Touchstone's verbal battery of William in As You Like It rests upon pugnacious hierarchies of synonymia. His tirade is both threat and execution: a lexical copiousness that overruns his addressee, whose ‘better understanding’ is bamboozled by his accelerating rhetoric. In the multiplied image of ‘poison … bastinado … steel’, the real weapons are the words that signify them. The threat is that Touchstone will translate William to death, not that he will actually harm him. ‘Poison’ and ‘bastinado’ are not needed when words enact their effect. Instead of representing realities through language, Touchstone's inverted dramaturgy transposes realities into words. ‘I will bandy with thee in fiction’ is not just equivalent to ‘I will kill thee’: it replaces it. Signifier and signified are elided: language becomes the site of violence, as the real violence fades into metaphor, a shadowy guarantor of the verbal signifier.

Touchstone's rhetoric was not an abstracted exercise in synonymity: it was a practical instance of how the linguistic registers of English functioned hierarchically and combatively. The process of linguistic mimesis had been an object of scrutiny for chroniclers, poets and language theorists, for whom it had been a more straightforward idea of a verbal imitation, performance or embodiment of an event; but it was especially, indeed endemically, so for dramatists, visible in their terminology of shadow and substance to describe the actor and the original.