As You Like It Act 5, Epilogue

 

As You Like It Act 5, Epilogue

Summary

Rosalind steps forward to deliver the Epilogue, breaking the fourth wall. She playfully acknowledges the unconventionality of a woman giving the epilogue. She claims a good play shouldn’t need one, but then argues that good plays, like good wine with a sign (bush), can benefit from one. Pleading she is neither a good epilogue nor a good beggar, she instead "conjures" the audience: she charges the women, for the love they bear men, to like the play, and charges the men, for the love they bear women, to ensure the play pleases everyone. She ends with a flirtatious hypothetical, stating that if she were a woman, she would kiss all the agreeable men in the audience, and hopes those men will applaud her in return.

Analysis

The Epilogue is a masterful final stroke that encapsulates the play’s central themes of gender, performance, and audience complicity.

1.     Metatheatrical Mastery and the Unstable Self: Rosalind—the actor—steps out of the character of Rosalind, who had just spent the play disguised as Ganymede. This creates a layered performance: a boy actor (in Shakespeare’s time) playing a woman (Rosalind) who played a man (Ganymede) now speaking as a playful version of herself. This final blurring of boundaries reminds the audience that identity is, ultimately, a performance, and that the "magic" of the play relied on their willing suspension of disbelief.

2.     Direct Address and Audience Complicity: By speaking directly to the men and women in the audience, Rosalind draws them into the final act of the play's resolution. She makes the play’s success dependent on the same forces that drove the plot: the mutual affection between men and women. Her charge implicates the audience in the play's world, asking them to extend the spirit of reconciliation and goodwill from the stage into the theater.

3.     Final Play on Gender and Desire: The climactic line—"If I were a woman..."—is a brilliant and cheeky joke. It highlights the fictional construct of her own gender on the Elizabethan stage while simultaneously teasing the audience with conditional desire. It reinforces the play's exploration of how love and attraction transcend simple appearances and fixed roles.

4.     Thematic Coda on Art and Persuasion: Rosalind dismisses the need for an epilogue only to deliver a perfect one. This mirrors the play's own method: it dismisses artificial conventions of love and theater even while expertly employing them. Her refusal to "beg" but instead to "conjure" aligns with her character's agency throughout—she commands, orchestrates, and charms, rather than pleads.

In essence, the Epilogue does not simply end the play; it dissolves it. It transitions the harmony achieved on stage into the shared space of the theater, asking the audience to seal the comic contract with their applause. Rosalind’s final words cement her status as the play’s controlling intelligence, a charismatic guide who has navigated the forests of identity and love and now gracefully returns us to our own world, leaving us charmed and complicit in the illusion we just witnessed.

 

Location: United States

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