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Fulfillment in As You Like It1 0 1love of his followers, he resembles the latter in his failure to understand thatthe truly fulfilled life, even at its most nobly self-denying, is founded on selflove.In contrast, both Rosalind’s partial desertion of Celia in order to pursueOrlando and the prolonged testing of her potential lover which follows showhow a deep understanding of one’s own needs leads one to make careful discriminationsin the search for fulfilling friendships.This is not to deny that the open and warm compassion exhibited bothby Duke Senior and the two women is deeply endearing. One may infer fromRosalind’s first meeting with Orlando that our pervasive longing for intimateattachments leads any harmonious soul to approach the world initiallyin a spirit of general benevolence and compassion, but to become more discriminatingwhen the possibility of a fulfilling friendship arises (1.2.173–82,1.2.194–98). The broadly contemporary setting of the play seems to suggestthat Christianity is more conducive to The Good Life than classical philosophy,no doubt because it encourages this broadly loving approach. On a morefundamental level, however, Shakespeare agrees with the classical view thatthe truly fulfilled life involves following one’s own deepest interests, even as hedefines these interests in a way that differs radically from Plato and Aristotle.In contrast with the duke, the philosophical Jaques is subject to a deepmelancholia which seems to stem from his determination to isolate himself.Despite his talk of justice he is an unconscious tyrant in his dealings with hisfellow men, as we see when he rides roughshod over Amiens’s repeated wishnot to sing again, as the two lords while away the time “under the greenwoodtree” (2.5.1–18). He sees gratitude—presented as the foundation of all loyalfriendships elsewhere in the play—simply as a ruse which obscures the factthat life is a matter of gratifying base appetites: “and when a man thanks meheartily, methinks I have given him a penny, and he renders me the beggarlythanks” (2.5.27–29). The contrast with Amiens shows how far Jaques is fromtrue fulfillment. Amiens’s initial refusal to sing is motivated partly by a worrythat music would increase Jaques’s melancholy and partly by a wish not toaggravate his own sore throat (2.5.10–24). Amiens is, in other words, concernedboth about himself and his companion: the song he sings celebratescompanionship and his music making itself functions as a fitting metaphorfor the harmonious interchanges that occur between friends, in which onecan simultaneously create joy for oneself and others (2.5.1–8). Jaques, on theother hand, sees himself as indulging his appetite for music with a purelyprivate relish, “suck[ing] melancholy out of a song, as a weasel sucks eggs”(2.5.12–14). He sings his own song in a typically mocking spirit, reducing