contest of wit and will is for Portia’s future happiness, it is not the only or even the major one that she must win. Not Shylock but Antonio is her rival for Bassanio’s heart. Portia must rescue him from Shylock’s deadly snare because Antonio is, in her words, “the bosom lover of [her] lord” (III.iv.17). Were the merchant to die, Bassanio’s guilt at financing his courtship at the cost of his benefactor’s life would poison the marriage. But Portia’s description suggests her subtler and more complex task: to supplant Antonio in Bassanio’s “bosom.” From the first, she is wary of the attachment. As noted above, before she sends Bassanio to Antonio’s aid, she asks to see the merchant’s letter. Antonio’s plea, on the surface humble and self-effacing, is in fact manipulative and narcissistic. He writes that he clears the young man of all debt “if I might but see you at my death,” and adds that only Bassanio’s “love” should “persuade [him] to come, not my letter” (III.ii.319–21). Poisoned darts of guilt and self-reproach wait in every line. It should be no surprise that Portia rushes to rescue so willing a sacrificial lamb. Whether Antonio is moved by homosexuality, as some recent productions have suggested, or simply the Renaissance male friend’s strong bond with a protégé, he behaves like a possessive lover. It is a hold that Portia must break if the handsome, feckless Bassanio is to become her soulmate.
When we see Antonio under arrest, his masochism and self-pity are clearly evident. He describes himself to Bassanio as “a tainted wether of the flock, / Meetest for death,” and “comforts” the distraught young man with the assertion that his most worthwhile course would be to live on and “write mine epitaph” (IV.i.114–18). Again, this is the guilt that binds. Bassanio is helpless before this onslaught. He offers—futilely—to give his “flesh, blood, bones, and all” (l. 112) to save Antonio. More practically, he offers Shylock double the cash value of the bond. He is no match for either merchant. Shylock cuts him off and Antonio proffers more specious comfort: “Grieve not that I am fall’n to this for you” (l. 264, my italics). He also urges Bassanio to ask his “honorable wife” to “judge / Whether Bassanio had not once a love” (ll. 271, 274–75). He concludes with a morbid pun: “if the Jew do cut but deep enough, / I’ll pay [the debt] with all my heart” (ll. 278–79). Bassanio responds with a vow of his willingness to sacrifice “life itself, my wife, and all the world” to “deliver” Antonio (ll. 282–85). The disguised Portia, who overhears these words, makes a sarcastic retort on behalf of the “absent” wife. The dramatic irony of her presence lightens the tone. But the issue is a serious one: the ghost of the martyred Antonio would be an unconquerable rival for Bassanio’s love.
Even after Portia has rescued Antonio from Shylock’s clutches, she has not secured Bassanio’s loyalty. While she is still disguised, she subjects him to the test of the ring. The gifted young lawyer demands as his fee the jewel that Bassanio has pledged never to remove. At first, the young husband holds off. When polite refusals fail, he is driven to telling the awkward truth about the ring’s importance in his marriage vows. Portia pretends to be insulted, makes a sarcastic remark about false offers of generosity, and goes off in a supposed huff. Still, Bassanio has held his ground. Then Antonio interposes himself: “Let his deservings, and my love withal, / Be valued ’gainst your wife’s commandment” (IV.i.448–49). This loading of the case is too much, and Bassanio gives in. It could be argued that Portia is too exacting: in this personal trial, as in the legal one, she is an absolutist. Nonetheless, she is not one to back off from a power struggle. She will let both Bassanio and his mentor know in no uncertain terms who passes the judgments and determines the relationships in her world.
When Bassanio returns home, bringing Antonio, Portia greets the merchant courteously: “You are very welcome to our house.” But the plural pronoun is a reminder that she and Bassanio are a couple. When the greeting ritual is disrupted by the din of Nerissa and Gratiano’s quarrel over the loss of his ring, Portia interrupts. “You were to blame,” she pronounces, “To part so slightly with your wife’s first gift” (V.i.166–67). She knows, of course, that Bassanio is equally guilty, and she enjoys turning the knife and watching him squirm. When he is forced to admit his own fault, she turns her accusations in a comic direction by pretending to be jealous of “some woman [who] had the ring” (l. 208). She denies him her bed until the token is recovered—a reminder to us that the marriage is still unconsummated. She taunts him with the threat of cuckoldry, and with the very “doctor” of laws who has received the ring. Bassanio tries to explain the forces of “shame and courtesy,” the charge of “ingratitude,” that would have sullied his honor had he not relinquished the ring. But he does not reveal that Antonio urged him to the act.
Antonio, who has been standing awkwardly by while his hosts quarrel, intervenes: “I am th’unhappy subject of these quarrels” (V.i.238). Portia wryly assures him that he is “welcome notwithstanding.” Bassanio redoubles his effort to charm and apologize, but Portia is having none of it. She chastises him with having a “double self.” On the surface, she is saying that he is a hypocrite, which she knows to be untrue, but her underlying charge holds: his loyalties are divided between his friend and his wife. When Bassanio swears by his “soul” to be true to her hereafter, Antonio again interposes. Reminding them that he once pledged his “body” for Bassanio’s sake, he tries to offer Portia his “soul” as collateral “that your lord / Will never break faith advisedly” (ll. 252–53).
