Barber, C.L. Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and its Relation to Social Custom. (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1972) [ISBN 9780691013046].
Gay, P. As She Likes It: Shakespeare’s Unruly Women. (London: Routledge, 1994) [ISBN 9780415096966].
Jardine, L. Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989)
[ISBN 9780231070638].
Laroque, F. Shakespeare’s Festive World: Elizabethan Seasonal Entertainment and the Professional Stage, trans. J. Lloyd. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) [ISBN 9780521457866]
Lewis, A.J. The Love Story in Shakespearean Comedy. (Kentucky: University of Kentucky Press, 1992) [ISBN 9780813117867].
Rose, M.B. The Expense of Spirit: Love and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama. (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988)
[ISBN 9780801421891].
Traub, V. Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama. (London and New York: Routledge, 1992)
[ISBN 9780415055260].
Section B of the examination asks you to write a critical essay on a single text from the curriculum. The following chapter serves as an example of the kind of analysis you may be expected to produce.
As You Like It is part of the tradition of Shakespearean comedy that consists of roughly 13 plays. This chapter invites you to consider a number of key areas central to an understanding of the play. It is by no means exhaustive, but intends to offer you some background and insight into some of the themes and issues that constitute the play. Read the text closely and think about it in relation to the ideas discussed below, but also try and locate some of those ideas in other Shakespearean comedies you have read. Not all of the principles will apply but you will find that with some modification, there is a great deal of thematic similarity across the genre.
As You Like It is best described as a ‘pastoral’ comedy, given its population of lovers, shepherds, swains and fools. Pastoral is a form that enjoyed some popularity in the Elizabethan period, yet it can be traced back as far as ancient Greece and the poet Theocrites, who mixed country-dwellers with mythological figures in order to explore the sorrows of love and the harsh realities of life. Pastoral is more or less exclusively identified with rural locations and rustic motifs. Yet its view of the countryside is by no means realistic. Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden is a benign arboretum that provides fully for its inhabitants, and provides little threat or discomfort besides the occasional marauding off-stage lion or snake. The view of the countryside expressed in the pastoral tradition is one that is both idyllic and nostalgic. Nostalgic inasmuch as, by the 1590s, increased urbanisation had seen many people economically uprooted from their traditional rural homes and transplanted into the ever-swelling cities. As a result, for the crowded audience packed in at the Globe Theatre, the countryside stood as a kind of natural antidote to all the problems of city living. Duke Senior’s praise for the exile’s life is typical of the pastoral tradition:
Are not these woods
More free from peril than the envious court?
Here feel we not the penalty of Adam,
The seasons’ difference, as the icy fang
And churlish chiding of the winter’s wind,
Which when it bites and blows upon my body
Even till I shrink with cold, I smile and say
‘This is no flattery; these are counsellors
That feelingly persuade me what I am’?
Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;
And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.
(2.1.3–17)
Activity
How has Duke Senior made a comparison between the court and the countryside? Is the countryside considered in its own terms, or as an extension of court?
Shakespeare is a highly sensitive and self-conscious writer familiar with many different literary styles. Despite the apparent simplicity of pastoral, it is essentially a highly artificial form, drawing as it does on literary conventions that were nearly 2,000 years old by the sixteenth century. Therefore, even though it may sound contradictory, the ‘simple life’ of pastoral is an extremely artificial representation of rural life. Unsurprisingly, Shakespeare is not content for As You Like It to simply conform to pastoral conventions without passing some kind of knowing comment on the contrivance and artifice of those conventions. The play features several examples of characters who either unconsciously parody or directly dismiss the pastoral form. Consider, for example, this exchange between Corin and Touchstone:
CORIN: Those that are good manners at the court are as
ridiculous in the country as the behaviour of the country is
most mockable at the court. You told me you salute not at the
court but you kiss your hands; that courtesy would be uncleanly
if courtiers were shepherds.
TOUCHSTONE: Instance, briefly; come instance.
CORIN: Why, we are still handling our ewes, and their fells you
know are greasy.
(3.2.38–48)
This conversation has the effect of puncturing some of the idyllic nature of pastoral by drawing our attention to some of the more unpleasant aspects of being a shepherd. This type of comic levelling of pretension is known as bathos, and this is also the comic mode employed by the melancholy Jaques, whose consistently bad-tempered contributions to the proceedings have the effect of presenting a balanced counterpoint to the otherwise straightforward presentation of pastoral that the play might otherwise become.
Activity
Jaques is the only courtier who opts to remain in the Forest at the end of the play. Why might this be?
In addition to the pastoral setting, Shakespearean comedies are often associated with festivity: that is, pre-ordained days of the year set aside for holiday and celebration. Indeed, solstitial festivity is reflected in the titles of two of the comedies on this course: Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Seasonal holiday plays still exist in the form of pantomimes, but during the early-modern period, dramatic performances had even closer ties to certain calendric events. This is a tradition that Renaissance theatre practitioners inherited from the Mystery cycles of the late-Medieval period, a series of devotional plays that were performed in conjunction with the religious calendar. Festivals could often be unruly and regularly provoked outrage from puritanical quarters of society, as a sermon preached in St Paul’s Cathedral in 1578 clearly shows:
There be not many places where the word is preached besides the Lord’s day… yet even that day the better part of it is horribly prophaned by devilish inventions, as with Lords of Misrule, Morris dancers, Maygames, insomuch that in some places they shame not in the time of divine service, to…dance about the Church, and without to have men dancing naked in nets, which is most filthy.
