The Different Varieties of Love

"There are three unlike affairs in As You Like It. But they all reveal the complex potentialities of love". Elaborate this statement with appropriate reference to the text.

Or

Discuss and illustrate the different varieties of love in As You Like It.

Or

Write a note on the contrasted lovers in As You Like It.

Introduction: As You Like It owes its charm and beauty to the flavor love that pervades the plot. The drama maintains a number of love anisodes, which as a matter of fact spring from the main fountain- love between Orlando and Rosalind, But there is another touch of love in the play, which distinguishes it from most of the Shakespearean comedies. It is the innocent yet sincere and penetrating love between the two cousins Rosalind and Celia

 

Presentation of Love on the Stage: The presentation of love on the stage is fraught with grave dangers even when attempted by a great artist; for it has a natural tendency towards degenerating into the ridiculous. Lyric poetry remained the appropriate domain for love's expression in literature. It was only post-Renaissance dramatists who made a bold experiment in introducing love as an absorbing theme in drama. In the Elizabethan age romantic love often became the main ingredient of novels and dramas. To Elizabethan people to live was to love, and to love was to love romantically. That was for them a fact of experience". It was left to Shakespeare and his great contemporaries to achieve a mystical alliance between comedy and romance, and to elevate comedy from the region of the farcical and the ludicrous to the realm of the poetic and the romantic. A note of high seriousness often characterized a comedy of love. As You Like It is replete with different portrayals of love.

 

True Love between Orlando and Rosalind: True love pervades the souls of Orlando and Rosalind. The very presence of Rosalind radiates soul-enkindling light, and its interpenetrating rays have thrilled the encircling gloom of Orlando's heart. He is at once lifted out of the slough of despondency and despair, for him life now receives a new significance. Romantic love-love at first sight-has stirred the deepest depths of his heart which naturally seeks consolation in offerings of amatory verse dedicated to the adoration of the 'lost beloved. The heroine gifted with an unusually rich fund of common sense, fully alive to the silly excesses committed by youthful lovers, cautioned by Celia and warned by Touchstone, is exceptionally competent to come to her lover's rescue. In asking Orlando to woo her in masquerade, when she remains unrecognized, Rosalind hits upon a very novel method of indirectly teaching her lover proper restraint in the art of wooing, not without now and then subtly fanning its consuming flame, and at the same time herself drinking the delicious cup overflowing with his passionate outpourings of love. We are greatly amused when she assumes, when herself madly in love, the lofty philosophical pose of a very wise and experienced man and thus speaks to Orlando: "Love is merely a madness; and I tell you deserves well a dark house and a whip as mad men do, and the reason why they are not so punished and cured is that the lunacy i so ordinary that the whippers are in love too." (IIL ii) This camouflaged courtship is unique experience for both the lovers: and it is the most entertaining form of stage representation of love in literature, probably unsurpassed in its appeal at once to the comic instinct of every spectator due to the inherent comicality of the situation so deftly created and also the romantic sense of poetry lovers who will easily discover the intense sincerity of both concealed underneath the superficial levity of make believe,

 

The Love between Rosalind and Orland versus that between Celia and Oliver: The love of Orlando and Rosalind is not as sudden as that of Oliver and Celia, and there is some difference between the two pairs of lovers. Although the love-story of Rosalind and Orlando begins at Court, it is in the forest that Rosalind wooed. There under pretence of curing Orlando's malady by counsel she has delightful proofs of the fervency of his love without betraying her own. But the suddenness in the case Celia and Oliver very conspicuous. Celia has all along affected an airy cynicism about the true that kid love that has sprung up in her cousin's heart at first sight; with an exquisite irony of unconsciousness both Rosalind and Orlando wonder at the love that Celia and Oliver all of a sudden feel for each other No sooner had Celia and Oliver seen one another than they fell in love, there is no opportunity of wooing-in earnest or in jest. Another point that some critics have brought out is that Shakespeare has not given enough time to lend conviction to the fact that Celia could have fallen in love with Oliver who is not quite a likable character, though reformed.

 

Rosalind's description of this love is indicative of its humorous side; "no sooner lookd'd but they lov'd : no sooner lov'd but they sigh'd : they are in the very wrath of love, and they will be together: clubs cannot part them " This love affair does not have the imaginative, fanciful, poetical quality of the Rosalind-Orlando affairs. Nor does this love possess that wit, humour, gaiety which marks the love of the other pair. The suddenness and abruptness of love between Celia and Oliver is somewhat surprising. Shakespeare seems to have been in a hurry to unite these two characters at the cost of realism.

 

The Love between Silvius and Phebe serves as a foil to love between Rosalind and Orlando. The love between Rosalind and Orlando ie deep and genuine, while that of Silvius and Phebe is shallow and unreal. The love between Posalind and Orlando is loveat first sight; it is mutual, it is reciprocated in every possible manner, whereas the love between Silvius and Phebe is one sided. It is no love at all. Silvius is mad in his love for Phebe, but Phebe scorns him, and when she marries him, she does so almost under compulsion, there being practically no other alternative.

 

Mrs. Jameson points out that a very amusing effect is produced by the contrast between the frank and free behaviour of Rosalind in disguise and the scornful airs of a real shepherdess. Phebe represents the typical coquette of pastoral convention and Silvius is the hopeless swain Their love is to be contrasted with the frank, healthy and natural lovemaking of Rosalind and Orlando, and with the rustic courtship of Audrey and Touchstone. Some critics look upon this love as a parody (or a comic representation of the love convention of pastoral poetry.

 

The Love of Touchstone and Audrey: The union of Touchstone and Audrey represents the most prosaic kind of love. Audrey is ugly. But he does not mind that. In her very presence he refers to her as a poor virgin, an ill-favoured thing." He says that he is going to take a woman whom no other man will. He sees no harm in marriage, even though he knows that wives are often faithless. He proposes to leave her when he is tired of her. As for Audrey, she knows she is not fair but she has the opportunity to marry a social superior. By this marriage. "Touchstone lets in the East Wind of realism into the artificial palm-house of Arden."

 

Significance of Phrase "Whoever Loved that not at First Sight": If we consult the evidence of the play it will be abundantly clear that Love-at-first-sight is the main theme of the comedy of As You Like It All the lovers in this play, courtiers as well as rustics, follow this kind of love. Rosalind and Orlando fall in love with each other the moment they see each other, and the rest of the lovers following the same course.

 

Such a conception of love is romantic, and Shakespeare has employed unhesitatingly for no less than four pairs of lovers, two from the higher and two from the lower class of society, follow such a mode of romantic love. Whether one agrees or not with such a mode of love one cannot but observe that in this play this motive of love eventuates in the happiness of all the lovers.

 

Conclusion: The end of the play is a triumphant celebration of ve's order. Music sung, Hymen appears mysteriously, and the eight lovers are joined in marriage and all make merry. Love's ideal has been achieved.