Firmly, Portia moves to break up this unwholesome triangle. The Renaissance conception was that two lovers completed one another. Their bond should form a perfect circle, symbolized by the wedding ring. A triangle is the wrong shape. She preempts both the lead and Antonio’s claim and casts him in the role of guarantor of the couple’s union: “Then you shall be his surety…. Give him this … and bid him….” (V.i.254–55, my italics). The imperative voice is the mark of a woman sure of her place and in firm command of her estate. Only after Antonio complies does she reveal her role in Shylock’s defeat. She clearly relishes the company’s shock. “You are all amazed,” she gloats, and Antonio concedes, “I am dumb!” (ll. 266, 279). Portia’s final ploy is to restore his financial security. She has withheld the news that three of his ships have come safely to harbor. “Sweet lady,” he says, “you have given me life and living” (l. 286). Portia has taught Antonio to be grateful for the mercantile wealth and power—the Venetian domain—that he is entitled to. Bassanio’s love, the province that she has captured by venturing abroad, she will keep for herself in Belmont.
While it is unlikely that Portia’s father could have foreseen these complex results in establishing the test of the caskets, he did provide the means both to safeguard and to free his daughter. His legacy may also have included providing the model for her own strong character. We get no chance to see them together, but we do know that even in her isolated outpost Portia has somehow learned to gauge men and to lead. Wiliness and prescience, the defining qualities of her intellect, are also, by implication, those of the writer of the will. As the clown, Launcelot Gobbo, says, “It is a wise father that knows his own child.”
Viola is the most father-bereft of these daughters. Her father, “Sebastian of Messaline” (II.i.15), died on her thirteenth birthday. How much time has passed since that sad event is unclear, but internal evidence suggests that it cannot be more than about three years. The plot of the play hangs on the fact that Viola and her twin bother, named for their father, look so young as to be androgynous. That father is mentioned only briefly in the course of the play, but the allusions are key to understanding the daughter. Her decision to present herself disguised as a page at Duke Orsino’s court is based on her father’s former acquaintance with the nobleman. When Viola lands in Illyria after a violent storm, she thinks that Sebastian has drowned and that she must make her own way in the world. She asks the captain who has rescued her who “governs” this place, and, at his answer, exclaims, “Orsino! I have heard my father name him” (I.ii.24, 28). In a seeming non sequitur, she adds, “He was a bachelor then.” The captain confirms his single state but says that Orsino has been “seek[ing] the love of the fair Olivia,” a countess. Viola’s first plan is to apply for service with the lady Olivia. While that would seem the safer course, she abruptly decides instead that she will “serve this duke” (l. 55). Like Portia’s, her preferred suitor is linked to a past time when her life was more secure. Is Viola seeking a father figure to replace the one that she has lost? Secretly piqued by the challenge of winning him away from Olivia? In any case, it is her father’s commendation that serves as the catalyst for Viola’s life-changing decision.
Her father’s other function is as the parent of Sebastian, who, in name as in actions, stands in his place as protector and model. Viola believes in the woman’s traditional need to be safeguarded by a strong male. Yet because she has been deprived of both her father and her brother, she makes the bold choice of taking on that role herself. Instead of turning to the Duke and asking for shelter, her impulse, on landing alone in Illyria, is to “conceal me what I am” until she is ready to be “delivered to the world” (I.ii.53, 42)—reborn, in a sense, in her female state. She hides her “maid’s garments” (V.i.267) and strives to “imitate” her brother in “fashion, color, ornament” (IV.iv.362–63) and “voice” (V.i.208). Her effort is a resounding success. Ruby lipped and shrill-voiced, the twins seem to everyone in Illyria the same charming boy. As the sea captain Antonio exclaims when they are at last brought face to face: “An apple cleft in twain is not more twin / Than these two creatures” (ll. 215–16). Even Sebastian himself is fooled. When they meet at the end, he says, “Do I stand there? I never had a brother” (l. 218). By that point, Viola has discovered the truth, that he is still alive, but for much of the play she believes, as she tells Orsino, in her lone—and double—state: “I am all the daughters of my father’s house, / And all the brothers, too” (II.iv.119–20). That heritage, and its accompanying responsibilities, stir Viola to new heights of boldness and imagination. Although more constrained than either the resolute Portia or the ebullient Rosalind, Viola, too, is freed by assuming male dress.
This is not to suggest that Viola becomes manly, in either appearance or physical aggression. Shakespeare is clear about the distinction between the genders, which overlap only in the guise of the handsome boy. His audience, of course, enjoyed an added fillip of dramatic irony: in the Elizabethan theater, the actor playing a girl playing a boy was, in fact, a male. For Viola, as for her cross-dressing Shakespearean sisters, male dress sparks her incipient gifts and provides her entry to the traditionally masculine provinces of chivalry and courtship. In choosing to assume the role bequeathed by the Sebastians, senior and junior, Viola takes risks and ventures actions that better the lives of everyone she loves.
