Touchstone
Who is Touchstone in As You Like It?
How does Touchstone view love and marriage in the play As You Like It?
What is Touchstone’s interaction with Corin about in the play As You Like It?
How do the characters Touchstone and Jaques differ in the play As You Like It?
Touchstone, fictional character in William Shakespeare’s comedy As You Like It, written about 1598–1600 and published in the First Folio of 1623. He is a jester in the court of Duke Frederick, who ousted the rightful duke, known as Duke Senior, Frederick’s brother. Touchstone accompanies Duke Frederick’s daughter Celia and her cousin Rosalind into exile in the Forest of Arden. Through his irreverent wit, ironic philosophy, and cynical treatment of social norms, Touchstone functions as both comic relief and a satirical participant-observer of the play’s romantic and pastoral conventions.
Role in As You Like It
From court to forest (Acts I–II)
Touchstone is introduced in Act I, scene 2, exchanging gossip and witticisms with Celia and Rosalind. The three of them meet on the duke’s palace lawn just before the beginning of a wrestling match between Charles, who is Duke Frederick’s wrestler, and Orlando, a son of Sir Rowland de Boys. Rosalind is banished from court by the mistrustful Frederick, who is threatened by her popularity with the people of the dukedom. Celia, devoted to Rosalind, elects to join her in exile. When the cousins flee to the Forest of Arden, they take Touchstone with them. Rosalind and Celia decide to disguise themselves: Rosalind takes the guise of a boy named Ganymede, and Celia disguises herself as a woman named Aliena. Meanwhile, Orlando flees his home for the Forest of Arden when he learns that his older brother Oliver intends to have him killed.
Touchstone is vocal about his discomfort upon reaching the forest. Not only do his legs hurt, but he frankly declares that he would rather be home: “When I was at home I was in a better place, but travellers must be content.” He, Rosalind, and Celia eavesdrop on a conversation between two shepherds, Corin and Silvius, as the latter fawns over Phoebe, a shepherdess with whom he is besotted. As Rosalind compares Silvius’s doting with her attraction to Orlando, Touchstone relates how he used to court a woman called Jane Smile, a mocking take on romance that nevertheless ends with a sentiment Rosalind agrees with: “As all is mortal in nature, so is all nature in love mortal in folly.”
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Celia requests that one of the others ask Corin for food. Touchstone rudely hails the shepherd Corin, ironically calling him a clown. He asserts that he, Celia, and Rosalind are Corin’s betters, despite their state of exile. The three buy Corin’s master’s lodgings, securing their shelter in the forest. Later, offstage, Touchstone meets Jaques, a courtier of Duke Senior who has joined him in exile. Amused by the jester’s philosophical musings on fortune and time, Jaques later repeats his words to Duke Senior and the other nobles:
’Tis but an hour ago since it was nine,
And after one hour more ’twill be eleven.
And so from hour to hour we ripe and ripe,
And then from hour to hour we rot and rot,
And thereby hangs a tale.
Influenced by his encounter with Touchstone, Jaques expresses his desire to become a jester. However, he remains a melancholy critic who makes his famous and cynical observation on the human condition in the form of a popular monologue, known as the “Seven Ages of Man,” that begins, “All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players.”
Conversations with Corin, critiquing Orlando’s poetry, and the courtship of Audrey (Acts III–V)
Touchstone next appears with Corin, immediately after the lovestruck Orlando has pinned a poem about Rosalind to a tree. When Corin asks Touchstone how he likes life in the forest, Touchstone is practically noncommittal in his self-contradictory answer and instead asks Corin, “Hast any philosophy in thee, shepherd?” Corin claims he has none but summarizes the human condition in a simple manner—“He that wants money, means, and content is without three good friends”—such that Touchstone describes him as a “natural philosopher.”
