Shakespeare also eliminated the razzle-dazzle band of robbers who kidnap Rosalind. The shepherd is lovelorn, and the shepherdess disdainful. The pastoral represents rural life as idyllic, idealized, and sweetly picturesque. No one feels hunger or cold. A few pure white, woolly lambs gambol among the flowers dotting the verdant hillside, at the base of which meanders a gurgling, tumbling brook.
Rural life is unsullied, and therefore superior to urban.
In Lodge's original, the two cousins head for the forest without a man. Shakespeare gives them a male companion. Both court and country, compared to Touchstone as quality test, seem more genuine than he. Audrey also, in her utter failure to understand the linguistic acrobatics of Touchstone, demonstrates the uselessness, not only of his talent for equivocating, but of language itself when lust prevails. The original Audrey was a seventh-century saint from East Anglia.