As You Like It is one of Shakespeare’s most romantic and amusing comedies. Having such unforgettable characters like Rosalind, Jacques, and Touchstone, the story trips along, carrying the reader, or watcher, for a pleasant ride. The witty banter amidst the characters only heightens its enjoyment. Following the interactions between the lovers Rosalind and Orlando and their various friends and relations, the reader vicariously experiences all their frustrations, heart-aches, and merriment. By the end, everyone is happy and no one is left alone.
While masquerading as the young man Ganymede, Rosalind meets the love-sick Orlando, who tells her his woes of unspoken love. In response, she says, “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 he lunacy is so ordinary that the whippers are in love too. Yet I profess curing it by counsel,” (407-412). She, in guise of a “saucy youth,” makes fun of the very man she loves and the malady from which they both suffer. By her own definition, they ought both to be whipped out of their lunacy.
She agrees with Plato in her categorization of love as madness yet not to the extent that it is divine. Rather, she places it on the same level as other madnesses, curable by human means and ought to be cured at that. On that point, I believe that Plato would fight with her. Plato would say that love is not “merely a madness,” something to be cured, but something to be nurtured and allowed. And, if it can be rid of, it could not be done by human means such as counsel, as Rosalind says. Granted, she is being a little ridiculous, but the ideas still remains, the idea that love is a madness to be cured by human means. Can it really? And should it?
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