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.