Touchstone then criticizes both court and forest, telling Corin he is “damned” for not having learned good manners at court. The shepherd replies that courtly manners suit only the court, just as a shepherd’s manners suit only the forest, deprecating himself by unfavorably comparing shepherds’ dirty hands to the perfumed hands of courtiers. Touchstone turns Corin’s image around by pointing out that the perfume comes from the musk glands of a civet. He uses this to declare courtly culture more base than forest etiquette. Corin simply gives up in the face of Touchstone’s wit.
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Rosalind, disguised as Ganymede, then enters, reciting a poem Orlando wrote for her. Touchstone mocks the poem’s poor rhyme scheme and teases Rosalind with a facetious doggerel composed of slant-rhymed couplets with bawdy overtones:
Sweetest nut hath sourest rind,
Such a nut is Rosalind.
He that sweetest rose will find
Must find love’s prick, and Rosalind.
Touchstone also compares Orlando’s poetry to bad fruit yielded by the tree on which it was hung. In response, Rosalind tells him she will graft him and a type of fruit called a medlar that can only be eaten when soft, implying that Touchstone is foolish or rotten. Touchstone, for once, delivers no witty quips, replying only that the forest will judge the merits of Rosalind’s wit.
Later in the forest Touchstone woos a goatherd named Audrey. His approach to the courtship is both coarse and absurdly polished. Indeed, the lines he delivers to woo her parody courtly manners:
Come apace, good Audrey. I will fetch up your goats, Audrey. And how, Audrey? Am I the man yet? Doth my simple feature content you?
But his courtship soon devolves into a crass and dismissive style:
Well, praised be the gods for thy foulness; sluttishness may come hereafter. But be it as it may be, I will marry thee.
The questionable nature of his blandishments notwithstanding, Touchstone convinces Audrey to marry him. He arranges for a priest of questionable authority to marry them, hoping this will give him an excuse to abandon Audrey later, reflecting his cynical approach to love:
I were better to be married of him than of another, for he is not like to marry me well, and not being well married, it will be a good excuse for me hereafter to leave my wife.
Although Jaques convinces Touchstone to hold off on the wedding once he learns of Touchstone’s duplicitous motive, the jester continues to court Audrey. Touchstone confronts another of her suitors, William, and haughtily warns him to leave Audrey alone, threatening to kill him “a hundred and fifty ways.”
As he assures Audrey that the two of them will be married soon, they are visited by pages who sing a ditty for the couple. Touchstone disparages their attempt, and the two eventually join the rest of the characters in the final scene of the play. Rosalind is ready to drop her disguise so that she can marry Orlando. As she and Celia come in without their disguises, they are accompanied by Hymen, the Greek god of marriage.
Hymen predicts the fate of the various couples in the play: Rosalind and Orlando and Celia and Oliver (Orlando’s brother) are promised happy conjugal lives. Touchstone, too, is finally set to marry Audrey as Hymen makes it clear that he and Audrey suit each other “as the winter to foul weather.”
Character appraisal: Touchstone—participant critic and bawdy cynic
Touchstone’s wit acts as his medium for commenting on and deconstructing the events of the play. Though his lines appear to fulfill a comic purpose, they often contain incisive observations on the play’s action, such as his pithy reply to Celia’s warning against his tendency for satire in Act I, scene 2:
CELIA: You’ll be whipped for taxation one of these days.
TOUCHSTONE: The more pity that fools may not speak wisely what wise men do foolishly.
In his capacity for insight and critique, Touchstone is often compared with Jaques by critics, but unlike the melancholy former courtier, Touchstone chooses to be an active participant in the life of the Forest of Arden. His complaints on reaching the Forest of Arden challenge the idealized notion of pastoral life, and he speaks inconvenient truths, such as highlighting Orlando’s lack of romantic refinement.
Touchstone also represents the unromantic and often cynical dimensions of love. For him, sexual desire is a reality, one he seeks to manage through marriage:
As the ox hath his bow, sir, the horse his curb, and the falcon her bells, so man hath his desires; and as pigeons bill, so wedlock would be nibbling.
