< previous page page_44 next page >

Page 44

Orlando:  Why now, as fast as she can marry us.

Rosalind:  Then you must say “I take thee Rosalind for wife.”

Orlando:  I take thee Rosalind for wife.

Rosalind:  I might ask you for your commission; but I do take thee Orlando for my husband. There’s a girl goes before the priest, and certainly a woman’s thought runs before her actions.

(4.1.120–33)

The extent to which the play may be said, in presenting this opposition, to favor troth-plight marriages to some degree is not entirely clear, but it seems to form part of an overarching recognition of the claims of “lore”over those of law discernible at large in the plays. Certainly, it prepares the ground for the final troth-plight ceremony performed by Hymen with which the play climaxes, and perhaps suggests a dimension, otherwise hidden, in the enigmatic lines with which Hymen seals the contract:

Here’s eight that must take hands

To join in Hymen’s bands,

If truth holds true contents.

(5.4.127–29)

My argument is a simple one. To accept the play’s bias against a codified, reified, and book-based “law” is at least to warm to its commitment—perhaps in the name of Shakespearean drama at large—to “lore,” orality, face-to-face communication and its attendant prolific ambiguity and fruitful shiftiness of meaning. This must then have a considerable, expanding effect on that last line. To discern ‘‘troth” already at work in “truth,” and to allow that the emphasis in “contents” may slide readily from the first to the second syllable, is to confront issues—albeit unresolvable—that may reasonably be thought to lie near to the heart of Arden.8 After all, As You Like It is a play in which all manner of preconceptions about the nature of love and marriage are subjected to close and often withering scrutiny. It would be surprising if the Hymen scene, in which troth-plighting becomes a source of genuine content, were not central to such concerns.

That such a reading “saves” —indeed, makes pivotal—a chunk of the play that the “New Shakespeare” edition of it would excise is of course no knock-down argument in its favor. It merely highlights the partiality inherent in all readings of all texts. But Q’s influential

< previous page page_44 next page >