Emily AtkinsonProfessor Oram ENG 256Paper 29 November 2011

Courtly Masks

Both Rosalind in As You Like It and Hal in Henry IV, Part I

manipulate their environments to a remarkable degree,

coaxing their desired reactions from their fellows, gleaning

information by methods slightly on the wrong side of sneaky,

and, in the end, managing to get quite a few people to do

exactly what they want, with life-altering consequences,

albeit of varying degrees. However, Rosalind’s control,

although it does leave the forest in the form of the

marriages she arranges, is primarily confined to the play-

space of the Forest of Arden. In keeping with its location,

it is a playful control that hurts no one and is exercised

largely in fun, its only serious purpose being to test

whether or not Orlando will really make a good lover and

husband. Hal’s control, on the other hand, is not as

complete as Rosalind’s, despite spanning the court, the

battlefield, and the world of the tavern. Falstaff’s self-

deprecation and humorous awareness takes some of the wind

from Hal’s plot to humiliate him, and Hal can never explain

the full glory of his plan to gain legitimacy through false

rehabilitation to his father, and so takes chastisement from

the court as well. Although both use their plans to remove

themselves from their respective play-worlds of forest and

tavern and take on the inevitable responsibilities of their

adult lives, Rosalind’s power in the forest marks the height

of her control, and she exercises it in order to fulfill

herself through unity in her personal relationships and

others’, eventually getting everything she wants, while Hal,

though he will become king and gain political power, does so

through a plan that distances him first from his father and

then from Falstaff, and creates a fractured identity that

prevents him from fully inhabiting either the court or the

tavern world, while by the end of the play, Rosalind has

been successful in the forest and will be so when she

returns to the outside world.

When Rosalind first appears, she has very little

control over anything, taking solace only in her witty

dialogues with Celia and Touchstone. She is at court at her

uncle’s pleasure, and he is a man who has just ousted his

older brother from the throne by force, and who clearly does

not trust her. Her lack of control is emphasized by her

dissatisfaction with her own circumstances and inability to

alter them—first, in conversation with Celia:

Dear Celia, I show more mirth than I am mistress of, and would you yet I were merrier? Unless you could teach me to forget a banished father, you must not learn me how to remember any extraordinary pleasure. (I.2.2-6),

and again, when she almost throws herself at Orlando: “He

calls us back. My pride fell with my fortunes./I’ll ask him

what he would” (I.2.252-3), but the primary display of

Rosalind’s impotence in Duke Frederick’s court comes when

the Duke does, in fact, banish her. Of course, it is through

this most compelling demonstration of Rosalind’s

powerlessness that she is finally able to change her

situation and take control, which she does as soon as she

and Celia decide to run away to the forest. Thus, Rosalind’s

control develops out of an absence of power. Unlike the Duke

and Oliver, who use their power to transform even instances

of supposed play, like the wrestling match, into

opportunities for manipulation, deceit, and above all,

division, Rosalind uses her power in the forest to unify

those around her the forest, primarily through genuine play.

This is especially notable in the marriages she brings to

fruition, but she also unifies herself and her father, while

the forest itself brings together Orlando and Oliver, and

allows for a resolution of the conflict between Dukes Senior

and Frederick.

Though her control in the forest is absolute and her

playful actions well-thought-out, there is a sense that

Rosalind is not certain of the outcome she intends when she

first enacts her plan. Had Orlando failed to satisfy the

tests she gives him while playing Ganymede, their marriage

would not have taken place. For Rosalind, the plan itself is

an end, if she has fun while executing it; her plans are

play, and have a value in themselves, separate from what

results they yield.

As it happens, Rosalind’s plan succeeds completely,

ending in the marriages of all the nascent couples in the

play and her reunion with her father; however, her victory

is not a total one. The marriages mean, as Hymen’s song

implies, that the couples, or at least Rosalind, Orlando,

Celia, and Oliver, will be returning to the outer world, to

courts and town, and so Rosalind will lose the power she

wielded in the forest-world, and the group will have to put

aside the play in which they engaged in the forest and move

completely into adult reality. This movement is presaged by

the shifting feelings of Orlando, Rosalind, and Celia toward

a discomfort or dissatisfaction with the play-world as the

end of the play draws ever nearer. When Orlando responds to

Rosalind-Ganymede’s suggestion that they continue to playact

as lovers the next day with the remark, “I can no longer

live by thinking” (5.2.53), he sets firmly into motion a

chain of events that began with his and Ganymede’s mock

marriage and became inevitable when Rosalind broke character

upon hearing of Orlando’s wound. Rosalind, recognizing the

forces gathering to push the lovers forward, tells him that

she will summon herself in her own form by benign magic,

thus maintaining the power and whimsy she commands in the

forest, but doing so in order to effectually end the game.

