As You Like It
nd
2 Lecture
Experimental Theater?
Play among the first to be performed
on the stage of the Globe (1599)
Seeing play vs. reading it
• AYLI very much depends on our seeing it.
• In theater the play can seem quite satisfying,
even moving if Rosalind is well played.
• In reading we encounter lots of curious stuff, not
all of which still works.
• E.g., Touchstone’s riff on the seven types of
quarreling in V.4. 68ff. (“retort courteous”
through “lie direct”).
• And other topical jokes, mainly in Touchstone’s
part, some in Jaques’.
• The play demands a lively, witty Rosalind and an
appealing Orlando.
Play as experimental theater
• We notice how little plot there really is.
• Classic beginning sense of a world awry, the Cain and
Abel pattern of brothers murderously at each other’s
throats.
• Moving to a magic green world where everything seems
suspended.
• And pastoral virtues can prevail: (in Duke Senior’s
formulation) “tongues in trees, sermons in stones,/
Books in the running brooks, and good in everything.”
• Toward the end of the play, Oliver is converted in what
looks like a parody of pastoral action: the snake, the lion,
Orlando’s rescue of him.
• And Duke Frederick, as Jaques de Boys tells us, simply
comes in contact with the pastoral forest and an old
religious man and is converted.
• Pastoral is magically effective.
Experimental theater (continued)
• Once we enter pastoral world, in Act II, the plot seems to
stop.
• Instead, lots of talk.
• Songs (more than in any other of Shakespeare’s plays).
• Bad poetry recited: III.2.85-92, 121ff.
• And parodied: 98ff. And mocked, 161ff.
• Wooing: Orlando of “Ganymede,” Silvius of Phebe (and
Phebe of Ganymede), Touchstone of Audrey (rhymes
with bawdry).
• And mockery of wooing: IV.1.63ff, 135ff.
• And of literary traditions; IV.1.88ff.
• And more talk.
• And finally, the marriage Masque of Hymen.
Jaques’ “seven ages of man” in the
Globe
• A set piece, a sort of theatrical “aria.”
• “All the world’s a stage” – perhaps a cliché.
• But it translates, “Totus mundus agit histrionem,”
the motto of The Globe.
• In theater the audience sees itself, understands
its theatrical role.
• So we’re aware that the speech reflects the
audience; we’re included in the theatricality.
• New Globe production of the play a few years
ago: the schoolboys, then everybody else.
• The pat entrance of Orlando and Adam at end.
• But the inadequacy of the speech to define
them.
Jaques as character
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Completely extraneous to the plot.
His name.
Related to contemporary fashion for satire: II.7.58ff.
But his satire is general (ll. 70ff) – and therefore
toothless?
Satire of the fashion for satire?
Jaques also represents parody of the fashion for
melancholy: he “can suck melancholy from a song, as a
weasel sucks eggs” (II.5).
Orlando and he are like oil and water: III.2.248.
The mocker mocked.
Comes he comes in for mockery from Rosalind in IV.1.
And when Orlando enters, Jaques leaves: “God be with
you an you speak in blank verse”
And at end, “I am for other than for dancing measures.”
Touchstone
• Will Kemp (played Falstaff, Dogberry, other
“clown” roles) had left the Lord Chamberlain’s
company. (Danced a jig all the way to Norwich.)
• And was replaced by Robert Armin, who was
physically Kemp’s opposite.
• Armin known for his singing voice, sharp wit.
• Would go on to play Feste in Twelfth Night, the
gravedigger in Hamlet, the Fool in King Lear.