Category: As You Like It

As You Like It is a comedic play by William Shakespeare that follows the story of Rosalind, a woman who flees persecution disguised as a man, and her journey of self-discovery and love in the Forest of Arden. The play features themes of gender, identity, and the transformative power of nature. As You Like It has similarities to other Shakespearean plays such as Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which also explore themes of mistaken identity and love in a fantastical setting. However, As You Like It stands out for its emphasis on nature and the idea that the natural world can be a transformative force for personal growth and emotional healing.

Browse the text of As You Like It entire play here.

As You Can Take It Or Leave It

~ duane ~ 2 Comments

Whenever we discuss Shakespeare’s best or greatest play, some folks will make the case for As You Like It.  Just yesterday on Facebook, in response to yesterday’s “The One Play” thread, one reader suggested that it is “at least as good as Hamlet.”

I don’t get it.

I don’t think it’s a bad play, necessarily.  But that’s not saying much, I’m not sure I’d say that any of them are bad.  But there are some that, if I never saw again, I think I’d probably be ok.  I’m not a Love’s Labour’s Lost fan, or All’s Well That Ends Well or Two Gentlemen of Verona.  There are other potential candidates, like Merry Wives of Windsor, that I’ve simply never seen live.

But other than general agreement that Rosalind is one of Shakespeare’s strongest female leads?  As You Like It is right in that “It’s fine, I guess” category for me.  There’s no real conflict or drama, the plot is ridiculously convoluted, the ending entirely unbelievable.  The only real laugh out loud moments for me come during the exchanges between Jaques and Orlando.

Give me Twelfth Night any day if you want a strong female lead dressed up like a boy.  That one’s not afraid to play with some dark edges, like what they do to poor Malvolio.  His ending certainly isn’t happy.  Does anybody know WTF we’re supposed to take from a character whose last line is, “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you”? That’s the kind of thing somebody says before coming back with an automatic weapon.

So let’s have the alternate argument?  We’ll call it the Battle for Cross-Dressing Shakespeare.  I suppose we can go ahead and throw in Portia from if you really want to go down that path, but I don’t really think of her as the “female lead” in the same way as a Rosalind or Viola.  But, your call.

 

Naught Without Mustard

~ duane ~ 2 Comments

Sometimes you find yourself in those situations that make you feel like more of a geek than usual.

A reddit user had asked about Touchstone in As You Like It and I was going through some quotes when I found this:

Of a certain knight that swore by his honour they
were good pancakes and swore by his honour the
mustard was naught: now I’ll stand to it, the
pancakes were naught and the mustard was good, and
yet was not the knight forsworn.

Hmmm, that rang  a bell. I immediately thought of, “Not without mustard,” and had to go do some research.

For those that don’t get it, “Not without mustard” is a line from Ben Jonson’s Every Man out of His Humor, and is thought by some to be a joke reference to the coat of arms that Shakespeare had recently acquired for himself bearing the motto Non Sans Droit, or, “Not Without Right.”

 

So, then, is Touchstone’s line a response to Jonson’s? It’s unlikely we’d ever truly know for sure, but it can be fun to pursue the line of reasoning.

Dating the plays is already notoriously tricky, not to mention answering the question of who knew what when.  Would Shakespeare have had to see a performance of Jonson’s play to know the line, or would they have been sharing scripts while it was being written?

Jonson’s play was acted by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in 1599, and it is technically a sequel to the 1598 Every Man in His Humour, so we have a pretty small window to work with there.

But what about As You Like It?  The Wikipedia entry reads, “believed to have been written in 1599 and first published in the First Folio, 1623.” Even if we don’t always trust Wikipedia, the Royal Shakespeare Company page says, “Typically dated late 1599.”

Not Without Right
Not without mustard.

Looks like it’s certainly possible.  After some cursory research I called in Bardfilm, who is much better at this sort of thing than I, and has access to all the best resources. He tells me that the Arden edition offers no notes on the connection, but then goes on to find this amusingly “relevant” article from an author named Mustard.

So who knows.  Either we’ve uncovered a joke between playwrights that nobody else has thought to mention, or it’s just a coincidence.  This is why we’re geeks about this stuff!

 

On The Complexity of Rosalind

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“Rosalind and Hamlet are surely the most complex in the vast parade of Shakespeare’s characters.”

So begins this Signature article, “What’s So Complex About Shakespeare’s Immortal Rosalind?”

I’m already stumped, and that’s nothing personal against Rosalind.  I’ll give you Hamlet. But a funny thing happened as I sat here thinking, “No, wait, surely there’s a lengthy cast of characters that could vie for that title.”  Complex female characters in Shakespeare’s work. Ummm….hmmm. Maybe they have a point? I keep rattling off names – Desdemona, Juliet, Cordelia – but the word “complex” does not come to mind for each of them, even though they each have their own strengths.  I guess Viola is the obvious competition.