Shakespeare reminds us of Viola’s essential femininity in every instance of physical combat. Certainly she is no swordsman. When, provoked by the mischievous Sir Toby, Sir Andrew challenges “Cesario” to a duel, the youth “pants and looks pale” and protests weakly, “I am no fighter” (III.iv.275–76, 227). Sir Toby questions “his” right to wear a sword, claiming that a man must be ever ready, according to “the duello,” to fight “for honor’s sake” (ll. 286–87). In other words, valor is seen as a male virtue. Viola is so terrified that she almost reveals her true identity. Shakespeare keeps the play from veering into tragedy by making her opponent, the cowardly Sir Andrew, even more frightened than she is. They are spared by the comic device of coincidence: the timely intervention of two rescuers, first Olivia and later Sebastian’s mentor Antonio. Olivia is indifferent to the duello and horrified by the attack on her beloved. She condemns Toby as barbaric, a “rudesby,” who is “fit for the mountains and the barbarous caves” (IV.i.44), and orders him off, rescuing Viola in the process. The real Sebastian, in contrast, is valiant and feisty. Later, when the hapless Andrew, convinced that Cesario will not defend himself, mistakenly attacks her brother, Sebastian “strikes” him three times for his one blow. Sir Toby intervenes and “seizes” the young man, but Sebastian “frees himself,” draws (stage directions, ll. 24–39) and challenges: “If thou dar’st tempt me further, draw thy sword” (l. 38). The familiar pronoun, from someone a third Toby’s age, shows Sebastian’s boldness. Olivia breaks up this confrontation, too, but later, off-stage, the two knights attack the boy again, and he proves more than a match for both men. In Sir Andrew’s tearful complaint, Sebastian “broke [his] head across” and gave “Sir Toby a bloody coxcomb too” (V.i.169–70).
It is not that Viola is a coward. Simply, she has not been trained in fencing, and she does not have her brother’s physical strength. But in the other masculine arena, courtship, “he” proves “masterly.” Sent as Orsino’s emissary to the cold Olivia, Cesario exudes an irresistible charm. The initial reason is physical: the countess is attracted to adolescent good looks. When her steward Malvolio announces that still another messenger has arrived from Orsino, Olivia is matter-of-fact in her indifference: “Tell him he shall not speak to me.” But once she has provoked Malvolio into describing “his personage and years” as “in standing water, between boy and man” and “very well-favored” (I.v.149, 152–54), Olivia changes her mind. “Let him approach,” she commands.
If good looks were Viola’s only asset, however, she would not hold Olivia long. Like all of Shakespeare’s daughters, she is a gifted speaker. Although her first words as Orsino’s messenger are conventional—“I can say little more than I have studied” (I.v.170)—she soon proves spontaneous and daring. Orsino has urged her to be aggressive: “Be clamorous and leap all civil bounds” (I.iv.20), courting Olivia with “fertile tears” and “groans that thunder love” (I.v.241–42). But Viola soon perceives that such self-dramatization repels Olivia. Cesario is a more subtle lover. When Olivia asks how he would court her, he responds:
Make me a willow cabin at your gate
And call upon my soul within the house;
Write loyal cantons of contemned love
And sing them loud even in the dead of night;
Hallo your name to the reverberate hills
And make the babbling gossip of the air
Cry out “Olivia”! O, you should not rest
Between the elements of air and earth
But you should pity me [ll. 254–62].
The speech pictures the lover not as an aggressor, leaping and clamoring at his mistress, but as a pilgrim worshipping at her shrine and a poet making music of her name. It is centered not on his needs but on his tributes to her, and it wins Olivia instantly. The countess, whom Viola has just frankly described to her face as “too proud” (l. 236), practically throws herself at the youth’s feet and begins pursuing him with a single-mindedness that surpasses Orsino’s.
How has Viola known what will win Olivia? First, because she is herself an unrequited lover, pining for the Duke even as she courts another woman in his name. But situation alone would not afford her such eloquence. In common with her Shakespearean sisters, the gift that Viola has in highly developed form is intelligence. In Sebastian’s words, she “[bears] a mind that envy could not but call fair” (II.i.26). On the simplest level, Viola is witty, relishing every duel of words and matching her opposite—Andrew, Toby, Maria—idiom for idiom, riposte for riposte. As Andrew marvels after eavesdropping on an exchange between Cesario and Olivia, “That youth’s a rare courtier” (III.i.83). The one verbal duelist who outfences her is the clown Feste, but Viola is sufficiently clever both to concede defeat and to philosophize afterwards on his gift: “This fellow is wise enough to play the fool” (l. 58).
Viola’s greatest intellectual gift is prescience. Olivia praises that quick insight: “To one of your receiving / Enough is shown” (III.i.117–18). That compliment is substantiated when Olivia sends Malvolio after Cesario to return a ring that he supposedly left her. Viola quickly gets the underlying message. She reveals nothing to the peevish steward, but immediately after his exit, she exclaims: “Fortune forbid my outside have not charmed her” (II.ii.17). She sees the token for what it is—evidence of “the cunning of [Olivia’s] passion.”
The main use that Viola makes of her intellect is in the moral/emotional education of the Duke. At the beginning of the play, Orsino depicts himself as the resident authority on love, and its chief victim. He equates love with “fancy,” the Elizabethan word for infatuation, a quality as changeable as the sea. He says that his desires are like “cruel hounds,” pursuing and destroying him. He is convinced that the solution to his dilemma would be for Cupid’s “rich golden shaft” to penetrate Olivia’s heart, and make him the “one self-king” occupying all her “thrones” of passion (I.i.39). These fantasies are entirely self-centered. The main proof is that at the end of the scene, Orsino does not go to court the object of his devotion but to recline on “sweet beds of flowers” and conjure up her image—to indulge in masturbatory fantasies. It takes Viola, come from the sea, to show him the difference between infatuation and love.