The play of Rosalind’s plot ends in the establishment

of an order she defines; everyone marries neatly and dances

together in a perfect celebration of the intersection of

order and play: “Then is there mirth in heaven/When earthly

things made even/Atone together” (V.4.112-4). The couples

marrying are made even; their matches express a harmonious

order. As Hymen emphasizes, these marriages between young,

happy couples will be fruitful; beauty and happiness

dominate their wedding; no hint of darkness looms, though

society and order make their presence known: “Wedding is

great Juno’s crown,/O blessed bond of board and bed./’Tis

Hymen peoples every town.” (V.4.146-8). Music, a joyous

expression of freedom, after all requires harmony, and some

order within it.

Although the game and the time in the forest must end,

Rosalind and the others leave the forest to return to a

court that will be led Duke Senior and his all-encompassing,

playful approach to ruling. This approach, like the dance

that ends the play, combines the playfulness of the forest

world with a necessary degree of government. At the feast

that Orlando interrupts, Duke Senior is clearly in charge,

and rules by a coherent, civilized, set of ideas. Duke

Senior’s command and the clarity of his values are

emphasized when he asks Orlando, “Art thou thus boldened,

man, by thy distress,/Or else a rude despiser of good

manners,/That in civility thou seem’st so empty?” (2.7.96-

8). He immediately establishes his authority with Orlando,

who becomes embarrassed. Duke Senior welcomes Orland to sit

and, with a word, stops the rest of his men from partaking

until Orlando has retrieved Adam, demonstrating the strength

of his position as host and ruler, apparent to both those

who serve him and to strangers. These qualities ensure that

the court to which Rosalind, Orlando, Celia, Oliver, and

Duke Senior must return will be a safe place, which will

allow proper play. There is a sense that the play cannot be

as free as that within the forest, and that certainly the

married couples must now adhere to their given names and

genders, but certainly there will be much more and better

play than at the courts of Duke Frederick, Henry IV, or even

Hal, whose court will leave no room for Falstaff.

Hal, unlike Rosalind, always plans for a purpose, with

a definite outcome to achieve. He is already in the process

of executing his plot to appear first wicked, then

rehabilitated, in order to increase the legitimacy of his

and his father’s claims to the throne, when he first appears

in the second scene of Henry IV, and he outlines it in detail

before leaving the stage:

Yet herein will I imitate the sun, Who doth permit the base contagious cloudsTo smother up his beauty from the world,That, when he please again to be himself,Being wanted, he may be more wondered atBy breaking through the foul and ugly mistsOf vapors that did seem to strangle him. If all the year were playing holidays, To sport would be as tedious as to work;But when they seldom come, they wished-for come,And nothing pleaseth but rare accidents. So, when this loose behavior I throw offAnd pay the debt I never promised, By how much better than my word I am, By so much shall I falsify men’s hopes;And, like bright metal on a sullen ground, My reformation, glitt’ring o’er my fault, Shall show more goodly and attract more eyesThan that which hath no foil to set if off. I’ll so offend to make offense a skill,

Redeeming time when men least think I will. (I.2.190-210).

