Celia is more than a sister to Rosalind. She’s different from the virtual sisters, Julia, the two Rosalines, and Portia in the preceding plays; and Beatrice, Viola and Imogen in contemporaneous and later plays by Shakespeare. Celia is Rosalind’s foil and counterpart, and, in Act 1 at least, her equal partner. She’s not just Rosalind’s sidekick but her own person with strong views and powerful emotions, inflected with her distinctive brand of Celian wit and humour.
Celia is, in fact, not Rosalind’s sibling but her first cousin. But as courtier Le Beau says, and everyone else knows, their meshed loves ‘are dearer than the natural bond of sisters.’1 Almost as symbiotic as twins, each is an only child and a motherless girl. Celia accompanies Rosalind throughout almost the whole play, loving, empathising, encouraging, supporting, joking and mocking, step by step in the same actual and liminal space.
The emotional connection between Celia and Rosalind is so intuitive and playful that it’s closer to an ideal of sisterhood than to mere cousins. However, when they leave court to enter the Forest of Arden in disguise, it’s as a brother and sister partnership; Ganymede and Aliena. By the end of the play, when they marry two brothers, Orlando and Oliver, they become quasi sisters-in-law. From the beginning, in the potential tragedy of the play’s first act, Celia is a spirited and enterprising partner for Rosalind. It’s Celia who has the energy, takes the initiative, and stands up to her psychopathic father, Duke Frederick, when he banishes Rosalind from court. It’s Celia who refuses to be separated from her ‘sweet coz’, Celia who instantly conceives the plan to seek asylum with Rosalind’s father, the rightful Duke in the Forest of Arden, and Celia who has the radical idea of going in disguise.
For Rosalind and Celia, ‘coupled and inseparable’, this friendship between women is the true rapport of like minds. For Juliet Stevenson who played Rosalind to Fiona Shaw’s Celia in 1985 for the RSC, it’s ‘the greatest female friendship in all of Shakespeare.’2 It was a wonderful relationship...There’s no real parallel to their journey anywhere in Shakespeare. I had never seen this friendship fully explored.’3 Their tie pre-dates Rosalind and Celia’s later discovery of heterosexual love. It can be seen as an image of passionate lesbian attraction or of the platonic rapport of female minds – or both.4 Novelist George Eliot often invoked the love between the cousins, the tender affinity of Juno’s swans as Celia calls it, when writing to her women friends. ‘I heartily echo your kind wish that we should be “like Juno’s swans” coupled together.’5
Before we ever meet the two cousins, we’re alerted to the unique quality of their bond, as Charles the Wrestler notices.
| Charles | [Celia] the Duke’s daughter, her cousin, so loves her, [Rosalind] being ever from their cradles bred together, that she would have followed her exile or have died to stay behind her. She [Rosalind] is at the court and no less beloved of her uncle than his own daughter, and never two ladies loved as they do.6 |
On Celia’s part, it’s a love bond deeper than any crush, both yearning and tough. Shakespeare had envisaged same-sex teenage love before when he painted the more than ‘sisters’ vows’ between Hermia and Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This aspect of Helena could have been an early draft for Celia, just as there are rehearsals for Rosalind.
| Helena | We, Hermia, like two artificial gods, Have with our needles created both one flower, Both on one sampler, sitting on one cushion, Both warbling of one song, both in one key, As if our hands, our sides, voices and minds, Had been incorporate. So we grew together, Like to a double cherry, seeming parted, But yet an union in partition, Two lovely berries moulded on one stem; So, with two seeming bodies, but one heart...7 |
Helena depicts a powerful and inescapable connection, almost like Siamese twins. But the entrance of men into their lives dramatically severs Helena and Hermia’s friendship. Though they are eventually reconciled, we feel it will never be the same again. However, Celia’s passion for Rosalind holds firm through and beyond the arrival of romantic heterosexual love.
