ABSTRACT
When Rosalind discovers Orlando’s poems scattered about the forest, she remarks wryly, ‘I was never so berhymed since Pythagoras’ time that I was an Irish rat, which I can hardly remember’ (III.2.172–73). 1 Pretending belief in the theory of metempsychosis, Rosalind imagines her soul having transmigrated from body to body over millennia, from a time so distant that she has almost—but not quite—forgotten it. Her memory thus stretches back far beyond her identity as ‘Rosalind’ (or ‘Ganymede’, as the case may be). She’s joking; but the joke is peculiarly apt given the questions about memory and identity swirling through As You Like It. In Rosalind’s fancy, her sense of herself as ‘I’ goes back to the time when ‘I was an Irish rat’: a time when ‘I’ was someone else (and something else) entirely. No one in the play undergoes metempsychosis, but many undergo transformations almost as complete. There are ways of being someone else without being reborn as a rat. In this play, a transmigration from one age to another, one guise to another, can be quite as transformative. Any sense of subjective continuity depends on memory, but memory can also make us uncomfortably aware of how different we once were.
