Comedies head towards marriage. This is a useful place to start thinking about the typical shape of comedies. Marriages conventionally represent the achievement of happiness and the promise of regeneration. So important to Shakespeare is the symbolic power of marriage that some end in more than one marriage. Both A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Twelfth Night end with three. In the final scene of As You Like It, Hymen, the god of marriage, takes the stage to preside over no fewer than four nuptial couplings and to celebrate ‘High wedlock’  in song. All the play’s couples have achieved happiness through misunderstanding.

 

 

 

 

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Orlando has wooed Rosalind in make believe, not grasping how his feelings were being reciprocated. Orlando’s brother Oliver, having repented his previous vindictiveness to Orlando, has been smitten by the apparently poor Aliena, not realising that she is Rosalind’s friend Celia. Phebe the shepherdess had preferred Ganymede (in fact the disguised Rosalind) to the adoring but low-born Silvius, but has learnt her error. Touchstone has won Audrey, the country girl, almost casually by impressing her with his mock courtly talk. This last pairing, founded on vanity and ignorance, seems considerably less satisfying than the other three: even here, in one of the lightest of Shakespeare’s comedies, we are invited not to feel easy about every marriage. In other Shakespeare comedies, some concluding marriages – Claudio and Hero in Much Ado about Nothing, the Duke and Isabella in Measure for Measure – seem designed to look convenient rather than affectionate.