For it is Celia who does the most loving, the most daring, the most caring, the most forbearing in this relationship. The love flows from her to Rosalind in similar unequal proportions to the love between another pair of Shakespearian cousins, Beatrice and Hero in Much Ado About Nothing. Beatrice, like Celia, does most of the cousin-to-cousin loving, fervently supporting Hero when she is wrongly denounced at the altar. Hero appears less loving towards Beatrice, making sure she overhears this personal assassination, albeit for benevolent motives of tricking her cousin into falling in love with Benedick.
| Hero | But Nature never framed a woman’s heart Of prouder stuff than that of Beatrice. Disdain and scorn ride sparkling in her eyes, Misprizing what they look on, and her wit Values itself so highly that to her All matter else seems weak. She cannot love, Nor take no shape nor project of affection, She is so self-endeared.8 |
Although Hero utters these words to goad Beatrice into self-examination, they invert the truth about her cousin’s character. Beatrice is the female protagonist of her play and she’s the active companion in her unswerving loyalty towards Hero. The dynamics switch in As You Like It where Rosalind is the female protagonist but does less of the cousin-to-cousin loving.
When we first meet the cousins in As You Like It, Celia is taking action to lift Rosalind’s lack-lustre mood, ‘I pray thee, Rosalind, sweet my coz, be merry.’ Rosalind responds flatly, ‘Dear Celia, I show more mirth than I am mistress of...Unless you could teach me to forget a banished father you must not learn me how to remember any extraordinary pleasure.’9 Celia counters with a breathtakingly complex sentence that attempts to change Rosalind’s frame of mind. With one huge lungful of air, and of thought, Celia offers Rosalind an avowal of pure love – and recaps recent politics for the audience. The First Folio of 1623 gives Celia’s speech as a single sentence, as I do here, although modern editions break it into three.
| Celia | Herein I see thou lov’st me not with the full weight that I love thee. If my uncle, thy banished father, had banished thy uncle, the Duke my father, so thou hadst been still with me I could have taught my love to take thy father for mine. So wouldst thou, if the truth of thy love to me were so righteously tempered as mine is to thee.10 |
Celia longs for reciprocity. Her declaration is made with the same zest for wordplay that can fly like Rosalind’s. Fiona Shaw played Celia to Juliet Stevenson’s Rosalind in 1985 and knows how demanding this speech is, as she explained in discussion with Adam Phillips at the National Portrait Gallery in 2011. She focused on the commas because they reveal Celia’s state of mind. ‘You have to learn to walk – literally – on the commas – in order to make sense of the speech!’ Shaw demonstrated this by performing the speech twice, the first time at top speed. Giving it a second time, Shaw marched from side to side of the stage, pausing to turn on each comma, to show how she physically unlocked the meaning of this difficult, tonguetwisting speech.11 In performance Shaw explored the subtle intensity of Celia’s love for Rosalind. This avowal has a special rhythm to it, noted Shaw. ‘It’s staccato, it has an incredibly charming formality, all balances and counterbalances and antitheses. It tells you who Celia is: she’s a character who has a desire to say things pertinently and yet delicately. She doesn’t say, “I love you”. Because she is Celia, she says “I love you” in a way which allows for a hint of slight separation from things, the possibility of irony, as though she would like to connect with her feeling, but it is so passionate she dares not.’12 Shaw’s Celia was deeply wounded when Rosalind fell in love with Orlando and she became the loser. Her love for Rosalind had felt symbiotic, ‘thou and I am one,’ although other Celias may work out a less intense and more humorous, sisterly relationship with their Rosalinds.
Celia reinforces her emotional confession with a wholly practical deed of gift to Rosalind.
| Celia | You know my father hath no child but I, nor none is like to have, and truly when he dies thou shalt be his heir, for what he hath taken away from thy father perforce, I will render thee again in affection. By mine honour, I will! And when I break that oath let me turn monster. Therefore, my sweet Rose, my dear Rose, be merry.13 |
At a stroke, Celia appoints Rosalind heir to the dukedom, a promise she will fulfil at the end of the play. She literally gives away what might have been her inheritance. She does this freely for love of Rosalind, disregarding her own interests, to right the wrong performed by her father, Duke Frederick.
Rosalind doesn’t comment on the gift of Celias love. Instead she quickly lightens the tone by suggesting they should ‘devise sports.’ ‘Let me see, what think you of falling in love?’ But in the wake of her avowals to Rosalind, Celia can’t envisage transferring her affection to any man. ‘Marry, I prithee, do, to make sport withal; but love no man in good earnest.’ She doesn’t want Rosalind falling in love with boys. Instead she tries to divert her from such dangerous pursuits by drawing her into a vigorous debate about the relative merits of Fortune and Nature in their ‘gifts to women.’
