As You Like It

Rosalind has more lines than any other Shakespeare heroine and more control over her plot than almost any character in the canon. Disguised as Ganymede, she becomes the play's director — managing Orlando's courtship education, orchestrating the final revelations, and addressing the audience directly in the Epilogue. Her wit is not decorative; it is diagnostic. She uses comedy to strip romantic love of its cliches and replace them with something harder and more durable: genuine knowledge of the other person. She is simultaneously the play's most romantic character (she faints at Orlando's blood, she cannot contain her excitement when she finds his poems) and its most pragmatic (she mocks the very love conventions she is living through). That combination — passion and clear-sightedness — is what makes her Shakespeare's most complete human being in the comedies.