Maybe I’ve not yet seen a good As You Like It, because my impression of Rosalind is inevitably “boy crazy teenager.”  I saw this one interpretation where Rosalind and  Celia, talking about boys, at one point grab each other by the forearms, jumping up and down in a circle while laughing and squealing loudly. You’ve no doubt seen similar played out in many a television sitcom. It didn’t take much creative energy, I’m sure. I didn’t like it, as it left me thinking, “Is this all there is to this one?”

Maybe I’m wrong, though, and I’m open to debate.  I think I’m biased toward Viola in Twelfth Night , however, thanks to Wayne Myers’ book “The Book of Twelfth Night, or What You Will: Musings on Shakespeare’s Most Wonderful Play,” which explores many of the darker themes of that one.  Viola doesn’t have time to finish mourning for her dead brother before she assumes his identity. Let’s see Rosalind try that!

Rosalind. Complex?

P.S. – Can I get a word in about the editor’s note?  The article’s title says “the immortal Rosalind,” to which the editor adds, “a character who has never lived and therefore can never die.”  So…literally, in the literal sense of the word, every fictional character.

 

 

Which Play Is The Most Romantic?

~ duane ~ 12 Comments
Might Twelfth Night be Shakespeare's most romantic play?

Going over edits for my Shakespeare wedding quotes book, I’m curious about which play provided the most romantic quotes.  That’s a fairly arbitrary measure, of course, but it’s an interesting question. I’m not thinking of the storyline. I mean, which play has the most passages that you could pull out of context and use elsewhere and still have them sound romantic?

From where I sit, As You Like It and A Midsummer Night’s Dream both have a great deal of stuff to say on the subject of love and romance.  But they’re both … light? about it.  Neither, in my book, expresses the sort of ups and downs that come with what love’s really all about.  Don’t get me wrong, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is damned near perfection from some angles, but half the time, the lovers are in the grip of a magic potion and in love with the wrong person.  As You Like It, I find just too corny.  Cute but corny. Life’s not as easy as that one makes it out to be.

I think I’ll put my money on Twelfth Night. I love the discussion we had on music being the food of love.  Orsino has got some amazing insight about what love’s really all about, and that place where it can actually cause you pain, and yet you still want more of it.

“They are in the very wrath of love, clubs cannot part them.”

“Love sought is good, but given unsought is better.”

Welcome John Hudson of The Dark Lady Players!

~ duane ~ 7 Comments

http://www.darkladyplayers.com

If you don’t recognize the name, John Hudson is known for having put forth Amelia Bassano Lanyer as the latest contender for the Authorship Question (also known as the “Shakespeare was a black Jewish woman?!” theory).

When I first posted about the theory I wondered aloud if it was a joke.  I also wondered why the discussion is always about As You Like It, since it seems that you’d want to go right to Shylock if you’re going to argue that a Jewish person created him. So when I got email from Mr. Hudson, I apparently have no shame, I dove right in and asked both questions :).  Answers printed with his permission:

Q:  With all due respect, are you serious?  Or is this some larger satirical joke on the Authorship question as a whole that’s gone over my head?”  (paraphrased)

A: Actually I am serious–which is why in March last year I went to London to present this theory to Mark Rylance and the Shakespearean Authorship Trust, who treated it seriously and brought her in as candidate number 8  at the top of the ‘other candidates’ section of their website. I would also not be spending money putting on demonstration allegorical versions of the plays unless I was serious!

Q: Why have I not heard anyone ask about Merchant, or even Taming of the Shrew?  Why would Bassano have written such misogynistic, anti-Semitic works?

A: This theory holds that the plays are written as allegories—as was much of Elizabethan and Renaissance literature—so they have a meaning in some cases on the surface that is opposite to what they really mean underneath. Both MOV and Shrew are quite complex, so  it is easiest if I begin  referring you to my analysis of more straightforward plays like MND and AYLI (which we are currently rehearsing for production in late July). Once you see how those work it is easier to make analogies to the others. For instance I would show why the way that Adam disappears half-way through AYLI is a parallel to the way that Shylock disappears half way through MOV–and what happens to them is similar. (I would however refer you to the literary signatures she has left on the two Shrew plays, which have also recently been detected by Rene Weis in Shakespeare Unbound pg 177).

(I certainly plead ignorance regarding the depth of these arguments, but that answer to the Shylock question does seem similar to the “nonono, it’s not anti-Semitic, it’s showing us the dark side of anti-Semitism” case that we’ve spoken of.)

Hudson goes on to add, “The only person who has ever considered Amelia  Bassano was the Russian critic Gililov, who  identified the Shakespearean quality of her poetry (The Shakspeare Game pgs 305-312) then decided as a lower class woman she could not have written it, even though she was educated by a duchess and a countess from the age of 7. Once you have read the two documents will be happy to talk further, and yes please use it in your blog, I would like to get the public debate going!!”

[John did attach two PDF documents for me, but I don’t have a good way to attach them to this post.  Perhaps if he is reading he can provide links.]

Thank you to John Hudson for his response, and the boatload of reference material he provided.  I’ve got some reading to do.