| Celia | Let us sit and mock the good housewife Fortune from her wheel, that her gifts may henceforth be bestowed equally. |
| Rosalind | I would we could do so, for her benefits are mightily misplaced – and the bountiful blind woman doth most mistake in her gifts to women. |
| Celia | ‘Tis true, for those that she makes fair she scarce makes honest, and those that she makes honest she makes very ill-favouredly. |
| Rosalind | Nay, now thou goest from Fortune’s office to Nature’s; Fortune reigns in gifts of the world not in the lineaments of Nature. |
| Enter Touchstone | |
| Celia | No? When Nature hath made a fair creature may she not by Fortune fall into the fire? Though Nature hath given us wit to flout at Fortune, hath not Fortune sent in this fool to cut off the argument?14 |
Celia definitely prefers the witty semantics of philosophical discussion to any concrete prospect of falling in love. She enjoys colloquial proverbs that remain in the language today, such as ‘that was laid on with a trowel.’15 She’s got a light touch, and a talent for friendship as she shows in bantering with Touchstone, the clown or professional entertainer at her father’s court.
| Touchstone | Stand you both forth now. Stroke your chins and swear by your beards that I am a knave. |
| Celia | By our beards – if we had them – thou art.16 |
The cousins’ femininity is soon contrasted with the testosterone of a wrestling match. This promises to be an unequal contest between the Duke’s brawny champion, Charles, and his amateur challenger, Orlando. ‘Alas, he is too young; yet he looks successfully,’ reflects Celia. She takes the lead and tries to dissuade Orlando from what seems an impossible task.
| Celia | Young gendeman, your spirits are too bold for your years... We pray you for your own sake to embrace your own safety and give over this attempt.17 |
As soon as the bout begins, she’s mentally in the ring with Orlando, so immediate is her empathy for the underdog.
| Celia | I would I were invisible, to catch the strong fellow by the leg. |
| [Orlando and Charles wrestle.] | |
| ...If I had a thunderbolt in mine eye I can tell who should down.18 | |
| Shout. [Charles is thrown] |
Her reaction to Orlando is more practical, less aroused than Rosalind’s exclamations, ‘Now Hercules be thy speed, young man!...O excellent young man!’ But when, unbelievably, Orlando triumphs and Duke Frederick is ungracious to him in victory, Celia becomes both more regal, and more suggestive, as she moves into blank verse.
| Celia | Gentle cousin, |
| Let us go thank him, and encourage him. My father’s rough and envious disposition Sticks me at heart. – Sir, you have well deserved. If you do keep your promises in love But justly as you have exceeded all promise, Your mistress shall be happy.19 |
Is there a hint that Celia could have fallen for Orlando first? If so, she’s instantly thrust aside by Rosalind as if she’s wrestling with her cousin. Rosalind’s response is quite different from Celia’s, bold, impulsive and reckless. She’s completely absorbed in the selfishness of first love. Suddenly no one else exists, not even best friends. In a memory of the ancient Olympic games, Rosalind garlands Orlando, not with laurels, but with a chain from round her own neck. She forces herself to depart from his magnetic aura but immediately invents an excuse for returning, ‘Did you call, sir?’ Celia has to tear her away, ‘Will you go, coz?’20
In their tête-à-tête afterwards, Celia tries to bring some logic to bear on Rosalind’s sensational coup de foudre for Orlando. ‘Come, lame me with reasons,’ she begs Rosalind, as she emphasises the potency of the wrestling match. ‘Come, come, wrestle with thy affections.’
| Celia | But turning these jests out of service, let us talk in good earnest. Is it possible on such a sudden you should fall into so strong a liking with old Sir Rowland’s youngest son? |
| Rosalind | The Duke my father loved his father dearly. |
| Celia | Doth it therefore ensue that you should love his son dearly? By this kind of chase I should hate him for my father hated his father dearly; yet I hate not Orlando.21 |
Humorous and acerbic though her tone is with Rosalind, Celia does understand the predicament of love. Enraptured Rosalind commands her cousin to love Orlando for no better reason than ‘because I do.’ In her euphoria, Rosalind wants to twine the chain of friendship around their female cousinhood, to embrace her potential male lover.
