The Bicycle Suit
(Photo-engraving of ink drawing)
Athenæum Club Library, London

For the Victorians, one of the guilty pleasures of viewing As You Like It was that you got to see the legs of the actress playing Rosalind, if she was wearing, as the text specifies, doublet and hose. In 1885, a commentator wrote, "It was the prospect of seeing the new Rosalind’s nether limbs that was responsible for the excited rush for seats on the part of the public." Above are the traditionally dressed Victorian maiden (right, well swathed), and her friend showing a lot of calf in her "bicycle suit." However… the Victorian Rosalind showed off not only calves, but thighs!

Anybody reading this probably knows that Love’s Labor’s Won is included in Meres’ 1598 list of Shakespeare’s plays in his book Palladis Tamia (cited in the previous article, “Where is Love’s Labor’s Lost?”) — and likewise knows that no copy of a play by that name has been found. Shakespeare scholars have suggested that Love’s Labor’s Won survives under a different name, and among those that have been proposed as the rewritten play are Much Ado About Nothing, All’s Well That Ends Well, Twelfth Night, The Taming of the Shrew, Troilus and Cressida (!), Love’s Labor’s Lost^[1] and, bringing up the rear, As You Like It.^[2]

Very possibly some of the unhappy endings in Love’s Labor’s Lost might be reversed in a rewritten Love’s Labor’s Won, and some recognizable features of the former play might have survived in the latter. None of the plays in the list above displays a happy reversal of unhappy things that happen in Love’s Labor’s Lost or even any of the same elements — except one. That one (I think) is As You Like It, which happens also to be Glynne Wickham’s choice.^[3] So however deluded I may be, at least I am in the company of somebody who has real credentials. Wickham wrote his article after directing a production of As You Like It, and made the following observations about that play and Love’s Labor’s Lost:

1. Both plays have woodland settings.
2. Both plays involve sonnets, although As You Like It has only one sonnet fragment which Orlando hangs on a tree.^[4] Love’s Labor’s Lost has four examples of the sonnet form, three of which are badly mangled, because one of the theses of that play is that human beings make mistakes. See 4 on p. 2.
3. Both plays have four sets of lovers. In As You Like It they are: Rosalind/Orlando, Celia/Oliver, Phebe/Silvius and Touchstone/Audrey. In Love’s Labor’s Lost they are: Princess/King, Rosaline/Berowne, Katharine/Dumain and Maria/Longaville. (Love’s Labor’s Lost also has a fifth pair, Armado/Jaquenetta, to be discussed.)
4. In Love’s Labor’s Lost the four sets of lovers fail to marry, and in As You Like It all the couples get married, so their love-labors are definitely won.

Wickham might have added, but didn’t, that both plays take place in France, Love’s Labor’s Lost in Arden (Ardennes) Forest, As You Like It in Navarre which became part of France in 1589.^[5]

Wickham is a scholar, and I am a snake-oil salesman, so naturally we part company on at least one point. Wickham maintains that there is no Jaquenetta/Armado counterpoint in As You Like It because the boy who had played Jaquenetta had grown up and Shakespeare couldn’t find a replacement. But I have my own snake’s reason that the Jaquenetta character doesn’t have a counterpart in Love’s Labor’s Won. Read on —^[6]

In “Where is Love’s Labor’s Lost?” I tried to prepare for this discussion by pointing out some features of Love’s Labor’s Lost:

1. In the story the Princess of France, accompanied by Rosaline and two other ladies, calls on the King of Navarre and his three lords to settle their dispute about ownership of Aquitaine. Berowne cites the impending visit as a reason that the edict against speaking to women cannot be obeyed:

   BEROWNE (reads) “Item: If any man be seen to talk with a woman within the term of three years, he shall endure such public shame as the rest of the court can possibly devise.” This article, my liege, yourself must break; For well you know here comes in embassy The French king’s daughter, with yourself to speak — A mild of grace and complete majesty — About surrender up of Aquitaine . . . (I.1.128-35)

2. The setting of the play is French Navarre, but the setting shares characteristics with the Garden of Eden. There are many references to apples. Holofernes mentions two apples in describing the shooting of a deer by the Princess:

   HOLOFERNES The deer was, as you know, sanguis, in blood; ripe as the pomewater, who now hangeth like a jewel in the ear of caelo, the sky, the welkin, the heaven; and anon falleth like a crab on the face of terra, the soil, the land, the earth. (IV.2.3-6)

   Crab is an apple we will hear of again in the song (“roasted crabs”) and pomewater is an obsolete word for an apple, according to the OED. Costard’s name means a kind of apple. Since Berowne has to be somewhere high up to spy on the other lords, why should he not be in a tree, and an apple tree at that? Now that we have an apple tree as part of the set, it becomes possible for Jaquenetta to pick an apple from this chimerical tree and give it to Armado in their only scene together, thereby reenacting that disastrous transaction in the Bible.

3. The time scheme of the play is impossible. For the Princess, the play takes up two days, but during the same time, Jaquenetta becomes two months pregnant. Presumably time meant nothing to us in Eden.

4. The lords woo the ladies by writing for them sonnets, three of which are obviously flawed. Berowne’s sonnet is in alexandrines, not iambic pentameter, and the last line can’t be made to scan, even in alexandrines (although a lot of ingenuity has been expended in attempts): “That sings heaven’s praise with such an earthly tongue” (IV.2.114)^[7]

   The King’s sonnet has not one but two concluding couplets:

   But do not love thyself; then thou wilt keep My tears for glasses, and still make me weep. O queen of queens! how far dost thou excel No thought can think nor tongue of mortal tell. (IV.3.36-9)

   Dumain’s poem has nothing in common with a sonnet and might be described uncharitably as doggerel.