Orsino is oblivious at first to both Viola’s wisdom and her devotion to him. One of the funniest and most painful scenes in the play is their debate on the nature of the lover. Orsino claims to be the expert—“such as I am all true lovers are” (II.iv.16). They are, he asserts, constant in only one quality, their worship of the “image of the creature that is beloved” (ll. 18–19). This ideal should not be confused with mere “appetite,” the Duke pontificates, the only sort of love of which women are capable. Barely pausing for breath, he then unwittingly uses that very metaphor to describe his longing for Olivia as “all as hungry as the sea” (l. 99). Viola counters by positing the case of a hypothetical woman in love with him. “You cannot love her,” she continues, “you tell her so. Must she not then be answered?” (ll. 90–91). Viola has surmised that this would be the scenario should she reveal her own feelings. Rather than risk such humiliation and, perhaps worse, separation, she keeps her own counsel. The true lover, she argues, is selfless: better to “pine[ ] in thought” and “smile[ ] at grief” (ll. 111, 114) than offend by confessing a passion that would be rejected. We men, she continues, may “say more, swear more,” but “our vows” surpass “our love” (ll. 115–17). This comes too close to home for Orsino—or Cesario—to dwell on. She cuts the exchange short by offering to renew the pursuit of Olivia, and Orsino seizes the chance to turn from discomforting thought to familiar action. On stage, a long—and longing—look may pass between the Duke and Viola at this point. He is strongly, disturbingly, drawn to the boy in whom he has confided so much and who understands him so thoroughly. Yet his soul mate, he insists, is the countess. For Orsino, as for Viola, the “strife” is too “barful” to resolve (I.v.40). Because this is a comedy, “Time” and happy, impossible coincidence will “untie” this knot (II.ii.39–40). But the cause of the conflict goes beyond that in Shakespeare’s earlier confusion-of-twins play, the farcical Comedy of Errors. There, caricature is the mode and happenstance will do to sort things out happily. In the subtler comedy, changes in character must bring about the resolution.
The next time that Viola and Orsino come together is in the final scene of the play. There, she does what she has not dared do before: make a public profession of her love for him and be bold and courageous in its service. Orsino is outraged by what he believes is Cesario’s duplicity in courting Olivia for himself. He threatens to kill first the countess and then the boy, proclaiming that his “savage jealousy” is noble and the murder of Viola a “sacrifice” of “the lamb that I do love” (V.i.124). Both his tone and his diction sound alarmingly like Othello’s. His, too, is the language of egotism masquerading as love. Viola responds with self-denigrating devotion: “To do you rest, a thousand deaths [I] would die” (l. 127), she says fervently. And she announces to Olivia and all the rest of the court that she loves Orsino “more than I love these eyes, more than my life” (l. 129). Into this tangle of barbed emotions steps Sebastian, and, magically, the feelings of betrayal are soothed and the new matches made.
The proof of Viola’s identity is her confirmation of her paternity. Sebastian instigates an exchange that proves her to be, like himself, the child of “Sebastian of Messaline,” but daughter rather than son. Olivia must undergo the public humiliation of having courted “a maid.” But the sting is lessened by having Sebastian himself treat that attraction as a joke. The greater sense of foolish exposure is Orsino’s. He has been blind to both Viola’s passion for him and his for her. With typical self-centeredness, he vows to “share” in the “happy wrack,” and he turns to claim the woman who has so often professed her love for him. He commends her “service done him / So much against the mettle of [her] sex” (V.i.311–12) and promises that when she has redonned her feminine garb, he will make her “Orsino’s mistress and his fancy’s queen.” (l. 377). These words, for all their prettiness, nonetheless imply Orsino’s faults: he remains the chauvinist and the fantasizer. Still, he has learned to value Viola’s courage and devotion. Is he a comparable prize for her? The play does not answer such a question; it is a comedy, after all, and we do not follow the couple beyond the plans for a joyous double wedding. The one ominous note is Feste’s final song about the inevitability in life of “the wind and the rain.”
For the present, however, Viola, like Portia, has fared very well in her father’s absence. She has profited from his predilections and his example, continued in the person of his son. Alone, she has entered the male arenas of court and courtship and won for a husband the man she most desires. When Orsino commends Viola for having served him in ways “so much against the mettle of [her] sex,” he is assuming, as she did at the outset, that the role of protector belongs to the male. Inadvertently, though, he is confirming that on her own Viola is intelligent and resourceful enough to have served in that capacity not only for herself but for him. Daughters, too, can inherit their father’s strengths.
Rosalind, like her sister heroines, is made to fend for herself in the world. She, too, chooses male disguise as protection and release. Because her father is not dead but merely exiled, however, we get to see his influence at firsthand. More than the other two comedies, As You Like It anticipates the romances, particularly The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale, in the idealization of a pastoral place where kindness and generosity prevail. The tone is more high-spirited and less nostalgic than that of these later plays, however. Perhaps the reason is that the focus is on the present generation, the resilient daughter rather than the yearning father. Duke Senior does not have Prospero’s magic powers or his propensity to orchestrate his daughter’s future. But, like the magician, he does act as benevolent overseer and well-wisher, as well as wise mentor of the man she loves. He, too, models the positive values that allow her to flourish in adversity and that help bring about the happy resolution of her conflicts. But it is Rosalind who dons the costume of son and heir and directs the course of her own future.
