As You Like It

Rosalind

Rosalind begins the play as the quick-tongued companion of her cousin Celia, trading wit in her usurping uncle's court until his suspicion drives her into exile. In the Forest of Arden she trades her gown for a man's coat, and the disguise becomes a laboratory: she can say what a woman cannot, test Orlando's love, and mock the very conventions of romance she is falling into. Her pleasure in play and her ache for her father pull against each other, and her voice—sharp, tender, restless—sets the whole comedy's temperature.

Celia

Celia is the daughter of Duke Frederick, which makes her Rosalind's cousin and, by the play's strange arithmetic, the one person whose loyalty cuts against her own father's interests. When Frederick banishes Rosalind, Celia refuses to be left behind, trading a palace for a forest and a name for a costume. Her devotion is the play's quiet counterweight to all the scheming around her: she is the witness who keeps Rosalind honest, the friend who laughs at her own father's cruelty, and the woman whose love story with Oliver arrives as a kind of afterthought—proof that in Arden even the practical can be surprised.

Orlando

Orlando opens the play pinned under his elder brother Oliver's cruelty—kept at home like a farm animal while his education and birthright are withheld. He answers with his body: he wrestles the duke's champion, wins, and falls instantly and speechlessly in love with Rosalind. When Oliver's malice turns murderous, Orlando flees to Arden, where he hangs love poems on trees and lets a boy named Ganymede lecture him on the art of wooing. His earnestness is the joke and the point: he is the play's proof that a good man can be taught.

Jaques

Jaques is the courtier who chose the forest but refuses to be cheered by it, preferring his own compounded sadness to anyone else's joy. He meets a fool in the woods and envies him; he watches a deer die and moralizes; he wants a motley coat so he can speak his mind with impunity. He is not a villain and not quite a friend—he is the play's running counter-argument, the voice that asks whether any of this pastoral happiness is real, and the character whose absence from the final dance is the sharpest thing about him.

Touchstone

Touchstone is the licensed fool whose job is to say what courtiers cannot, and he takes that license into the forest like a man carrying a weapon he intends to use. He falls for Audrey, a woman he describes in terms of meat and dishes, and his courtship is a parody of every romantic convention the play otherwise indulges. He matters because he keeps the comedy honest: while Orlando hangs sonnets on trees, Touchstone is negotiating a marriage under a bush with a hedge-priest, and his cynicism is not the opposite of love but one of its many dialects.

Phebe

Phebe is the beautiful, hard-hearted object of Silvius's devotion, and she treats his love as an inconvenience until she meets a sharper tongue in the forest. When Ganymede mocks her, she mistakes contempt for godhead and writes him a letter that Rosalind reads aloud with delight. Her sudden passion is both a joke about the arbitrariness of desire and a mirror held up to Orlando: she is what happens when love is refused, and her eventual surrender—reluctant, embarrassed, real—is one of the play's quieter satisfactions.