ABSTRACT
As You Like It, by its contrasts, illuminates Shakespeare’s use of the rhetoric of consciousness. Here we learn about Rosalind and the other characters not through self-revelation in soliloquy, the basic strategy of the New Comic model, but through their interaction with other characters and the contrasting of one attitude with another, of Touchstone’s physicality with Silvius’ pastoral laments, for example. In fact, the play has only one soliloquy, which closes the first act, in which Oliver expresses his hatred of Orlando. Though Shakespeare has Rosalind use asides to juxtapose her true feelings with her assumed pose as critic of love, these remarks are always addressed to another character, usually Celia. And because Rosalind’s disguise is self-consciously assumed, it does not lead to the kind of confusion and suffering experienced by the Antipholi in Errors, or by Bottom and the lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