This playful prose discussion is suddenly interrupted by Duke Frederick who sweeps in to arraign Rosalind on a trumped-up charge of treason. With stern formality he banishes her from his court on ten days’ notice. In dignified blank verse to match the severity of his, Rosalind mounts a powerful defence which Celia corroborates with loving testimony. She first interrupts, and then confronts her father, painting a tender picture of more than a sister’s bond that has evolved during a youth spent together.
| Celia | I was too young that time to value her, But now I know her. If she be a traitor, Why, so am I. We still have slept together, Rose at an instant, learned, played, ate together, And whereso’er we went, like Juno’s swans, Still we went coupled and inseparable.22 |
Juno, queen of the ancient classical gods, was mythic and immortal. Her swans are Celia and Rosalind. Celia probably had in mind that swans mate for life. Or the words of Orlando Gibbons’ plaintive madrigal, ‘The Silver Swan,’ may have already been on the breeze.23 Mute swans belonged to the Queen, and do so, by default, to this day. In her strong and beautiful image Celia is the real swan. She allies herself completely with Rosalind. Conscious of his shaky hold on power, the Duke counters Celia with a torrent of self-justification and apparent care for his daughter’s reputation. ‘Thou art a fool. She robs thee of thy name,/And thou wilt show more bright and seem more virtuous/When she is gone.’24 When he repeats his banishment decree against Rosalind, Celia simply replies,
| Pronounce that sentence, then, on me, my liege; I cannot live out of her company.25 |
It’s Celia’s report on the state of her heart. Yet as the Duke stalks away, it’s Celia’s brain that immediately begins planning their joint escape. In serious danger, she continues to joke, to brighten Rosalind’s spirits, and to reiterate her avowal that ‘thou and I am one.’
| Celia | O my poor Rosalind, whither wilt thou go? Wilt thou change fathers? I will give thee mine. I charge thee, be not thou more grieved than I am. |
| Rosalind | I have more cause. |
| Celia | Thou hast not, cousin. |
| Prithee, be cheerful. Knowst thou not the Duke Hath banished me, his daughter? | |
| Rosalind | That he hath not. |
| Celia | No? Hath not? Rosalind lacks then the love Which teacheth thee that thou and I am one. Shall we be sundered? Shall we part, sweet girl? No, let my father seek another heir! Therefore devise with me how we may fly, Whither to go and what to bear with us, And do not seek to take your change upon you To bear your griefs yourself and leave me out. For by this heaven, now at our sorrows pale, Say what thou canst, I’ll go along with thee. |
| Rosalind | Why, whither shall we go? |
| Celia | To seek my uncle in the Forest of Arden. |
| Rosalind | Alas, what danger will it be to us, Maids as we are, to travel forth so far! Beauty provoketh thieves sooner than gold.26 |
Celia takes command. Thinking on the spot she turns the terrifying prospect of exodus into an exciting adventure. ‘I’ll put myself in poor and mean attire,’ she says, ‘And with a kind of umber smirch my face – /The like do you; so shall we pass along/And never stir assailants.’27 As her creativity soars, a sort of miracle happens. The two cousins start to think as complementary parts of the same whole. Rosalind leaps into the freedom that Celia has outlined and takes off from it. She finesses the plan into a friendship beyond gender.
| Rosalind | Were it not better, |
| Because that I am more than common tall, That I did suit me all points like a man?28 |
She doesn’t waste a moment in choosing ‘Ganymede’ for her mischievous male incognito while rueful Celia is left behind to pick her own new identity.
| Celia | Something that hath a reference to my state: No longer Celia, but Aliena.29 |
Choosing ‘Aliena’ suggests Celia has not just alienated herself from her royal status at her father’s court, but realises she may become estranged and sidelined from Rosalind, too, whose bravado has whirled her into translating her sex. In Celia’s self-naming, there’s self-knowledge. Her position has shifted from active to reactive. In Act 1, Celia held the power and was heiress apparent. At Uncle Frederick’s court, Rosalind had no power. At this point it could have been Celia’s play. By Act 2 the power has transferred – and it’s all Rosalind’s. In the forest Rosalind re-sexes herself and finds the unexpected liberty to say whatever’s on her mind. Celia has resigned command, she’s handed the energy to Rosalind, and from now on her role will be relegated from equal protagonist to caustic observer, umpire, or shrewd commentator.
