As you like it, Act 4 Scene 2 — Summary & Analysis

What happens

Jaques encounters a forester who has killed a deer and arranges to present him to the duke as a Roman conqueror. Jaques requests a song to celebrate the kill, and the forester sings a bawdy tune mocking the hunter by crowning him with the deer's horns—a traditional symbol of cuckoldry. The scene is brief, comic, and marks time between the main romantic plot.

Why it matters

This scene is pure interlude, a moment of festive mockery that breaks the emotional intensity of the love plots. Jaques, who has spent much of the play observing and criticizing, becomes an orchestrator of ceremony here, transforming a simple hunt into mock-heroic theater. The presentation of the hunter 'like a Roman conqueror' is comic exaggeration, but it also reflects the play's larger interest in performance and ritual. Jaques directs the scene with the authority of someone who understands how to make meaning through costume and spectacle—he's become a kind of stage manager within the forest.

The song itself is the scene's heart: a ribald celebration that frames the hunter's achievement as a path to cuckoldry. 'Take thou no scorn to wear the horn; / It was a crest ere thou wast born' is both playful and pointed—horns are a mark of shame in Renaissance culture, yet the song insists they are ancient and inevitable. This connects to Rosalind's earlier mockery of male sexuality and Orlando's anxiety about what marriage will bring. The forester's song suggests that all hunters, all lovers, all married men wear invisible horns. It's wisdom disguised as jest, and it lightens the weight of commitment that the play's multiple couples are about to undertake.