As You Like It mocks traditional dramatizations of love, inspiring folly, servitude, and sorrow in its victims. Orlando’s bad, omnipresent poetry; Silvius’s slavish commitment to Phebe, a plain and unloving shepherdess; and Rosalind’s, Oliver’s, and Phebe’s speechless and instantaneous infatuations (they all fall in love at first sight) are all exaggerated instances of the dramatized representations of love that the play is mocking. At the end of the play, Rosalind serves as a fair judge of love, assessing the relationships of each character in the play and rationally determining who shall marry whom. The final scene is a grand wedding, with vows said between four couples (Rosalind and Orlando; Celia and Oliver; Touchstone and Aubrey; and Silvius and Phebe). The play thus concludes by celebrating a more reasonable, sustainable form of love, demonstrated in four instances of its most potent and permanent manifestation.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Romantic Love ThemeTracker
Romantic Love Quotes in As You Like It
What passion hangs these weights upon my tongue? I cannot speak to her, yet she urged conference.
Come, come, wrestle with thy affections.
O, thou didst then never love so heartily! If thou rememb’rest not the slightest folly that ever love did make thee run into, thou hast not loved.
We that are true lovers run into strange capers; but as all is mortal in nature, so is all nature in love mortal in folly.
Run, run, Orlando, carve on every tree the fair, the chaste, and unexpressive she.
O wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful, and yet again wonderful, and after that, out of all whooping!
Then there is no true lover in the forest, else sighing every minute and groaning every hour would detect the lazy foot of Time as well as a clock.
Love is merely a madness, and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do; and the reason why they are not so punished and cured is that the lunacy is so ordinary that the whippers are in love too. Yet I profess curing it by counsel.
O, for shame, for shame, lie not, to say mine eyes are murderers. Now show the wound mine eye hath made in thee.
Dead shepherd, now I find thy saw of might, “Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?”
Nay, you were better speak first, and when you were graveled for lack of matter, you might take occasion to kiss. Very good orators, when they are out, they will spit; and for lovers, lacking – God warn us! – matter, the cleanliest shift is to kiss.
Your brother and my sister no sooner met but they looked; no sooner looked but they loved; no sooner loved but they sighed; no sooner sighed but they asked one another the reason; no sooner knew the reason but they sought the remedy; and in these degrees have they made a pair of stairs to marriage.
[To Orlando] As you love Rosalind, meet. [To Silvius] As you love Phebe, meet. And as I love no woman, I’ll meet. So fare you well.
Peace ho! I bar confusion; ‘Tis I must make conclusion of these most strange events. Here’s eight that must take hands to join in Hymen’s bands, if truth holds true contents.
Play, music, and you brides and bridegrooms all, with measure heaped in joy, to th’measures fall.
