Last week I tried to think about double-casting and was thwarted by the minor detail of the actual text itself. This week, I want to make a case I genuinely believe about how doubling shapes a character’s role in the play, and how decisions enforced by the practicalities of performance (like having a limited number of actors) can use intentionally play with those limitations in order to tell the story.
So I want to talk about Oliver, the angry older brother who bookends Shakespeare’s As You Like It.
“I never loved my brother in my life.”
Oliver hates his brother Orlando. This is where the play begins, this is what more or less causes it to happen. Oliver’s refusal to grant Orlando his proper inheritance leads Orlando to flee to the court of the usurper Duke Frederick, where he meets the lovely Rosalind, inadvertently gets her in trouble with her uncle, the same Fredrick, and then returns home to find that Oliver has been plotting to kill him all along. Separately, both he and Rosalind flee into the Forest of Arden where cross-dressed hijinks ensue.
Oddly—and rather like Camillo—Oliver is the first character to be granted use of an empty stage in order to address the audience. He uses that time to confess that the obvious hatred for his brother he’s already displayed stems ultimately from jealousy. Orlando’s a more charming, well-liked person than him, and that makes it hard for Oliver to gain his people’s respect.
In a way, he provides the explanation we never get for the play’s other pair of fractious brothers, the aforementioned Duke Frederick and his older brother, only called Duke Senior, who Frederick overthrew and sent into exile in the Forest of Arden. The two sets of brothers are like funhouse mirror reflections, almost matching but not quite: a younger banishing an older to take his throne, an older seeking the death of the younger for no real reason at all.
So we never hear from Frederick about why he did what he did—instead we hear from Oliver, who suggests that what lies at the core of the play’s familial divisions is not calculation or politics, but changeable and irrational human feelings. Such illogic lands Oliver in trouble in the scene where he and Frederick finally meet. The two hateful brothers would seem to be natural allies, but Frederick hauls Oliver in to threaten him and hold him responsible for finding his missing brother, who they suspect of assisting the likewise-missing Rosalind.
A production I once saw was set in 1930s America, and while it otherwise made very little use of this setting, one of the best scenes aesthetically was seeing Oliver menaced by a pack of broad shouldered toughs in pinstripe suits, shoved into a chair with a single lightbulb shining in his face as they accuse Oliver of helping Orlando escape.
Oliver, clearly (and not unreasonably) thinking Frederick will empathize, protests with the quotation at the beginning of this section: “I never loved my brother in my life.”
Frederick, however, is not impressed: “More villain thou.” And he orders Oliver’s lands confiscated until Orlando can be found.
“‘Twas I, but ‘tis not I.”
Matters turn to romantic entanglements in the forest with a truly massive cast of forest denizens, and Oliver’s problems are pretty much forgotten. The quantity of characters who turn up for one-scene cameos in Arden is possibly unprecedented in Shakespeare: a priest, an ex-lover, a pack of lords, two pages. It’s all but impossible for every speaking character to be played by a separate actor—and thus actors playing characters like Oliver, who is only in three scenes with lots of time between appearances, were surely double-cast in other roles. I’ve seen many productions cast Oliver as Amiens, a singing role and one of the main followers of the exiled Duke.
Given all this, I wonder if we are actually meant to recognize Oliver when he comes back.
Rosalind and her cousin Celia, with whom she fled into the forest, are hanging around arguing about Orlando, which is what they spend most of the play doing. A man dressed in foresters’ clothes shows up with a message from Orlando: he can’t come, he was attacked by a lion (classic excuse). In fact, he was attacked by a lion while trying to save the life of his brother, Oliver, who he stumbled across in the forest. In fact, the man delivering this message is Oliver himself.
I’ve never seen a production try it, but I think it’s possible to briefly let an audience think this is really just a messenger, or one of the Duke’s lords. We’ve probably seen the actor playing Oliver appear in other roles, so his reappearance wouldn’t be a surprise. He’s explicitly described as being dressed like a forest-dweller, not like a lord, and may even have different hair. His speech patterns are also completely different: before, he spoke only in prose, but now he speaks exclusively in verse. Plus, these days, directors love the cheeky joke of doubling an actor in a way that causes one character to talk about the other character they play, which this mysterious messenger does before revealing that he is actually Oliver. Nothing about it needs to seem suspicious.
I’m drawn to this idea partly because I genuinely think it’s true. Shakespeare deliberately strips away all the tools an audience normally uses to recognize a character who hasn’t been onstage in a long time and whose actor has probably played other characters in the interim. Shakespeare hints in the dialogue about Oliver’s identity, but he avoids confirmation until we’ve had time to get a sense of who this new character is—to meet Oliver as he is now, unburdened by our memory of who he was.
That’s the other reason I really like this theory: because it’s just a more direct reflection of what’s already what’s happening in the play. We shouldn’t be able to recognize Oliver, because Oliver can’t really recognize himself: “I do not shame,” he says, “To tell you what I was, since my conversion / So sweetly tastes, being the thing I am.” And he’s rewarded for his reformation by becoming one of the four (yes, four) couples that conclude the play, marrying Celia.
This is the well-known magic of the Forest of Arden: to turn girls into boys, princesses into shepherdesses, clowns into lovers, and enemies into brothers. Letting Oliver be briefly unrecognizable after his transformation prepares us to believe in the magic to come in the play’s final scene, when we are left unsure if the happy ending has come about by the forest’s magic, or just by normal people realizing, through love, who they really are.
Thank you for reading dramatis personae! If you liked this letter, do share it with a friend.