The first Act of ‘As You Like It’ by William Shakespeare, reveals a reoccurring theme of love. As can be observed in the modern times as well, Shakespeare addressed the problems of how easy one thinks to be fallen in love and how foolish we are to believe in love of first sight. The first time when Rosalind sees Orlando, she’s already fallen for him, even though they don’t know anything about each other.
Rosalind notices him for the first time when he defeats Charles the wrestler, which reminds of the never ending theory that ‘women just want to be rescued’. This theory is still well known these days as can be seen in one of the episodes of the successful TV-series Sex and the City for example. It seems as though each of us ladies has deep down a desire to be rescued from her everyday life and by a man so magical that he could fit right into one of ‘The brothers Grimm’ fairytales. Women have been influenced by all these fairytales where the prince comes on a white horse and saves the princess from her evil stepmother or a 100-year sleep and only then the princess has her happy ending, an allusion that has been following and haunting women since way before Shakespeare’s time. This is exactly what happens when Rosalind sees Orlando wrestle Charles: she imagines him to be her prince charming.
Separated from her dad who is in exile, she is vulnerable and needs a man to protect her. When she learns that Orlando is the son of Sir Rowland de Bois, she is pleased in her choice of man because she knows that her father appreciated and respected Sir Rowland de Bois a lot. The fact that she thinks of her father immediately after falling in love with someone she has just met, could reveal certain ‘daddy issues’ as she might miss the masculine authority by her side. This explains her foolish revolt against her uncle who doesn’t approve of Orlando because he did not worship his father: she feels empowered by her feelings and the link she found between her love and her father, who is banished himself, and therefore isn’t scared by the decision of her uncle to banish her too.
Celia on the other hand doesn’t believe in love as much as her cousin. When asked what she thinks of falling in love, she answers: ”Marry, I prithee do, to make sport withal: but love no man in good earnest, nor no further in sport neither than with safety of a pure blush thou mayst in honour come off again.”, which means that she thinks that only the sport of love is worthwhile. She represents a different type of women: the type that has rejected the image of a prince charming and thinks that she is the man in the relationship. In a romantic comedy she would be categorized as the girl who is emotionally unavailable and needs someone originally like her, to change her mind and in the end find the love of her life anyways.
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