Audrey
Audrey is Touchstone's rustic love interest - her plain incomprehension of his wordplay comically undercuts his cleverness at every turn, and her marriage to him in Act V folds even the play's most unromantic courtship into its concluding happiness.
Appears In
Who is Audrey?
Audrey is a goatherd Touchstone meets in the forest and decides, with characteristic bluntness, to marry - a courtship the play plays almost entirely for comedy, since Audrey has no idea what 'poetical' means when Touchstone uses the word, and receives his elaborate wit with a plain incomprehension that undercuts his cleverness more effectively than any rival could.
Her responses throughout their courtship are practical rather than romantic - she asks whether Touchstone truly means to marry her, expresses mild concern about her own honesty and virtue in terms that suggest she has only a loose grip on the concepts, and generally treats the whole arrangement with a straightforwardness that has nothing to do with the literary conventions Touchstone is simultaneously mocking and half-sincerely performing.
Audrey is caught between two suitors briefly - the rustic William makes some claim on her before Touchstone's arrival - and Touchstone dispatches him with a mock-menacing speech about the number of ways he might have him killed, which is enough to see William off entirely. Audrey marries Touchstone in the play's final scene alongside the other three couples, an ending that gives her, whatever her limitations of wit, exactly what she seemed to want.
Motivation
Audrey is motivated by a straightforward, practical desire to be honestly married, expressed without any of the literary or romantic elaboration that surrounds every other courtship in the play.
Personality
Audrey's total imperviousness to Touchstone's wit is the source of most of her comedy - she takes his elaborate jokes at face value or misses them entirely, and her plainness serves as an unintentional but effective commentary on the gap between clever speech and actual meaning.