1 Laroque, Shakespeare’s Festive World: Elizabethan Seasonal Entertainment and the Elizabethan Stage p.37. Spelling modified.
1
This quotation demonstrates both the horror that festive behaviour instilled in Puritans, but also the extent to which outrageous and normally inconceivable behaviour was permitted for a short period of time. Holidays allowed a degree of collapse in the social hierarchy and the temporary inversion of societal norms. We might like to think of this as a period of ‘licensed transgression’, a mode of behaviour whose unacceptability is made acceptable purely because it is limited and predicated upon the notion that normal social hierarchies will be reinstated as soon as it is over. Perhaps these holidays worked as a kind of release valve in early-modern society, a built-in discharge of social pressures and antagonisms in the course of a year that allowed the established social order to run smoothly at all other times.
As You Like It’s relationship to festivity is in some ways clear just from the very tone of the text. The Forest of Arden is alive with celebrations of summertime and nature’s fertility, and with wrestling matches, forest banquets, dressing up, songs, a masque, love poetry and May games. In keeping with the idea of holiday, work is notably absent. As this exchange shows, time does not exert its tyranny as it does in the town:
ROSALIND: I pray you, what is’t a clock?
ORLANDO: You should ask me what time o’day: there’s no clock in the forest.
(3.2.290–291)
The absence of time’s burden is significant, because it means that the day is measured in terms of leisure rather than profitability or state-craft. All financial and business enterprise is rendered redundant in the Forest, as rather than selling labour in order to make money to live, the Forest itself provides an abundance of munificent bounty for all those who live within it.
Think about the activities of the characters in the Forest. How do they live? Who works, and who hunts? Is there any sense of social class distinctions in the Forest?
Just as the spirit of festivity marinades the play, so does the idea of licensed transgression. Rosalind’s cross-dressed transformation into Ganymede is the most obvious example of this. That a woman may pass herself off as a man represents a clear breaching of the delineated orthodoxies of gender distinctions as they were understood in the Renaissance world. However, Rosalind’s cross-dressing is always pragmatic and never perverse. It serves as a means to protect herself from the wrath of Duke Frederick. Just as the days of Misrule must inevitably end, the generic formula of Shakespearean comedy demands that Rosalind will once again become a woman as soon as social injustice has been addressed.
Where pastoral and festivity come together is in the idea of the ‘Green World’. This term works as an extremely useful means with which to understand both the geography and narrative movement of Shakespearean comedy. A Green World is a location to which characters presented with problems retire to escape their dilemma. Without any conscious act of will on the part of the characters, the Green World provides answers to their predicaments, enabling them to return, restored, to their initial point of departure. The Forest of Arden is one such location, as are the woods outside Athens that allow the young lovers of A Midsummer Night’s Dream to be together, the Illyrian forest in Twelfth Night, and Portia’s Belmont in The Merchant of Venice. The Green World is a quasi-magical place of healing and reconciliation that induces transformations in all who enter it. Just as a good holiday has a restorative influence upon us, so entry into the Green World confers the ability to right the wrongs that start the play. However, the Green World is always a temporary home, dwelt in only long enough to re-adjust a sense of priority before returning to one’s proper place in society.
As You Like It begins with the banishments from court of Orlando and Rosalind, commanded by the despotic Duke Frederick. Frederick, who has already usurped his brother Duke Senior, acts as what is known as a ‘blocking agent’: that is, a character whose actions breed discord within the social interactions of the play. The exile from court initiates the retreat into the Green World of Arden. From this point in the play, much of the action is either explicitly or implicitly dedicated to finding a solution to Frederick’s injustice and the removal of blockages that disrupt social harmony.
Activity
As You Like It features familial relationships in discord. Whose are harmonious, whose disruptive?
The Green World is a wish-fulfilment location, an imaginary Shangri-La in which apparently irredeemable situations are resolved. It also provides space for the exploration of desires and the indulgence of senses that are not perhaps catered for at court, such as cross-dressing and the ambiguous sexual tension of Orlando and Ganymede’s wooing scene in Act 3, Scene 2. The ideas of country and city stand in opposition to one another: the city is a place of politics and deceit, whereas the country is one of love and leisure. In the resolution of Shakespearean comedy, however, the two ideas are brought together in a whole series of images of union. The wholesome ideals and restorative power of the Green World are brought into the court/city, and political harmony is restored, which is in turn underlined by the image of personal harmony and fulfilment implied by marriage.
Activity
List the types of transformation characters undergo when in contact with the
Green World.