5. At the end of the play four men propose to four women for marriage and are refused. Each woman sends her suitor away for a year and imposes on him a task, and perhaps gives her lord a glove as a token. It is hard to imagine any other reason for Shakespeare to specify that Rosaline be wearing gloves in the last scene:

   BEROWNE I do forswear them; and I here protest, By this white glove — how white the hand, God knows! — (V.2.410-11)

   Likewise Katharine is probably wearing the fancy gloves that Dumain sent her, and from these two instances we may surmise that gloves are the dress code for the final scene, since it would look very strange for the Princess to be barehanded when two of her ladies are gloved. It follows from this desperately twisted reasoning that the Princess (by now the Queen of France) has to remove a glove so that she and he can touch barehanded when she swears her oath to the King:

   PRINCESS Then, at the expiration of the year, Come, challenge me, challenge me by these deserts, And, by this virgin palm — now kissing thine — 798 I will be thine; and, till that instant, shut My woeful self up in a mournful house, 800 Raining the tears of lamentation For the remembrance of my father’s death. If this thou do deny, let our hands part, Neither intitled in the other’s heart. KING If this, or more than this, I would deny, 805 To flatter up these powers of mine with rest, The sudden hand of death close up mine eye! Hence hermit then, my heart is in thy breast. (V.2.796-808)

6. At the end of the play the season changes abruptly from spring to winter, as the song describes, moving suddenly from the depiction of spring “When daisies pied” to the chill of winter, “When icicles hang by the wall.” The four unhappy couples are sent away by Armado, brandishing the sword that he wore as Hector.

Rosalind, As You Like It, 1856
(Oil on panel, 91.5 x 70.5 cm)
BY Henry Nelson O’Neil

Shakespeare wrote both plays, Love’s Labor’s Lost and Love’s Labor’s Won, fairly early in his career, from internal evidence in the first play. In its first appearance I suggest (and others have, too) that Love’s Labor’s Won was a fairly predictable projector-run-backwards version of Love’s Labor’s Lost — the same characters met again but this time there was a happy ending. Sometime before 1599 Shakespeare rewrote both plays. Evidence that he rewrote Love’s Labor’s Lost is in the play itself — there are two different versions of several scenes.^[8] But Shakespeare rewrote Love’s Labor’s Won so completely that he decided to change the title, and with Professor Wickham, I suggest that the new title was As You Like It. Here goes:

In Love’s Labor’s Lost, the Princess and her court are on an embassy to discuss the ownership of Aquitaine. In As You Like It, nobody mentions Aquitaine, but Celia’s assumed name is “Aliena.” That Latin word means “foreign” or “out of place,” but it looks remarkably like the name for Eleanor of Aquitaine in Provençal: Aliénor^[9]

Eleanor’s court was, according to Denis de Rougemont, one of the places from where the cult of courtly love spread.^[10] One of the practices of the cultists was that the adored lady presented her knight a personal token, sometimes a scrap of her clothing, which the knight then carried with him into a tournament, or on a quest. The ladies in Love’s Labor’s Lost present their suitors with gloves. Rosalind in As You Like It takes a chain from her own neck and places it around Orlando’s:

We do not find out that it is a chain until Celia describes Orlando’s appearance in the forest:

De Rougemont describes how the knight carried “the veil or a fragment of the dress of his lady, and sometimes after the lists returned this to her stained with his blood.”^[11] This is very close to what happens when Oliver meets Celia and Rosalind as Orlando’s proxy:

The napkin is stained with Orlando’s blood, which he shed doing battle with a lioness. Lest we should think that his combat was due merely to Orlando’s fondness for battling lionesses and not part of his quest to earn the love of his lady, Oliver adds:

Touchstone the clown also has a mock-combat in which with windy threats he vanquishes his rival for Audrey’s hand, William:

To reinforce the theme of courtly love, Shakespeare gave some characters names of knights from the French epic The Song of Roland: As You Like It has Oliver (Roland’s companion); Sir Rowland (a variant of “Roland”); Orlando (the Italian version of Roland used in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and Robert Greene’s play of the same name); and Charles the great wrestler shares his name with Roland’s liege, Charlemagne.

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.

Wickham, maligned above, suggests that there is no couple in As You Like It that corresponds to the Armado/Jaquenetta pair in Love’s Labor’s Lost because the boy who had played Jaquenetta had grown too old. Such an explanation is perfectly possible — but Shakespeare had no need to resolve this fifth wooing in As You Like It, because it had already ended happily in Love’s Labor’s Lost.

I have put some of the possible correspondences and antitheses of As You Like It and Love’s Labor’s Lost into a beautiful table.

Besides, suppose we all were allowed to go back into the Garden of Eden — wouldn’t that be As You Like It?

I might write QED under my table, but in fact nobody needs to take my word for this, and practically nobody will. Partisans of Much Ado and other candidates will continue to shout and wave their partisans, and that, after all, is not different from what I have been doing, spouting my logics and waving my table. If we were to find a manuscript of a play called Love’s Labor’s Won, signed by Shakespeare, would it help resolve the quarrel? Of course not. Each scholar would ingeniously prove that the discovery enlarged and decorated the head of his or her own hobbyhorse, and Oxfordians would declare that it proves once and for all that the plays were written by Lord Vere.