Time and Haste in As you like it

Rosalind tells Orlando: “Time travels in divers paces with divers persons.” She then describes time as it feels to a young woman waiting for her wedding—a week stretched to seven years, every hour an age. Time is not clock-time in the Forest of Arden. There is no clock. Time is emotional, subjective, a mirror of the heart’s condition. The play uses this insight not as philosophy but as lived experience. It shows us time as the lovers experience it, time as the exiles experience it, time as it moves differently for different people in different states of mind.

When the play opens, time is the enemy. Duke Frederick banishes Rosalind, giving her ten days to leave or die. Orlando must flee his brother’s house. Time is measured in deadlines, in threat, in the working day of the court. But the moment the characters enter the forest, time becomes something else. Duke Senior speaks of reading “sermons in stones” and finding moral meaning in the forest’s timeless space. The songs move through seasons—from winter to spring—but not through hours. The exiles have all the time in the world because they have stepped outside of time’s usual measure.

Yet the play also insists that you cannot stay in the forest forever. Time returns. By Act Four, Orlando begins to feel its pressure again. He comes late to meet Rosalind. She scolds him for breaking his promise of punctuality. This small scene marks a shift. Love, which seemed timeless in the forest’s first moments, now requires time to be kept, promises to be honored. Time becomes real again because the real world is pressing in. Rosalind must ask: if you will be this careless with your promises now, what will you be when you marry and time becomes truly binding?

The play’s final move is to accept that time cannot be stopped, only lived through differently. Jaques chooses to remain outside time, seeking the converted Duke in the forest. But the others—Orlando, Rosalind, Oliver, Celia—choose to return to the world where time moves in its usual way, where seasons pass, where age comes, where bodies wear out. The play does not mourn this return. It suggests instead that the forest’s timelessness was preparation for living in time with open eyes. You go back to the world changed not because the forest made you perfect, but because it taught you that time is both real and relative, both a constraint and a gift.