Although half the action of this plot occurs within the

play-world of the tavern, it is not play, because it is

ultimately concerned with the world of the court. In fact,

even while he inhabits the world of the tavern, Hal never

gives himself completely over to play, because he has this

plan in mind; he only inhabits the play-world as part of

achieving his ends in the court world. Hal’s plot contained

within the play-world of the tavern has an edge of meanness

in its execution; Hal uses the minutest of facts to deflate

Falstaff’s tale after the fact, before it has even become

entirely absurd—“Why, how couldst thou know these men

in/Kendal green when it was so dark thou couldst not see/

thy hand?” (II.4.222-4)—which does not allow him to

participate in the verbal play of the tavern to the degree

that he does in his first scene there, and demonstrates a

legalistic mindset which gives the wordplay of the tavern

scenes to a slightly nasty edge and blends it with Hal’s

inescapable political destiny—so inescapable that in his

mouth, games gain the taint of law and politics. When the

action of Hal’s main plot moves to the court, there is no

verbal play. For quite a while, Hal is in fact unable to get

so much as a word in edgewise with his real father, in

marked contrast to the mock dialogues he engages in earlier

with Falstaff, wherein verbal play abounds. In the tavern,

as in the Forest of Arden, there is a degree to which roles

and identities are fluid, allowing Falstaff to play the king

and then Hal to switch roles and imaginatively become his

father. Of course, in doing so, Hal ends the fun with a note

of seriousness about his rejection of Falstaff and the play-

world of the tavern. The real rejection of that world goes

hand-in-hand with the deadly serious plot to kill Hotspur

and so take on his honors in the eyes of the world that Hal

discusses in his conversation with the real Henry—a stark

contrast, and yet the plan requiring Hotspur’s death reveals

the still-blurred nature of Hal’s role, when he sets off

toward the battlefield still unredeemed in the public’s eye.

Despite this blurring, Hal, like Rosalind, is largely

successful in his endeavors, although at greater cost; the

only person who does not get exactly what she wants at the

end of As You Like It is Phebe, and there is no reason to

believe that she is terribly displeased with the outcome. In

Hal’s case, Hotspur must die in order for Hal’s plan to

succeed, and many others also lose their lives. In Hal’s

defense, he prevents England from splitting apart and

descending into chaos. Eventually, though, not only will he

have to leave the tavern world, but he must completely

repudiate both it and Falstaff. Though Hal remained a prince

in the tavern, and even his final victory over Hotspur is

interrupted by Falstaff’s comic resurrection and bombastic

insistence on claiming Hotspur’s death as his own doing, the

presence of the tavern-world feels wrong on the battlefield,

and there is no room for it at all in the court world, and

no sense that Hal is willing to consider making room. Unlike

Rosalind, who brings people and ideas together, Hal works in

extremes; that is the nature of his plot. For him to

glitter, the ground he lies on must be “sullen” (I.2.205).

His redemption functions properly only if the dissipation of

the tavern world contrasts strongly with his rehabilitated

self, and so moderation between the two poles of court and

tavern can never come into play for Hal, while the joy and

order combined in harmony complete Rosalind’s masterpiece.

The tavern opposes Henry’s court more strongly than the

forest does Duke Frederick’s, though the values associated

with the contrasts are less starkly defined. The tavern

embodies pure anarchy and dissolution, while the forest

allows the order imposed by Duke Senior and Rosalind to find

purchase, and Rosalind herself limits how far she will take

her game. Hal’s central plot draws on serious political

consideration, not spontaneity, amusement, and love, as

Rosalind’s does; he knows it is never a game, but a matter

of kings and successions. Even in the tavern, Hal’s position

and future carry with them a degree of sobriety that gives

even friendship an edge; Falstaff asks him to make anarchy

policy while Henry demands that he behave constantly as a

dutiful prince. Though it occurs in the play-world, Hal’s

plot was not born in it and does not bear fruit in it.

Instead, Hal’s plot comes to fruition on the battlefield,

over the real corpse of Hotspur and the play-corpse of

Falstaff, a vivid demonstration of his as-yet incomplete

success, and of the total rejection of the play-world that

such a completion requires. Rosalind’s plot ends in song and

dance, an ordered expression of playful, unthreatening

chaos. Henry’s court constricts more than the tavern, but

since Hal does not fully play in the tavern, the effect is

not the same as the stunted play of Duke Frederick’s court

set against the freedom of the Forest of Arden. The

wickedness of Duke Frederick goes without question, but

Henry’s complex role as king demands deeper consideration,

consideration both he and Hal clearly give it. Hal has a

responsibility that Rosalind does not, and he recognizes it

as valid and inescapable, while she tries to reconcile her

love of Celia and her loyalty to her banished father and

attraction to the out-of-favor Orlando, refusing to choose

between the relationships she cherishes. Hal does choose. He

has, arguably, chosen from the moment he appears, already

fulfilling his role with a calculated political plot, one

which may save his life and his throne.