Like most of Shakespeare’s comedies, As You Like It begins with a potentially tragic situation. Duke Senior has been banished by his “brother and usurper” (the description given is in the cast of characters). This is also the case in The Tempest, except that here the evil brother, Duke Frederick, has a daughter instead of a son. At first, Rosalind’s lot is difficult but bearable. She is “no less beloved of her uncle than his own daughter” (I.i.103–04), and she and her cousin Celia are devoted to each other. In spite of her conflicting loyalties, Rosalind is reasonably content at Duke Frederick’s court. Soon, however, the paranoid usurper turns against her. He banishes her, for no “fault” except, as he charges, “Thou art thy father’s daughter, there’s enough” (I.iii.42, 54). He ignores Rosalind’s sensible objection: “Treason is not inherited, my lord.” Her very “patience” under adversity, he argues, wins her favor with “the people,” and so lessens his own daughter’s popularity. Celia will “show more bright and seem more virtuous” (ll. 74–77) when Rosalind is gone, he says malevolently.
The duke has reckoned without the cousins’ devotion, however. Celia, troubled before this outburst by her father’s “rough and envious disposition,” has already sworn to restore to Rosalind and Duke Senior what Frederick took “perforce” (I.ii.17). This, she stresses, is for her a question of “honor.” Now, at the moment of crisis, Celia does not hesitate to side with Rosalind. She proposes that they flee the court together, following Duke Senior into the Forest of Arden. “Let my father seek another heir,” she says defiantly, arriving at once at the surest way both to wound him and to assert her own will. In rejecting her own tainted legacy, Celia maintains boldly, she goes “To liberty and not to banishment” (l. 134). Rosalind, after a moment’s demur, accepts the offer gladly.
The young women, though callow, are resourceful. They plan to take their “wealth” and their “jewels” to sustain them. They also plan to “steal” Touchstone, the court fool, to give them “comfort” (I.iii.125–26) on their travels. Still, they know that there is “danger” for “maids as [they] are” to leave the protection of the court (104–05). Both their riches and their “beauty” could tempt thieves, and the jester is no fighter. Rosalind, the taller, declares that she will “suit me in all parts like a man.” Like Viola’s, her male disguise will include a sword. Though in her “heart … lies hidden … woman’s fear,” she claims to be no weaker than many “mannish cowards” who have only “a swashing and a mannish outside” (ll. 115–17). This is the joke that Shakespeare develops more fully in Viola’s disrupted duel with Sir Andrew. Rosalind, too, will come to a test of “masculine” prowess. But at this point in the play, her donning of “doublet and hose” gives her the swagger needed to “show itself courageous to petticoat” (II.iv.6–7). When, after hours of weary trudging, Celia loses heart, Rosalind—alias Ganymede—first bolsters her spirit with brave speeches. Then she takes the practical step of procuring them shelter. From a local shepherd, she buys “the cottage, pasture, and the flock” of his master, and so assumes the masculine prerogative of owning property.
But Rosalind’s heart, like Viola’s and Portia’s, remains feminine. Her emotional life is focused not on her dire predicament or her banished father, but on romantic love. Shakespeare is careful to establish her mindset before she changes into male attire. When Celia bids Rosalind to “be merry” in spite of Duke Frederick’s malevolence, the light-hearted topic that Rosalind proposes to distract them is “falling in love.” At her first meeting with the handsome, stalwart young wrestler, Orlando, Cupid’s arrow strikes with its usual speed. By the time that he has defeated the duke’s champion, the brutish Charles, Rosalind is deeply smitten. She “gives [him a] chain” [stage direction, I.ii.226] and hints strongly that her heart goes with it. Orlando, although equally attracted to her, is paralyzed with self-consciousness. Years of oppression at his jealous brother’s hands have deprived him of the courtier’s easy eloquence. After Rosalind has gone off, he despairs that he has appeared before the lively young woman as “a mere lifeless block” with “weights upon [his] tongue” (ll. 232, 238). But the whole structure of the comedy works to confirm Rosalind’s intuitive sense that Orlando is her rightful mate.
Crucial to bringing about their union is the influence of the benevolent father. That figure includes not only Duke Senior but also Orlando’s late father and Shakespeare himself as creator and orchestrator. The first speech of the play is Orlando’s, and its subject is his spiritual patrimony. As “the youngest son of Sir Rowland de Boys,” he says, he has within him “the spirit of [his] father” (I.i.20). That legacy makes him chafe against the “servitude” in which Oliver, his cruel elder brother, keeps him. Oliver has seized his inheritance and refused to school or train him. Orlando confronts Oliver with these charges, whose response is to scorn and strike him. Orlando, more than a physical match for his persecutor, “seizes him” and threatens to throttle him. He refrains from carrying out the threat, however, partly at the behest of old Adam, the loyal family retainer, who pleads, “For your father’s remembrance, be at accord” (ll. 58–59). Oliver, however, does not deserve accord. He is, as he soon accuses Orlando of being, “a secret and villainous contriver against his natural brother” (ll. 152–53). Hypocritical and envious, he arranges the wrestling match with the aim of having the burly Charles murder the young man. His motives are as baseless and as obsessive as Duke Frederick’s toward his brother: “My soul, yet I know not why, hates nothing more than he” (ll. 152–53). This generation of brothers, however, will be redeemed: the spirit of Sir Rowland is moving events toward benevolent and happy ends.
