In “Where is Love’s Labor’s Lost?” I tried to show that Love’s Labor’s Lost ends with the unsuccessful lovers being expelled from Eden. Many people have pointed out that the setting of As You Like It resembles Eden.^[15] “Here feel we not the penalty of Adam,” notes Duke Senior (II.1.5). Rosalind, on her arrival, strides downstage, looks around and announces “Well, this is the Forest of Arden” which sounds suspiciously like “Garden of Eden” (II.4.10). Touchstone alludes to the tree we were supposed to avoid, and didn’t: “Truly the tree yields bad fruit” (III.2.114). Arden/Eden has the snake that caused us so much trouble, here threatening the sleeping Oliver, as he himself describes:

So in Love’s Labor’s Lost the characters were banished from Eden, and in As You Like It the characters get banished back into Eden.

To establish firmly that his story reverses the first part of the Bible, Shakespeare began the play with a Cain-and-Abel conflict between Orlando and Oliver. Orlando attempts to strangle his brother and is prevented by, of all people, Adam.

“If this is Eden, where are Adam and Eve?” The obvious candidates are Rosalind and Orlando. But just as Shakespeare reversed our banishment from the garden and made Cain fail to kill Abel, so Rosalind is the opposite of a temptress. Orlando is already in love with her, and she tries mightily to dissuade him out of his passion by predicting that her behavior after marriage will be egregious.

And besides her emphatic “No, no, Orlando,” in this short scene Rosalind says, “never” (three times), “nay” (three times) “not” (four times) and “no” twice more. She’s not making things easy for Orlando’s wooing.