The stakes involved also inarguably influence the tenor

of Rosalind’s and Hal’s plots. No one confronts Rosalind

when she reveals herself; there is no anger at her deception

because it is only a game, and no injury was done anyone. By

contrast, two of Hal’s three plots involve very intense,

deliberate deceptions; his pretense at dissolution brings

grief first to Henry and, when it ceases, to Falstaff, and

his and Poins’ plot to steal from Falstaff is designed to

publicly humiliate their friend, if supposedly in good fun.

Hal’s third plan, of course, involves a good deal of death,

if no deception on his part. There is a meanness in his

plans that moves, even in the most trivial, out of the realm

of play and into a realm where the possibility of pain

exists. The only pain permitted entry to the world of the

forest is not inflicted by Rosalind but by a lion, and she

drops the game immediately in a show of real emotion and

fear, fainting when she hears of Orlando’s wound.

Hal’s remarks when he believes Falstaff to be dead

demonstrate less grief than Rosalind’s physical loss of

control:

I could have better spared a better man.O, I should have a heavy miss of theeIf I were much in love with vanity.Death hath not struck so fat a deer today,Though many dearer, in this bloody fray. (V.4.103-107).

Hal evinces regret here, but not remorse and not deep pain;

Hal returns to the verbal play of the tavern, but it rings

false, as out of place on the battlefield as Falstaff’s

flask. Hal can be a little callous, a trait completely

absent in Rosalind. Even when she verges on cruelty in her

interactions with Phebe: “For I must tell you friendly in

your ear,/Sell when you can, you are not for all markets”

(3.5.64-5), it comes from genuine emotion, not coldness, and

she soon returns to play: “I pray you, do not fall in love

with me,/For I am falser than vows made in wine” (3.5.77-8),

she says, in the guise of Ganymede. Her calculations always

remain within the realm of the game, and stem from a desire

to amuse herself and others, not to manipulate emotions to a

specific political end. In fact, she seems concerned that

Phebe, vain and even cruel though she may sometimes act,

might fall in love with the illusive Ganymede and end up

hurt, and hurting Silvius, where Hal cares less that his

friend has apparently died for his cause.

Finally, the differences come down to the fact that

Rosalind belongs to a comedy and Hal to a history. The

forest of Arden is not a tavern; there are no prostitutes in

it, and the deepest moral danger comes from Touchstone’s

seduction of Audrey and intent to annul their marriage after

having sex with her. No one owes anyone a debt, and no

physical danger truly threatens; only when the chance of

harm from the lion has already passed and the wicked duke

has magically converted does anyone catch the slightest

whiff of menace. Even in the court’s wrestling match, only

those who volunteer have a chance of being harmed—nothing

like Falstaff’s ragtag, desperate army, losing their lives

because he wanted the money better soldiers could pay him to

get out of fighting, comes anywhere close to existing.

Furthermore, Rosalind does not need to plot, and when she

faces the most serious problem in the play, her banishment,

she does not attempt to manipulate her way out of it. Celia

dismisses the banishment itself as a lark, and both young

women quickly succumb to the excitement of escaping the

court and themselves through flight and pretense. Like

Rosalind, Hal has fun when he pretends; Hal learns when he

pretends; Hal is quick and clever. But he, unlike her, is

constantly bound by his birth and by the knowledge that he

must succeed the throne and that his life will be in greater

danger if he does not make an unassailable claim on that

throne. Even in the tavern, Hal can never truly be other

than what he is. He may act like another self, but he is

always known as the Prince, and even his closest friendship,

with Falstaff, is tainted by that knowledge. There is no

magical forest to which Hal can run to escape himself. If he

must always be the Prince, he might as well be thought a

true prince and a good king, and if he must manipulate to

achieve his ends, then that is what he will do.