First, Orlando wins the match, soundly defeating Charles and gaining Rosalind’s admiration and love in the process. Obstacles only enhance this initial attraction. The paranoid Duke Frederick, while praising Orlando at first as “a gallant youth,” sees his heritage as a reason to nullify all reward: “The world esteemed thy father honorable / But I did find him still mine enemy” (I.ii.206–07), he pronounces. Scolding Orlando for not having “another father,” he sweeps off with all his train. Rosalind is stung into sympathetic defiance. She overcomes her maiden modesty to solace the young man: “My father loved Sir Rowland as his soul, / And all the world was of my father’s mind” (ll. 216–17). Later, when Celia expresses amazement at Rosalind’s falling so suddenly “into so strong a liking with old Sir Rowland’s youngest son,” Rosalind retorts with the same point that she made to Orlando: that her own father “loved his father dearly” (I.iii.25–28). Celia calls this a silly motive. But in Shakespeare’s plays, as in real life, affinities often extend through the generations. Both absent fathers are giving a symbolic blessing to Rosalind and Orlando’s union.
Old Adam is the living confirmation of Orlando’s benevolent parentage. He addresses the young man affectionately—“O you memory / Of old Sir Rowland”—and commends him to his face as “gentle, strong, and valiant” (II.iii.3–4, 6). Adam has come to warn his favorite not to return to his brother’s house. Oliver has reacted to the wrestling victory by cutting Orlando off entirely, and the young man can see beggary or theft as the only courses left to him. But Adam, emblem of “the constant service of the antique world,” gives Orlando his life savings and pledge to go with him and defend him. The nostalgic strain that permeates the romances sounds in this episode: the longing for a “golden world” (I.i.111) in which such qualities as Adam represents, “truth and loyalty” (II.iii.70), can thrive. So Orlando, too, escapes from the corrupt court to the Forest of Arden. There the prevailing presence is another father, Rosalind’s, who lives like “Robin Hood of England” in a spirit of amity and trust.
Unlike Prospero, Duke Senior does not have supernatural powers, nor does he act as a director of his daughter’s courtship. But through both example and direct intervention in Orlando’s plight, Duke Senior helps bring about the happy resolution. In the face of betrayal and exile, he has remained exuberant and resourceful. His first speech in the play contains the maxim that he lives by: “Sweet are the uses of adversity” (II.i.12). He tells his “brothers in exile,” former courtiers who have joined him in the forest, that they are well rid of the “painted pomp” of the “envious court” (ll. 1–4). He extols the benefits of their pastoral life, friendship, simplicity, and integrity, and asserts that the message of the greenwood is to find “good in everything.”
For all his optimism, the duke is no fool or weakling. He has drawn men to his service because he understands their needs and treats them justly. Those qualities are evident in his treatment of the desperate Orlando. The young man, in anguish at old Adam’s collapse from hunger and exhaustion, invades the Duke’s rural banquet “with sword drawn” and demands that the courtiers “eat no more” (II.vii.88). The sardonic Jaques responds with wry witticisms at the aggressor’s expense. The Duke, in contrast, is perceptive and generous. He asks Orlando what has caused his lapse in “civility”—“distress” or “rude despis[ing] of good manners” (ll. 91–93). The young man responds that he is not brutish by nature; still, however, he is threatening them with death. Duke Senior teaches him a lesson in “gentleness.” “What would you have?” he asks, and offers, “Sit down and feed, and welcome to our table” (ll. 101, 103). All the fire goes out of Orlando’s rage. He expresses amazement at the Duke’s courtesy. In an ironic reversal, he has found in the wild none of the savagery that he has come to expect at the court. The lesson takes instant effect: “I blush, and hide my sword” (l. 119), he says. Orlando then shows his own altruism by refusing to “touch a bit” (l. 133) of the food until he has fed Adam. He thanks the Duke and wishes that he be “blest” for his kindness. This first meeting between father and future son-in-law confirms their mutual sympathies and their shared belief in “sacred pity” (l. 123).
When Orlando returns with Adam, Duke Senior continues to play the spiritual guide and perfect host. He refrains from questioning the young man and provides music while the famished pair eat. The song that accompanies their feast concerns the lowest sin in the Duke’s credo: “man’s ingratitude.” No “sting” of “winter winds” is “so sharp / As friend remembered not” (II.vii.174–76; 188–89). The scene taking place against that musical backdrop demonstrates the exact opposite: Orlando “whisper[s]” (l. 192) his story and the Duke recognizes his resemblance to Sir Rowland. Dropping the disguise of the forester, he confirms what Rosalind has said earlier about the friendship in the older generation: “I am the Duke / That loved your father” (ll. 195–96). All the humane values lacking in the bitter song—generosity, loyalty, gratitude—inform this new bond.
The Duke’s influence extends beyond this initial meeting. It is in going later on “to attend the Duke at dinner” (IV.i.164) that Orlando stumbles upon the great test of the old values. The treacherous Oliver, having been ordered by Duke Frederick to capture Orlando “dead or living” (III.i.6), has gone into the Forest of Arden to hunt him down. But it is the “most unnatural” brother (IV.iii.123) who turns out to be in mortal danger. Orlando stumbles upon him asleep under a tree, menaced first by a “green and gilded snake” and then by a starving lioness. Orlando unwittingly frightens off the serpent, and then is twice tempted to leave Oliver to the beast’s clutches. But “kindness, nobler than revenge” (l. 129), wins out, and he attacks the lioness with his bare hands.
