When this week’s theme was announced, my first reaction was that here was a glorious opportunity to write about anagnorisis and the lessons we can only learn by getting things horribly wrong.
Then I remembered I’d talked about anagnorisis (in Macbeth) in June, and though those moments are amongst my favourites in the Tragedies (and therefore in Shakespeare), I didn’t fancy repeating myself. Letting those plays stand down for a weekend opened up the exciting prospect of looking at a Comedy, just for a change.
And, excitingly, that led me to As You Like It.
Exciting for two reasons: partly because it’s the 15th different play I’ve looked at in the 2026 run of Shakespeare Sundays. Mostly, though, because every time I watch the play – and no matter who is playing the part – I fall in love with Rosalind all over again.
I usually dismiss the male leads in the Comedies as feckless (and that applies to Romeo, too, inasmuch as the first half of R and J is a Comedy), but it’s a little unfair to Orlando. He’s got many good qualities, but like all those actually feckless lads, he’s got a lot to learn about women, and about love.
Orlando has a good heart, but his love poetry is naive and earnest, and his ideas about love are nonsensical. Rosalind tells him:
Men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love.1
Or so he believes. (Of course, the fun is that the person who delivers this line is herself hopelessly in love, but we’ll ignore that for now.)
With Orlando desperately in need of ‘tuition’, it’s a good job Rosalind proves to be such an excellent teacher (in my biased opinion, of course)!
Under her tutelage, the forest of Arden becomes the best kind of classroom. Rosalind doesn’t simply tell Orlando that he’s wrong. Or impose what she believes is the right answer.
She teases him, tests him, challenges him, and makes him think.
She gives him room to get things wrong.
Those thoughts brought me up short.
Student confidence is such a large part of my work. I don’t want students to be afraid of being wrong, and that is, sadly, how many of them reach me. I want them to be able to take an informed risk, make an argument, discover that the evidence doesn’t quite support it, and try again.
In fact, one of my favourite moments in tutoring is when a student gets far enough to say:
Actually, OK. That’s not working. I can’t properly justify that. Let’s go back.
Not the night before the exam, obviously.
But as part of the learning process?
Magic.
Because at that point the student is no longer waiting for me to tell them whether their answer is right. They are learning to evaluate their own thinking.
I’ve written before about asking students to do their own marking, and about why I usually point out a spelling error without supplying the correct spelling: I want them to learn how to find the answer, rather than simply receive it. In the classroom, the moment a student gets up, checks the dictionary, returns to their work and carries on is a tiny act of independence.
Arden feels rather like that kind of classroom to me.
It is a place where people can be wrong without becoming failures.
They can experiment. They can make mistakes. They can discover that their assumptions don’t quite work. They can change their minds. There can even be a bit of gentle teasing, going both ways (one of my favourite students used to tell me I was ‘full of shit’ at the end of a lesson, and then justify her opinion in the next piece of homework).
I loved teaching her.
But it isn’t a place where anything goes.
One of my teacher clichés is that English (Language AND Literature) is a subject of ideas. But ideas have to survive being tested, or they’re just fantasies.
Reading literature, we don’t just learn more about ourselves. We learn to look at other people (and at the world) with greater care. We encounter characters who initially seem easy to categorise, and then discover that they are more complicated than our first reading allowed.
We look again.
We revise.
We arrive, sometimes, at an answer we genuinely believe in — not because someone has handed us the answer, but because we’ve thought hard enough to earn our own.
Perhaps that’s why I love Rosalind.
She is clever enough to dominate Orlando intellectually. She chooses instead to develop him.
And that, I think, is what a good teacher does.
Not to make students think like us.
Not even to make them arrive where we think they ought to arrive.
But to help them become sufficiently confident, thoughtful and independent that, eventually, they can work out where they want to go for themselves.
Welcome to Arden.
Where the stakes are low enough to risk being wrong. And the conversation is always along the lines of:
Interesting. Why do you say that, and where can we go with it?
Sources and Further Reading
Title: The Beach Boys, “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” Pet Sounds (Capitol Records, 1966)
- William Shakespeare, As You Like It, ed. Juliet Dusinberre, Arden Shakespeare Third Series (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2006) ↩︎
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