ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Celia's remarkable role in the play, analyzing how Shakespeare experiments with her desires for agency, invisibility, and estrangement throughout As You Like It. It investigates her brief courtship with Oliver, which follows directly upon Oliver's encounter with the lioness and snake. The chapter considers some analogues to Celia offered in Shakespeare's sonnets and in his later plays, with specific interest in what such connections tells about Oliver and Rosalind. Oliver and Celia's courtship and marriage are a clear rebuke to the machinery Shakespeare has designed in Arden to put fathers and daughters and lovers together. John Milton was no doubt attuned to Shakespeare's Edenic coupling of greenery with danger and also to Shakespeare's representations of a divided female agency in As You Like It, given the way a fugitive Eve initially tries to elude the watch of her God and her husband before finally being restored to Adam's side.