Shakespeare wisely chose to narrate rather than dramatize this fairy tale rescue, and to have the would-be victim relate the “unscene.” The battle between ruthless beast and dauntless young hero would be hard to stage convincingly. So too would be the idyllic outcome: Oliver’s repentance and the reconciliation between the brothers. Some twelve years later in Shakespeare’s career, in The Tempest, a parallel conflict is less perfectly resolved. Prospero forgives his evil brother, but Antonio does not repent and the wronged Duke admits that he remains perfidious. Despite the nostalgic tone of the romance, it is darker than the comedy, where the brother’s conversion is instantaneous and complete. Again, the prevailing benevolent force in As You Like It is “the gentle Duke.” In another off-stage scene, Orlando leads Oliver to his new mentor, who provides Oliver with “fresh array” and “commit[s]” him to his “brother’s love” (IV.iii.144–45). Only then does the brave Orlando reveal the wound that he received. He also shows the newfound trust in his brother that the Duke has urged. He sends Oliver in quest of “his Rosalind,” bearing the “napkin,” “dyed in his blood” (ll. 155–56) as evidence of the reason for his missed appointment.
The encounter of messenger and recipient marks the turning point in the play. Rosalind, hearing from Oliver the story of her lover’s courage and seeing the red sign of his suffering, “swoons” (stage direction, IV.iii.157). It is the undeniable proof of her love, her body’s declaration of her bond with Orlando. While she does not then confess her true identity to Oliver, she cannot keep up her insouciant front, and he chides her with “lack[ing] a man’s heart” (ll. 164–65). Celia, worried about her cousin’s pallor, cuts short Rosalind’s feeble pretense of “counterfeiting” and insists on leading her home to rest. So it is Duke Senior who has, wittingly or not, brought the lovers to this mutual sympathy. He has rescued Orlando, confirmed the young man’s native integrity, sanctioned his heritage, and provided Oliver with the succor that leads to his repentance and the brothers’ reconciliation. In all this time, he has not interacted directly with his daughter. Does he know of her plight?
The play offers only elliptical evidence. Rosalind recounts for Celia’s amusement another unscene in which she met the Duke in the forest. He asked about her “parentage,” she answered wittily it was “as good as his,” and “he laughed and let me go” (III.iv.32–34). If he guesses her identity, he does not try to force her hand, nor does she, despite her precarious circumstances, choose to reveal herself and cling to him. To Celia, she claims to be bored with this subject: “What talk we of fathers when there is such a man as Orlando?” (ll. 34–35) she demands. Rosalind has her father’s independent spirit and single-minded sense of purpose. She feels no need of his direct aid. In her pursuit of the man she loves, “truly the lady fathers herself” (Much Ado About Nothing, I.i.98).
What does Rosalind accomplish in donning the guise of Ganymede? She gets Orlando to let down his guard; after his isolated upbringing, he is comfortable with other men in a way that he cannot be with women. She has a chance to try out her theories, born of self-doubt, on the fickleness of romantic attachment. Most important, she can test the depth of his love for Rosalind. Seeing the trees of the forest laden with verses written in her honor, Rosalind cannot doubt that the writer is infatuated. The poems commend Rosalind’s “beauty,” “majesty,” and “modesty.” But, as she may sense, these are superficial qualities, their praise inspired by one brief meeting. Besides, Touchstone is present at their discovery to mock the “false gallop” of their faulty meter and to undermine their rapturous tone with a bawdy parody. Rosalind is equally contemptuous of the anonymous versifier—until Celia begins to hint that it is Orlando. For all of Rosalind’s boyish bravado, she does not have, as she tells her cousin, “doublet and hose in [her] disposition” (III.ii.186–87). Usually the soul of wit, Rosalind loses all sense of humor on this subject. “The devil take thy mockery!” she exclaims to the bemused Celia, and then appeals to her sisterhood for sincere understanding: “Speak sad brow and true maid.”
When Orlando himself appears, Rosalind’s immediate instinct is to mask all these hopes and doubts. Ganymede’s comic misogyny is the perfect disguise. In two parallel scenes, “he” lists the “giddy offenses” (III.ii.330) supposedly typical of women and defines love as “merely a madness”: “changeable,” “proud,” “fantastical” (ll. 376; 385–86). Ganymede’s avowed purpose is to cure Orlando of this insanity by posing as his Rosalind and enacting all the shallowness and inconstancy of his beloved. The actual effect of this daring game is to keep pushing Orlando to greater protestations of devotion without risking her own self-esteem. As Rosalind admits, in a delicious double entendre, a woman is more apt to believe her lover when he professes that he feels ardor “than to confess she does” (l. 367). She treats Orlando’s protest that he will die if his love goes unrequited with sardonic dismissal. He is taking too exalted a view, she maintains mischievously. The accounts of the tragic fates of legendary lovers are “lies”: “Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love” (IV.i.96–98).
Rosalind even goes so far as to put Orlando through a mock nuptial, with Celia acting as parson. Ganymede undercuts every protest of constancy with arch jibes at both sexes. Men, she claims, are “April when they woo, December when they wed” (IV.i.134–35). Rosalind, she predicts, will welcome Orlando to her bed “and twenty such.” She will then use her “wit” to exculpate herself, for, she warns, “You shall never take her without her answer unless you take her without her tongue” (ll. 157–59). Orlando is shocked by these quips, but his own constancy is unshaken. As proof, he promises her “with no less religion than if thou wert indeed my Rosalind” (ll. 181–82) to keep his vow of meeting her again at two o’clock—and goes off to his fateful rescue of Oliver.