Before setting off for Arden, Celia has some practical functions to discharge. When she puts on ‘poor and mean attire’ to accompany Rosalind in her flight, she has no reservations about stepping down in caste and going as a peasant girl. Rosalind suggests asking Touchstone to accompany them into exile. Celia instantly actions the plan:
| Celia | He’ll go along o’er the wide world with me. Leave me alone to woo him. Let’s away, And get our jewels and our wealth together, Devise the fittest time and safest way To hide us from pursuit that will be made After my flight. Now go we in content To liberty, and not to banishment.30 |
They simply ignore class differences. If they now belong Nowhere, a Fool belongs Everywhere. And Celia belongs with Rosalind. ‘That’s what I like about Celia,’ reflects Janet Suzman who played Celia before she played Rosalind, ‘because she says, “I’ll come with you.” She’s wonderful, she could have said, “look darling, I’ll give you some clothes and off you go.’” Suzman explains, ‘My first loyalty was to Celia and it was very difficult in view of the star quality of Rosalind to find what it was about Celia that might be endearing. I found a rather wry humour as she allowed Rosalind to do all these nutty things like dressing up, schlepping her through the forest and falling in love ridiculously with Orlando – and she was a sort of wry counterpoint to that.’31
Once in Arden, Celia’s new role as Ganymede’s sister, Aliena, seems to drain her vitality, perhaps because her main function in the plot is over. Brutal Shakespeare! In resigning her status as the Duke’s daughter, Celia becomes more conventionally female. ‘I pray you bear with me; I cannot go no further... I faint almost to death.’ The first time Rosalind/Ganymede calls Celia by her new name, ‘Therefore, courage, good Aliena!’ marks the moment when Celia can no longer keep up with her on her journey into her new life and into loving Orlando.
But after meeting the old shepherd Corin who arranges for the brother and sister duo to buy a cottage, smallholding and flock of sheep, Celia revives. They’ve grasped a new independence they could never have exercised as women at court. In imitation of a subservient male employee, such as a steward, Celia seems to manage the money. ‘And we will mend thy wages,’ she tells Corin. This assertion reconciles Celia to the forest and she finds it proves a tonic. In their new personae as Aliena and Ganymede, Celia and Rosalind establish themselves as farmers in the Forest of Arden. Is this the ideal life for Celia, making a home with Rosalind, in role as a married couple, not as brother and sister, outside society as they’ve previously known it? Pastoral life and literature performs a critique of city life and by escaping the court Celia totally re-makes not only her place in society but also her emotional life. She can earn her own living, and spend her free time sauntering and observing.
When Celia overhears rustic Silvius declaring his courtly though surprising love for Phebe the shepherdess, his flowery idiom prepares her for finding Orlando’s love poems to Rosalind strewn across Arden. Their feeble rhymes: be-tree, vows-boughs, friend-end, heart-part, provoke Celia’s mockery of other people’s love. With the poems in her hands and on her lips she spins out Rosalind’s suspense about their authorship. Celia reels in Rosalind on a line of tantalizing questions. ‘Didst thou hear these verses?... But didst thou hear without wondering how thy name should be hanged and carved upon these trees?... Trow you who hath done this?... Change you colour?’ The game erupts in her boisterous exclamation,
| Celia | O wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful wonderful, and yet again wonderful, and after that out of all whooping!32 |
As earthy sheep-farmer, patrician Celia, alias Aliena, can even indulge in sexual innuendo, ‘So you may put a man in your belly,’ before she finally reveals, ‘It is young Orlando, that tripped up the wrestler’s heels and your heart both in an instant.’
How much rather would Celia prefer that Orlando had not turned up in Arden, and that Rosalind had not fallen in love with him? She takes a negative view of conventional lovers while her language for Orlando is subtly derogatory.
| Celia | It is as easy to count atomies as to resolve the propositions of a lover; but take a taste of my finding him and relish it with good observance. I found him under a tree, like a dropped acorn –...There lay he stretched along like a wounded knight – 33 |
From now on Celia is obliged to witness Rosalind’s forest trysts with Orlando. As Rosalind falls deeper and deeper in love with Orlando, she unconsciously sidelines Celia. No wonder Celia grows impatient with Ganymede’s continued cross-gender deception.
| Rosalind | Never talk to me, I will weep. |
| Celia | Do, I prithee, but yet have the grace to consider that tears do not become a man.34 |
Celia snipes to the audience that Rosalind is not a bona-fide male. She’s feeling increasingly sour about the Orlando effect on her hitherto exclusive friendship with Rosalind. She plays on Rosalind’s qualms about how genuine a lover Orlando will prove. ‘Nay, certainly, there is no truth in him...I think he is not a pick-purse nor a horse-stealer, but for his verity in love, I do think him as concave as covered goblet or a worm-eaten nut.’ Rosalind asks Celia, ‘Not true in love?’
