Rosalynde | Page 7

greater significance than the changes in the names of the characters are the additions and changes in the list of dramatis personae. Nine characters are added outright--Dennis, Le Beau, Amiens, the First Lord, Sir Oliver Martext, William, Audrey, Touchstone, and Jaques. The latter is most noteworthy. Hazlitt calls him the only purely contemplative character Shakespeare ever drew. From the beginning to the end of the play he does absolutely nothing except to think and moralize. Another critic has said, "Shakespeare designed Jaques to be a maker of fine sentiments, a dresser forth in sweet language of the ordinary commonplaces...." It has been suggested,[1] not without some show of reason, that Shakespeare in adapting Lodge's romance for the stage purposely included in the list of dramatis personae a character bearing a strong resemblance to Euphues, the pretended author of the romance. "Like Euphues, Jaques has made false steps in youth, which have somewhat darkened his views of life; like Euphues, he conceals under a veil of sententious satire a real goodness of heart, shown in his action toward Audrey and Touchstone. A traveler, like Euphues, he has a melancholy of his own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and is prepared, like his prototype, to lecture his contemporaries on every theme."
[Footnote 1: Seccombe and Allen, "The Age of Shakespeare," Vol. I, p. 119.]
Scarcely less significant are the changes that Shakespeare made in the characteristics of the dramatis personae. The motive of the elder brother in mistreating the younger he makes envy, not avarice as in the romance, a substitution due to his desire to unify the action by drawing a parallel between the brothers and the dukes. The superiority of Shakespeare's Rosalind to Lodge's delineation of the character has, perhaps, been slightly overestimated. To describe Lodge's Rosalynde as "a colorless being, incapable of entering into the spirit of her part"[1] is really too severe a condemnation. Of course Lodge's heroine does lack the exquisite charm of saucy playfulness coupled with gentle womanliness that makes Shakespeare's Rosalind perhaps the most popular heroine of English comedy. Yet Lodge furnished to Shakespeare far more than a name for his heroine. In the dialogue between Ganymede (Rosalynde) and Aliena there is a good deal of lively banter that must have furnished more than a suggestion for the teasing playfulness of Rosalind in the play. Such, for example, is the conversation between the two girls upon finding a love poem "carved on a pine tree."[2] As in the drama, Rosalynde's wit is always sharpened by the presence of her lover. Often her tone of raillery is noticeably similar to that of Shakespeare's heroine.[3]
[Footnote 1: W.G. Stone, Transactions of the New Shakspere Society, 1880-1886, pp. 277-293.]
[Footnote 2: P. 29. Compare the speech of Ganymede (Rosalynde) with Rosalind's speech in "As You Like It," III, ii, 367-381.]
[Footnote 3: Compare "Rosalynde," pp. 63-64, with "As You Like It," IV, i, 80-93.]
Upon a careful study of "Rosalynde" one cannot avoid the conviction that in selecting it as the basis for "As You Like It" Shakespeare displayed a sound judgment. Not only is it a good story of its kind, but it lends itself readily to dramatic adaptation. In adapting it Shakespeare made of it something quite different and incalculably more valuable than the romance. Yet "Rosalynde" is still in its way charming, and an appreciation of its charm may, instead of lessening our reverence for Shakespeare's genius, really increase it by leading us to see as he did the freshness and beauty as well as the dramatic possibilities of the story.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ANGLIA. Vol. X, pp. 235-289.
BULLEN. Lyrics from the Dramatists of the Elizabethan Age, London, 1901.
CHAMBERS. English Pastorals, London, 1906.
DUNLOP. History of Prose Fiction (revised edition), London and New York, 1888.
GOSSE. "Seventeenth-Century Studies" (new edition), London, 1895.
GREG. Lodge's "Rosalynde," being the Original of Shakespeare's "As You Like It," London, 1907.
JUSSERAND. The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare, London and New York, 1890.
LANG. Idylls of Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus (Golden Treasury Series), London, 1901.
LODGE. Reprint of Complete Works (excepting the translations of Seneca, Josephus, and Du Bartas), Glasgow, 1875-1882.
MARKS. English Pastoral Drama, London, 1908.
SAINTSBURY. Elizabethan Literature, London and New York, 1902.
WARREN. A History of the Novel, previous to the Seventeenth Century, New York, 1895.
THE PUBLISHED WORKS OF THOMAS LODGE ARRANGED IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER[1]
[Footnote 1: The titles are given in abbreviated form.]
1580 (?) Defence of Plays
1584 An Alarum against Usurers
1589 Scillaes Metamorphysis (reprinted with a new title-page in 1610
as A most pleasant Historie of Glaucus and Scilla)
1590 Rosalynde
1591 Robert, Second Duke of Normandy
1591 Catharos
1592 Euphues Shadow
1593 Phillis
1593 William Longbeard
1594 The Wounds of Civill War
1594 A Looking Glass for London (in collaboration with Greene)
1595 A Fig for Momus
1596 The Divel coniured
1596 A Margarite of America
1596 Wits miserie
1596 Prosopopeia
1602 Paradoxes
1602 Works of Josephus
1603 A Treatise of the Plague
1614 The Workes of Seneca
1625