As You Like It is packed with lovers and love interest, as you might expect from a play in the pastoral mode. But As You Like It does more than simply show us couples happily in love. It offers us an insight into the complexities of love and the often inexplicable or unpredictable nature of desire. The central couple dramatise the conventions of courtship and wooing, but this is not without satire. Orlando represents the classic Petrarchan lover, a lover schooled in the tradition of the fourteenth-century Italian poet Francesco Petrarca, whose verse was the blueprint on which almost all Renaissance love poetry was subsequently based. Orlando’s poems are examples of bad Petrarchanism being lampooned by Shakespeare:
From the east to the western Ind,
No jewel is like Rosalind.
Her worth being mounted on the wind
Through all the world bears Rosalind.
All the pictures fairest lined
Are but black to Rosalind.
Let no face be kept in mind
But the fair of Rosalind.
(3.2.83–91)
The laborious repetition of the rhyme, and the conventionality of the similes show that Orlando is trying hard, but not particularly succeeding, to be a Petrarchan lover.
Activity
In Act 3, Scene 2, Rosalind, dressed as Ganymede, but pretending to be Rosalind, tries to educate Orlando in the folly of such conventional love. Have a look at this scene and think about the ways in which Rosalind tries to puncture Orlando’s romantic fantasies and replace them with a more realistic view of men and women.
Two other sets of lovers stand in contrast to our central pair: Silvinius and Phoebe, and Touchstone and Audrey. As often happens in Shakespearean comedy, the words or actions of secondary characters act as contrasts or juxtapositions to those in the foreground. Act 3, Scene 5 sees an extended parody of the conventionalised wooing of Orlando. Silvinius and Phoebe play out a kind of rustic parody of the Petrarchanism so skilfully challenged by Rosalind. Silvinius complains of loving more intensely than any other who has ever lived, whereas Phoebe, obsessed with Ganymede, reacts to him in the manner of the haughtiest of Petrarchan mistresses. Touchstone and Audrey (who has no idea what the word ‘poetical’ means) represent what we might call the comic underside of Petrarchan love – a straightforward passion based on physicality and bawdiness.
Activity
What is the overriding view of love as it is presented in this play? Is it a poetic or pragmatic concept?
These three versions of love come together to form an overall critique of romantic relationships. If you consider also the cross-dressing elements, and the same-sex ambiguities of the pairings Ganymede/Orlando, Phoebe/Rosalind and Rosalind/Celia, we can see how Shakespeare’s play in its fantastical setting seeks to question the boundaries that conventional society places on human desire.
Activity
Are the changes and relative freedoms afforded by the Forest rendered invalid by the conventional marriages and return to court that conclude the play?
Some critics have suggested that the play is overtly homoerotic, imagining a harmonious all-male community in the forest that is then intensified with the love-play of Orlando and Ganymede. Certainly the name ‘Ganymede’ is loaded with homosexual implications, as Ganymede was the young male lover of Zeus, and was the term used during the early-modern period to describe the young male lover of an older man. This sexualised reading of the play is complicated further by Rosalind’s epilogue, when the actor playing her flirtatiously addresses the audience and admits he is a boy, yet:
If I were a woman, I would kiss as many of
you as had beards that pleased me, complexions that
liked me, and breaths that I defied not.
(5.4.211)
Activity
Despite the fact that Rosalind is the fullest female role in Shakespearean drama, is it possible to see As You Like It as a play that excludes women, or only permits them as long as they are honorary men?
Having read As You Like It and some of the recommended secondary reading on the play, you should be able to:
Section B of the examination asks you to analyse a single play. But if you wanted to use As You Like It for a Section C question, there are a number of ways in which your study of the play may be broadened. For example, you may like to consider the play alongside other Shakespearean pastorals such as Twelfth Night or A Midsummer Night’s Dream, looking specifically at points of comparison or departure in the treatment of elements like cross-dressed women and young lovers. Alternatively, you might look at the difference in tone of As You Like It, and a darker, more thematically challenging play such as The Merchant of Venice. How might you read the ‘Green World’ element of Portia’s Belmont alongside what seems to be an ostensibly racist narrative? How does the ‘Green World’ operate in this context? Is it still a force for healing, reconciliation and social harmony?
Alternatively, compare Shakespearean comedy with its urban Jacobean counterpart, represented in the work of Ben Jonson. Clearly Jonson is the more overtly venomous and satirical of the two playwrights, but his characters also undergo a process of transformation and change through the medium of comedy. How might you interpret these transformations? Are they the same as Shakespeare’s, or do they take the characters in a different direction altogether?
Finally, it is a good idea to begin to introduce an understanding of the social and historical background to the texts you read. How might your understanding of As You Like It be transformed if you placed it within the historical context of its first performance? By learning more about the role of women in the early-modern period, the concept of festivity and puritanical opposition to it, Petrarchanism, and ideas of social order and good government, you may find that, far from being simply an entertaining romp, As You Like It might be read as a deeply astute and politicised comment on certain aspects of sixteenth-century culture. It is highly recommended that you acquaint yourself with a variety of background material and a number of different perspectives in order to develop your own critical ability.