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effective king – if so, he is deeply Freudian, not responsive to his larger and better Falstaffian self. Freud's account of the successful leader is remarkably apt for Bolingbroke and, sadly, for Hal as well: ‘His ego had few libidinal ties; he loved no one but himself, or other people insofar as they served his needs. To objects his ego gave away no more than was barely necessary.’ (
Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
, 1921) Maybe that is the best we can hope for; but in the centre of what is perhaps Shakespeare's most striking meditation on rulership, there is a force that undermines this hard wisdom and a hope for something better.
    Rosalind in
As You Like It
is, like Falstaff, an enemy of reduction. In the tavern scene, Falstaff assaults political reduction; all throughher play Rosalind contends against reduction of the erotic kind. She comes to life as a character after she hears Touchstone the jester proclaim that erotic love is nothing more than an affair of rutting, wiping clean, and rushing away. Touchstone doesn't have anything to do with turning base metals into gold, as his name suggests, but rather takes what men and women have concurred in finding precious and exposes its sordid underside. Touchstone is a wild Freudian analyst whose nose is always ready to sniff out sex and scat. Touchstone is Hal's jester cousin.
    Rosalind has been swooning over Orlando's very conventional love poems, poems that are petrified Petrarch, at best. Touchstone, always obliging, pops up to enlighten her: ‘I'll rhyme you so eight years together,’ he says, then quickly hits stride:
    If a hart do lack a hind,
    Let him seek out Rosalind.
    If the cat will after kind,
    So be sure will Rosalind.
    Wint'red garments must be lin'd,
    So must slender Rosalind. (III, ii)
    Despite all the refined sentiment on display in the Forest of Arden, Touchstone insists, what it all comes down to is simple instinct, sweating and rutting and the two-backed beast.
    To which Rosalind says, eventually, yes. Yes, but. She takes in all that Touchstone knows and, with a lightning celerity – Rosalind is one of Shakespeare's quickest thinking figures – begins compounding a version of erotic love that includes sexual desires but isn't bound and defined by them.
    In her mock dramas with Orlando, in which she's disguised as a boy, Rosalind, goaded by Touchstone, grows candid about her own shifting sexual desires. But she doesn't stop there. For, to her, shifting erotic desire is the inspiration for shifting human identity and for the playful exercise of wit. Without sex, life would be insupportable, but without self-willed changes of identity, shifting, theatrical improvisation, life would be impossible as well. Sex isfinite, the affair of an hour. But play, pure extemporization, is endless, at least when the player is Rosalind (and Shakespeare). So, Rosalind avers, Orlando is going to have to put up with someone who never wants the same thing twice, and never is the same person on any two occasions: ‘I will be more jealous of thee than a Barbary cock-pigeon over his hen; more clamorous than a parrot against rain; more new-fangled than an ape; more giddy in my desires than a monkey: I will weep for nothing, like Diana in the fountain, and I will do that when you are dispos'd to be merry; I will laugh like a hyen, and that when thou art inclin'd to sleep’ (IV, i).
    In short, Rosalind asserts, ‘make the doors upon a woman's wit, and it will out at the casement; shut that, and 'twill out at the key-hole; stop that, 'twill fly with the smoke out at the chimney’ (IV, i). What Rosalind promises, in short, is a life of Shakespearean variety and largesse (and tribulation) – a life she might never have had the wherewithal to conceive, had not Touchstone sent her flying into her own broadening fields of play.
    The woman of Orlando's mawkish poetry is simple and clichéd. What Rosalind seeks to do in her erotic education of her wooer is to