| Celia | Yes, when he is in, but I think he is not in. |
| Rosalind | You have heard him swear downright he was. |
| Celia | ‘Was’ is not ‘is’.35 |
You could say that Celia is being realistic, trying to protect Rosalind from potential rejection, or you could find her tone bitter and jealous – or both. She’s fighting Orlando with the best weapon to hand, her witty, satiric language. But she feels victory slipping from her grasp. As Orlando gains the ascendant in Rosalind’s heart, Celia’s language sadly diminishes. This is her last major, rivalrous attack on Orlando.
| Celia | O, that’s a brave man! He writes brave verses, speaks brave words, swears brave oaths and breaks them bravely quite traverse, athwart the heart of his lover, as a puny tilter, that spurs his horse but on one side, breaks his staff like a noble goose. But all’s brave that youth mounts, and folly guides.36 |
On their very next forest date, Ganymede/Rosalind proposes to Orlando and propels him into an immediate play wedding. In a breathtaking act of transgression for 1599, s/he casts a woman, Celia/Aliena, in the role of officiating priest. ‘I cannot say the words,’ Celia protests. Almost literally, her flow of language is stalled. Rosalind prompts her as if she’s a dunce, and goaded, Celia recites: ‘Will you, Orlando, have to wife this Rosalind.’ ‘This Rosalind,’ Celia says, as if this isn’t the Rosalind she’s trusted, supported and loved over a lifetime, but a fake Rosalind, a new alarmingly sexual Rosalind, and perhaps to her, now a lost Rosalind.
When Orlando leaves his ‘wife’ for two hours to meet Duke Senior for dinner, Celia lets fly a last desperate assault of words against Rosalind.
| Celia | You have simply misused our sex in your love-prate! We must have your doublet and hose plucked over your head and show the world what the bird hath done to her own nest.37 |
Celia’s resentment is spat out in her obscene reference to genitals beneath doublet and hose and the bitter image of Rosalind fouling her own nest. Male disguise has finally polluted Rosalind’s femininity in Celia’s eyes. Is she very conventional about women’s place in the world? Or does Celia secretly envy the way Rosalind has re-sexed herself as Ganymede and been able to flirt openly with Orlando? Or is her thwarted love for Rosalind intensified by all these factors combining to send her into a diversionary fury? When Rosalind declares that her affection for Orlando, ‘hath an unknown bottom, like the Bay of Portugal,’ Celia retorts sardonically, ‘Or rather, bottomless, that as fast as you pour affection in, it runs out.’ Not only does Celia ironically accept that Rosalind’s new love may be bottomless, but she infers that the old mutual affection between the cousins, always intense on her part, seems to be running away like water through a sieve, obliterated in the flood of Orlando. ‘And I’ll sleep,’ says Celia curtly as she shuts down the scene, together with her most intense emotions. She expresses her loss in three small syllables.
The next two hours pass leadenly for Rosalind as once again Orlando fails to turn up on time. Forest mail provides a distraction when Silvius delivers Phebe’s blatant love letter to Ganymede. ‘Alas, poor shepherd!’ exclaims Celia. She feels for Silvius, as he has to witness Phebe, the object of his love, declaring herself to a rival. His position reflects her own, yet Rosalind dismisses Silvius briskly.
| Rosalind | Do you pity him? No, he deserves no pity. – Wilt thou love such a woman? What, to make thee an instrument and play false strains upon thee? Not to be endured! Well, go your way to her, for I see love hath made thee a tame snake...38 |
Celia has no time to wonder whether love for Rosalind has made her a tame snake, too, when a strange man arrives in search of Ganymede and Aliena. He brings a dramatic, if plot-creaking account of brotherly hatred, mortal danger, rescue and redemption. It is Orlando’s wicked brother, Oliver, thrown out of Duke Frederick’s court, who has been sleeping rough in the forest. Orlando found him, rescued him from snake and lioness, but in the fracas suffered a wounded arm, passed out, ‘And cried, in fainting, upon Rosalind.’ Oliver brings the evidence, a napkin ‘Dyed in his blood,’ and Orlando’s message for Ganymede to excuse his broken date. Celia physically supports Rosalind who mirrors Orlando’s blackout by losing consciousness herself at the sight of her lover’s blood. Celia is back in role as pillar and comforter to Rosalind. ‘Why, how now, Ganymede! sweet Ganymede!’ For a moment reality breaks in as Celia forgets her mask as Ganymede’s sister, Aliena, and automatically calls him ‘Cousin Ganymede!’ She enlists Oliver to help her rouse Ganymede, ‘We’ll lead you thither. I pray you, will you take him by the arm?...Come, you look paler and paler; pray you draw homewards. Good sir, go with us.’