Both Rosalind and Hal finally use their control to

remove themselves voluntarily and irrevocably from the play-

worlds of the forest and tavern, and plant themselves in the

starker reality of adult responsibility, at court, in

marriage, and on the battlefield. Rosalind’s power reaches

its zenith at the wedding in the forest, while Hal has two

further plays dedicated to his rise to royal power—and yet

Rosalind gets everything she wants over the course of her

time in the forest, and makes no compromises. She is never

forced to choose between her various loyalties, and in fact

resolves her initial conflict between duty to Celia and

desire for her father’s presence and Orlando’s love by

bringing all three together. Hal, as prince, begins with a

plot that distances himself from his father and subjects and

can only bridge that distance with the alienation of his

closest friend. It has always been impossible for him to

have both, and yet, at this stage, it is equally impossible

for him to completely cast off either his court or his

tavern identity – thus he is Prince in a tavern and jokes

over what he thinks is a corpse. He is partial master of

both, but fully inhabits neither; he is not yet a king but

he can only stop being a prince in order to become one. Hal

does not choose between the play of the tavern and the rigor

of court; he chooses which path to take to become a

legitimate king. Rosalind’s identity, layered and concealed

throughout the play, finally becomes clear and reveals

itself as a marvelous whole at the close; Hal’s identity

splits more deeply but does not yet fully fracture. The

final image of As You Like It proper is the perfect mixture of

court and forest, order and chaos, of the wedding dance;

Rosalind’s merry epilogue reasserts the playful mood and

reminds us that she did indeed have things as she liked

them. Henry IV Part I, a play named for a king hardly seen and

suggesting fracture and apartness by its very nature, ends

with three decisive encounters: Hal’s victory over Hotspur

in battle; Falstaff’s claim to Hal that he killed Hotspur,

and Henry’s division of his forces to battle the remaining

enemies of his kingdom. The final words of the play suggest

division and unfinished business:

Rebellion in this land shall lose his sway,Meeting the check of such another day;And since this business so fair is done,Let us not leave till all our own be won. (V.5.41-44)

Hal has succeeded for the moment, but this is a partial

victory. Falstaff very nearly gets the last words himself as

he voices a potential redemption for himself, predicated on

his alleged killing of Hotspur. Such a pledge, resembling

Hal’s as it does, calls up the prince’s yet-unfinished plot

and would itself end the play on the question of how far Hal

has indeed come. It is preempted only by a scene the

supposedly more ordered court—but it is a scene of

reassurance plagued by queasy uncertainty. There is no

epilogue here. There can’t be, because neither the action

nor the plot is over in any real sense. Falstaff’s parody

brings the efficacy of Hal’s plot into question, even as his

claim on Hotspur’s death mars Hal’s, however slightly;

Henry’s troops face even greater threats, and though they

have triumphed, there is no feeling of joy. The close of the

play has even Falstaff, however jokingly, bringing up the

throwing off of pleasure and play, with not even a true

sense of security or order to fill the space it leaves. The

deeply unsettling emptiness, the feeling that neither play

nor order has been sustained, raises the question of whether

Hal’s plot is either victorious or worth the cost it

demands, even as the harmonious ending of As You Like It affirms

Rosalind’s brilliance and makes the total fulfillment she

has achieved an undeniable success.

Acknowledgments

I am deeply indebted to several individuals, without

whom this paper would not exist with anything near its

current degree of coherence, and to none more than Professor

Bill Oram, whose comments on the first draft of this paper

were instrumental in both elucidating its content and in

formulating its organizational flow. Lydia Lovett-Dietrich

and Isabelle Smith-Bove are responsible for somehow

magically reinstating my sanity after it was lost, first to

the allergic inflammation and consequent itching of my inner

ear and upper palate, and then to an amount of Benadryl that

should have rendered me unconscious but instead induced a

tendency to spin in circles and inappropriately blurt out

quotations from Hamlet. I am also indebted to them for even

trying to reinstate my sanity instead of running away or

pointing and laughing, and for preventing me from trying to

scratch my inner ear and upper palate with various

potentially harmful implements. I am further indebted to

Tanya of Smith College Health Services for telling me to

stop taking Benadryl and to take Sudafed instead, because

otherwise the craziness probably would not have abated at

all, and I might have made the itch-induced decision to

stick a fork in my ear, which would not have been beneficial

to the completion of this paper, or anything else. Kathryn

Blakeslee’s company was also very welcome in the end stages

of writing this paper, because without her I might have

simply fallen asleep on my keyboard and woken up to fifteen

pages of nonsense courtesy of my nose befriending the sdfg

keys—even if she did laugh unduly hard at my loopy assertion

that “I understand that bacon comes from cows!” in the

process of keeping me awake and functioning. Shockingly, I

am not indebted to any form of caffeine for this paper’s

existence, unless there is something people aren’t telling

me about the contents of Tropicana Orange Juice.