Touchstone’s pursuit of Audrey exemplifies one aspect of his complicated relationship with the pastoral culture of the Forest of Arden. His rude attitude upon first hailing Corin highlights the biases he brings to the forest. But his later discussion with Corin on the relative merits of forest and court and the mannerisms practiced in the two settings shows that he has a genuine capacity to respect the intellectual character of the forest’s inhabitants: Touchstone goes from calling Corin a “clown” to a “natural philosopher.”
Touchstone is just as critical of the court as he is of the forest in this interaction. However, this does not deter him from using courtly culture to buttress his sense of importance in his dealings with denizens of the forest when it suits him. For example, in one scene he declares to Audrey:
I am here with thee and thy goats, as the most capricious poet, honest Ovid, was among the Goths.
The Roman poet Ovid (43 bce–17 ce) was exiled by Emperor Augustus to a remote outpost on the Black Sea, possibly in part for writing the Ars amatoria, a guide on romantic love that the emperor considered morally corrupt. Ovid complained that it was “wretched to be living among Bessi and Getae,” a people later confused with the Goths, who raided Rome over centuries. Touchstone’s comparison casts himself as a person of refined wit exiled among rustics.
Some of Touchstone’s later interactions with the forest dwellers mingle elitist disdain with a resigned sense of involvement. For instance, he is dismissive of Audrey’s character despite his courtship of her. Even during his confrontation with her suitor William, Touchstone self-consciously creates a hierarchy in language that he uses to belittle the other suitor:
Therefore, you clown, abandon—which is in the vulgar, “leave”—the society—which in the boorish is “company”—of this female—which in the common is “woman”; which together is, abandon the society of this female, or, clown, thou perishest; or, to thy better understanding, diest.
Nor does Touchstone allow the audience to believe him to be sincere at the end of the play. He ends his part with a masterful catalog of types and degrees of lies and a defense of ambiguity:
I knew when seven justices could not take up a quarrel, but when the parties were met themselves, one of them thought but of an “if,” as, “if you said so, then I said so;” and they shook hands, and swore brothers. Your “if” is the only peacemaker; much virtue in “if.”
Historical background
Touchstone belongs to a tradition of court jesters with comedic license to critique power structures. Shakespeare may have modeled Touchstone on Robert Armin, a new comic actor in the Chamberlain’s Men theater company about the time As You Like It was written. Some critics believe that Shakespeare’s shift from the broad comedy of Nick Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream to the more intellectual Touchstone may indicate a change in acting tradition, moving away from the type of comic performance represented by earlier actors such as William Kempe.
This transition may have continued in Shakespeare’s oeuvre with the role of the Fool in King Lear, who echoes and amplifies Touchstone’s sentiment of “The more pity that fools may not speak wisely what wise men do foolishly,” by saying:
Fools had ne’er less grace in a year;
For wise men are grown foppish,
And know not how their wits to wear,
Their manners are so apish.
Whereas Touchstone uses his comic license for satire and for his comically self-serving motives, the Fool in King Lear uses his liberty for uncomfortable truth telling. Thus, he can ruthlessly tell Lear:
When thou clovest thy crown i’ the middle and gav’st away both parts, thou bor’st thine ass on thy back o’er the dirt: thou hadst little wit in thy bald crown when thou gav’st thy golden one away.
Adaptations
Touchstone appears in most major film and stage adaptations of As You Like It. The role has been recast in various ways over the years, since Armin’s original enactment. Jean-Louis Barrault’s portrayal in the 1938 Italian production Come vi piace, for instance, presented Touchstone as a circus clown, whereas Kenneth Branagh performed the part as a working-class Cockney in a 1988 Renaissance Theatre Company production directed by Geraldine McEwan in Birmingham, England.
In productions that sought less emphasis on the critical tone presented by Touchstone and Jaques, such as the 1936 film adaptation by Paul Czinner featuring Mackenzie Ward in the role, Touchstone’s dialogue was trimmed considerably.