After her sparkling parity with Rosalind early in the play, it’s a let-down that Celia has no lines at all by Act V. Shakespeare pushes her into love at first sight with Oliver for no apparent reason, as in the best fairy tales, though this reiterates the coup de foudre experienced by Rosalind and Orlando at the wrestling match. We learn of Celia and Oliver’s impetuous love from Rosalind who knows all about the urgency of physical desire. Her account of their sexual discovery is really about her own, too. And as every romantic knows, falling in love at first sight really does happen, sometimes.
| Rosalind | Nay, tis true. There was never anything so sudden but the fight of two rams, and Caesar’s thrasonical* brag of ‘I came, saw and overcame.’...They are in the very wrath of love and they will together. Clubs cannot part them.39 |
But the ultimate success of Celia and Oliver’s union depends upon conversion. Will Oliver’s transformation from wickedness to virtue hold? Converts are often staunch to new allegiances so it’s not impossible. However, unlike Rosalind and Orlando, Celia and Oliver have had no time to get to know each other, so we are left with a lingering whisper of doubt. Celia has lost Rosalind to Orlando so there’s an emotional logic in settling for his brother. Her marriage will keep her close to Rosalind and now they will be related twice over.
When that notorious, cross-dressing, cigar smoking cavalier, George Sand, adapted As You Like It as Comme il vous plaira for the Comédie Française in 1856, she deliberately wrote up the part of Celia. Instead of giving Celia a formulaic marriage to Orlando’s elder brother Oliver, Sand awarded Celia an eccentric but perhaps more meaningful marriage of like-minded souls with Jaques, the mordant reporter on the seven ages of human life. Both he and Celia have been caustic commentators who function in something of the same way in the play. Dickens saw Sand’s version in Paris in 1856 in what sounds like a wooden production. He walked out after only two acts. He got bored watching ‘Jacques seat himself on 17 roots of trees, and 25 grey stones,’ so no one knows what his reaction might have been to Sand’s drastic revision of Celia’s story.40
Over a century later, Maggie Smith made an indelible impression as Celia to Barbara Jefford’s Rosalind at the Old Vic. Her biographer, Michael Coveney, said, ‘Her extraordinary inflections have always both highlighted unexpected phrases and declared her own idiosyncrasy. Alec McCowen [who played Touchstone] can still hear today the sonic imprint Maggie left on Celia in phrases such as ‘lame me with reason’ (‘lame’ given syllabic extension and a mocking viperish tincture); ‘like a dropped acorn’, said of Orlando found lolling under a tree; ‘I like this place and willingly would waste my time in it’ on arrival in Arden; and ‘Alas, poor shepherd’, a poignantly heartfelt ejaculation. McCowen, no technical slouch himself, says that this colouring of the words, the unexpected highlighting of phrases that normally pass unnoticed, put her, for him, in the same class as Edith Evans. “We knew she was a very special actress, even in that company; we were all pretty good. But to do this with Celia! Barbara Jefford was a bloody good Rosalind, but she must have been quite surprised.’”41
Victorian writer, Mary Cowden Clarke, captured what she called Celia’s ‘perfection of feminine attachment’ in her Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines.42 In this creative experiment, Cowden Clarke invented prequels or backstories for some of Shakespeare’s female characters. Her Celia and Rosalind were ‘sisters in heart...kindred in spirit...in mind, in soul.’ Celia avows to Rosalind, ‘I shall never love lover with any love half so worth having, as that with which I love thee, coz.’ Even allowing for the heightened register that Victorian women frequently used to express affection for one another, this is an impassioned declaration. How erotically entangled Celia’s relationship with Rosalind must have seemed when it was first played by males in 1599, two boy actors dressed as girls, imagining adolescent female friendships. Men have played Celia in all-male modern productions, Charles Kay to Ronald Pickup’s Rosalind in 1967, and Simon Coates to Adrian Lester’s Rosalind in 1991, a fascinating complication to the intensity of first love between women.
Rosalind and Celia
by John Everett Millais, 1867
* Boastful – from Thraso the bragging soldier in a comedy by the Roman playwright Terence.