As You Like It
Act 3 scene 2
Orlando is much changed from the character we saw wrestling, threatening the Duke, carrying in Old Adam. Here he is dressed as a hunter, hanging love poems on the trees. Again, in this line, we see Orlando's attempt to become more educated. He wants to learn about love, so he has been reading poetry, but this is the wrong kind of learning about love. He is learning how to "fake" love but not how to express it because his ideas are coming from someone else.
Touchstone can argue either side of any argument. And he loves to hear himself talk. He also assumes Corin is stupid, because he doesn't have the kind of learning one can get at court, but he is shown up as shallow because he doesn't acknowledge that the learning Corin has is appropriate for his role in life. Again Shakespeare is setting up these two characters as foils, but here the simpler character comes off better.
Colin's simplicity seems closer to contentment than Touchstone's one-upsmanship.
Orlando's poetry is pretty terrible. Before Rosalind even knows who has written these poems, she has commented satirically on the probable shallowness of the love expressed through these poems.
The appearance vs reality theme is brought up here as Rosalind acknowledges that she looks like a man but is acting in a very emotional way, which is associated with women.
Her first reaction to the knowledge that Orlando is in the forest with them is that she is embarrassed about being dressed as a man. But she will later decide to use her disguise to talk realistically to Orlando. She would be ready to reveal herself to Orlando and change back into her clothes and the personality as a woman, but then she overhears a conversation between Orlando and Jaques. She may be intervening to protect him from the cynical attacks of Jaques or because she sees how changed he is from the last time she saw him. Before he may have been too masculine, not able to speak to her, but now he is too feminine, too passive, too love-sick, and she wants to teach him to combine the masculine and feminine sides to his personality to be a truer lover and more well-rounded person.
Orlando speaks honestly to Jaques, rejecting melancholy or cynicism as a world view. He prefers to remain in love.
Both have them have seen through the other's affectations.
Orlando is living out of time in the Forest of Arden (the Garden of Eden, the Golden World). Rosalind believes that one much be aware of time, not part of the timeless world of romance, but part of the realistic view of time in the real world. But she also says that time is subjective or psychological. So perception is as or more important than reality (to freedom and not to banishment).
Shakespeare constantly reminds us of the Renaissance Christian Humanist beliefs that there are answers to all of life's questions which can be memorized. Most of the time, Shakespeare shows us that these expectations are not fulfilled, that the world is more complex than these simple answers, and we assume Rosalind is aware of this; she does not really expect him to have these attributes to prove he is a true lover. Another aspect of Orlando's love-sickness is that he is enjoying the idea of being in love, of just thinking about his love, even more than trying to actually find and interact with the real Rosalind. So Rosalind has doubts about whether Orlando is a true love, so she devises a test to see if he is true or counterfeit.
Like Jaques who wants to be the physician to cure the idealism of the world, Rosalind wants to cure Orlando. Since Orlando's main trait now is his idealism, his romanticism, Rosalind will show to Orlando the cynical side to love by being fickle, changeable, inconstant. Rosalind is using her supposed cure to test Orlando to see if he is just in love with being in love with her, or really cares about her as a person and will continue to love her even if she is human. Contrast the relationship between Orlando and Rosalind and that of Silvius and Phebe.