Lovers Win, Wise Guys Lose (Living “As You Like It”)

Last updated on: April 18, 2016 at 10:48 pm by John Mark N. Reynolds

Lovers Win, Wise Guys Lose (Living “As You Like It”) 2016-04-18T22:48:01-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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Émile_Bayard_-_As_you_like_it_opt Love can make you stupid . . . or seemingly stupid. People in love believe all kinds of things and have hope that kingdoms can grow out of the wilderness. Shakespeare made kingdoms grow out of nearly nothing on the stage, surviving critics, censors, and plagues to achieve unmatched greatness . . . and yet he is dead.

Doesn’t that prove something?

It might if death is the end, but it is not. Shakespeare understood this and so could write comedies that were not foolish and portray lovers that were foolish, but that somehow in the middle of lover’s folly, love prevailed. This is because God delights in love and even if he must use eternity to do it, He will see to it that love prevails. The comedy As You Like It begins with a good ruler gone into exile because a bad man has seized power. Soon nearly everyone interesting is in exile in the greenwood with the good Duke. The bad guys keep winning what they want and the good guys keep retreating, but soon the old court is just old and the new court is full of love and jollification.

This cosmos may be broken, but God is busy repairing what we have broken. All the separated pieces will come back together and what is sick will be healed. This is not fast or easy, but it is inevitable if not in this life, then in the life to come.

The crabby side of me gets worried about this good news. Isn’t life hard? Don’t I struggle with depression? Dreams do not always come true. So many seek true love and do not find it or find what they think is true love only to discover it is a cheat. Just like the Bible he loved, Shakespeare allowed this side of reality to speak. This is wise and so wise guys get great speeches and in them they verbally cut through all the cheery cheesiness of the lovers. Shakespeare has his wise guy Jaques give a speech:

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.

We start with mewling and puking in a nurse’s arms and end up sans everything. This is not particularly encouraging, but it is true. What are we to make of it?

Nobody really responds to the speech in the play because the young lover (Orlando before he was a spring break city!) and the old man, Adam (!), enter the scene. They are too busy getting on with living, making life interesting, to pay much attention to the wise guy speech. The difficulty is that death is not the end . .. just as exile was not the end . . . and losing is not the end. The end is God and God is love.

We have to give the wise guys their due, because the play can be very long, contain tragedy, and even death. We often miss our true love because she is disguised and so what should be quick and easy becomes long and hard. We get seven ages, but we end in the Eighth Day where all is green, restful, and jolly. Just when evil, like the wicked duke, is coming to kill us, then holiness will swallow up evil and the Kingdom will come! This play ends, as we like it, in “true delights.” Wise guys forget this because wisdom looks to the earth. Lovers know it because love always looks to heaven if it is true love.

Wise guy thoughts need to stay around because we are not fully in the Kingdom yet. Still love wins. Love always wins. Love is just mad enough to birth newness, make jokes, sing songs, eat at feasts. Sometimes we just need to laugh in the face of seriousness, of sin, of evil, and of folly. Let’s go write a poem and pin it to a tree. Ha!

Thanks be to God.

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William Shakespeare went to God four hundred years ago. To recollect his death, I am writing a personal reflection on a few of his plays. The Winter’s Tale started things off.

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