Celia, a silent witness to these encounters, is outraged by Rosalind’s “male” chauvinism: “You have simply misused our sex in your love-prate” (IV.i.185–86), she charges. But Rosalind is unrepentant—in, fact, exhilarated. “O coz, coz, coz, my pretty little coz,” she chants, “that thou didst know how many fathom deep I am in love!” (ll. 189–90). For Orlando has passed every test of faith: he is as sincere and devoted as she could wish. Shakespeare implies here, as in Much Ado, that the woman’s initial fears about infidelity are not groundless. The bawdy Touchstone and the cynical Jaques are present in the greenwood to remind us of the worldly take on romantic idealism. As You Like It, like all the comedies, is full of jokes about cuckoldry. Even the song about the killing of the deer, which follows the love scene, has as chorus a bawdy pun: “the horn, the horn, the lusty horn” (IV.ii.17), it reiterates, is every man’s fate.
Rosalind’s depiction of this worst-case scenario acts as a sort of charm against such cynical resignation. She is much more of a realist about love than her starry-eyed suitor. She wants to believe in Orlando’s fidelity, but she will not allow herself to do so without proof. Her astuteness about the nature of love is shown in her reaction to the shepherd Silvius’s infatuation with the scornful Phebe. Rosalind is frank about the marriage mart, advising the uncouth Phebe: “Sell when you can, you are not for all markets” (III.v.60). At the same time, she urges her to “thank heaven, fasting, for a good man’s love” (l. 58). When Silvius meekly accepts Phebe’s continued abuse, Rosalind reacts with scorn. She cuts short Celia’s expression of sympathy. “He deserves no pity,” she pronounces, and she berates him to his face as “a tame snake” (IV.iii.67, 71). The phallic pun suggests both Rosalind’s worldly knowledge and her respect for manly assertiveness.
Orlando has appeared at first to fail the final test of his love by missing his appointment. In fact, the episode confirms every aspect of his worth. He has rescued his brother, borne his wound in silence, and remembered his vow to his beloved. His last conscious thought is of her: the reformed Oliver reports that Orlando “cried, in fainting, upon Rosalind” (IV.iii.150). Rosalind’s corresponding faint at the sight of the napkin “dyed in his blood” (l. 156) is irrefutable proof of their bond.
When Rosalind meets Orlando again, he has regained his strength and she has recovered her insouciance. The news of Oliver and Celia’s sudden infatuation—this is the play that cites Marlowe’s line “Who ever loved that loved not at first sight” (III.v.81)—sets Rosalind happily scheming anew. First, she demands that Orlando swear by the sincerity of his faint: “If you do love Rosalind so near the heart as your gesture cries it out” (V.ii.59–60). Then she undertakes the role of “magician” when she claims to have means to grant each couple their hearts’ desire. Rosalind is no Prospero; she does not possess actual magic powers. But the forces of both fate and inventiveness are with her. In this play, it is the daughter, not the father, who acts as matchmaker. Duke Senior plays a benevolent but supporting role.
At the ceremony, the Duke is still the nominal authority figure. He has been invited by Orlando, who gratefully recalls his forest host and offers to “bid the Duke to the nuptial” (V.ii.41). But it Rosalind who is in charge. Duke Senior again fails to recognize his daughter, still in disguise, though he does “remember in this shepherd boy / Some lively touches” of Rosalind (V.iv.26–27). Ganymede asks for his formal consent to the banns: “You say, if I bring in your Rosalind, / You will bestow her on Orlando here?” (ll. 6–7). But it is she who has arranged the quadruple wedding, of Oliver and Celia, Silvius and Phebe, Touchstone and Audrey, and, of course, herself and Orlando, and she who conducts the ritual. First she goes off to don her feminine garb. Then to each couple, she recites the terms of their marriage contract as a final test of commitment. To her own father and fiancé, she makes identical vows—“To you I give myself, for I am yours” (ll. 110–11), a reminder of what Desdemona calls the daughter’s “divided duty.”
Larger forces are present to second Rosalind’s arrangement of these “bond[s] of board and bed”: Hymen, god of marriage, appears to join “eight that must take hands … in Hymen’s bands” (V.iv.122–23). The joyous celebration is further blessed by the bounty of Providence. The third son of Sir Rowland de Boys, absent during the rest of the play, enters as messenger-ex-machina to announce the miraculous transformation of Duke Frederick. Entering the forest to exact revenge, the evil duke has come under Arden’s benevolent influence and undergone a religious conversion. Deeply repentant, he restores his brother’s usurped dukedom and retires to a life of prayer and contemplation. Duke Senior, bountiful as ever, promises that all will “share the good of [his] returned fortune” (l. 168). Even before this news, he has welcomed Celia, daughter of his treacherous brother, “in no less degree” (l. 142) than his own daughter. His warmth and optimism permeate the forest, which he celebrates as a place of things “well begun and well begot” (l. 165). He urges all to join in “our rustic revelry.” Even the malcontent Jaques is moved to compliment his liege lord’s “patience” and “virtue” as “well deserv[ing] his “former honor” (ll. 171, 180–81). But it is Rosalind, in the Epilogue, who gets the last word. In As You Like It, the father is an essential supporting figure, but, like The Merchant of Venice and Twelfth Night, this is the daughter’s play.