As You Like It
As You Like It is one of the most popular and frequently performed plays of Shakespeare. It
is a romantic comedy and its main theme is love in all its forms. As in most of Shakespeare’s
comedies the majority of the characters end up marrying one another, just as in the tragedies
most of the characters end up dead. It’s a play which for the most part has a pastoral setting
in a forest and it praises the simple rustic life away from the cares of the court. As in many
of the comedies, like Twelfth Night for example, the heroine, Rosalind dresses up as a boy and
there are mistaken identities.
No certain record where the first performance took place. It may have been in Richmond
Palace on 20 February 1599, acted by the Lord Chamberlain’s men.
First printed in 1623 in the First Folio. In 1669, during the Restoration, play assigned to
the King’s Company by royal warrant.
Known to have been performed at Drury Lane in 1723 in an adapted form: called Love in
a Forest. But 17 years later Drury Lane returned to the original Shakespeare text.
Role of Rosalind, along with Cleopatra, is one of the longest women’s roles in Shakespeare
and has been played by many great actresses including Edith Evans, Vanessa Redgrave and
Helen Mirren. She dominates the play. So fully realized is she in the complexity of her
emotions, the subtlety of her thought, and the fullness of her character that no one else in the
play matches up to her. Rosalind is a particular favorite among feminist critics, who admire her
ability to subvert the limitations that society imposes on her as a woman. With boldness and
imagination, she disguises herself as a young man for the majority of the play in order to woo
the man she loves and instruct him in how to be a more accomplished, attentive lover—a
tutorship that would not be welcome from a woman. In fact, unlike most of Shakespeare’s
plays there are four good roles for women in As You Like It.
Play was filmed in 1936 with Laurence Olivier and a German actress Elisabeth Bergner who
played it with a thick German accent. Olivier thought the film a failure. Kenneth Branagh
made a film of it in 2006 set in 19th century Japan and there was a BBC TV production with
Helen Mirren.
One avant garde production had mirrors for the Forest of Arden instead of trees. Clock that
didn’t tick. Outside of time. Forest where the characters looked in on themselves.
Also a production with an all male cast.
Also a musical version and a Japanese style manga novel version set in modern China.
Play has received varied responses from critics. Samuel Johnson and Bernard Shaw said it
lacked the high artistry of which Shakespeare was capable. Tolstoy objected to the
immorality of the characters. A number of modern critics interested in gender studies have
been interested in the gender reversals in the play.
Play is unusual for Shakespeare in that 55% of the play is in prose and only 45% in
verse. Also unusual in that aristocrats often speak in prose and country folk often use verse.
But it does have one of Shakespeare’s most famous verse speeches, All the World’s a Stage.
There are also more songs in the play than in any other Shakespeare play - It was a Lover
and His Lass, and Blow, Blow Thou Winter Wind, for example.
Source of the play: The play is based on a novel by Thomas Lodge called Rosalyne,
published in 1590 and that in turn was based on The Tale of Gamelyn wrongly attributed to
Chaucer. Lodge’s novel is almost identical with the play but without the characters of
Touchstone, the jester and Jaques.
Setting: Like Lodge’s novel, the play is supposed to take place in France and the Forest of
Arden is probably an anglicized version of the Ardennes although Shakespeare could also
have chosen this name because Arden was his mother’s maiden name.
Plot: The plot is rather complicated but becomes clearer when you actually see the play. I’ll
try to give a brief outline of the main story lines.
Groups of characters:
1. Exiled Duke Senior and his followers, Jaques and Amiens. Senior is also the father of
Rosalind.
2. Usurping Duke Frederick, younger brother of Duke Senior. Celia, his daughter,
Touchstone his court jester, a wrestler called Charles.
3. The family of the deceased Sir Rowland de Boys: Oliver, eldest son, Jacques (hardly
appears), Orlando, youngest son and hero of the play.
4. Country folk in the Forest of Arden: Phebe a shepherdess, Silvius a shepherd, Audrey
a simple minded country girl. Corin an old shepherd, some :minor characters
5 Hymen, goddess of :marriage
*****
Duke Frederick has usurped his elder brother, Duke Senior and exiled him from court to the
Forest of Arden. But Rosalind, Duke Senior’s daughter, has been allowed to remain at court
because she is the bosom friend of Frederick’s daughter, Celia.
Orlando, who is the youngest son of the dead Sir Rowland de Boys has also been
persecuted. In his case it’s by his nasty eldest brother, Oliver who wants all the inheritance
for himself. Orlando escapes from him and turns up at Duke Frederick’s court where he takes
on the wrestler, Charles, in a wrestling match and wins. He meets Rosaland there and they’re
instantly attracted to one another. It’s love at first sight.
Duke Frederick becomes angry with Rosalind and banishes her from court. She leaves
with Celia and they disguise themselves. Celia becomes the country girl, Aliena and Rosalind
dresses as a boy and calls herself Ganymede, a name which has homoerotic overtones for
Ganymede in Greek mythology, was a boy whom Zeus abducted. We must remember that all
the female roles were played by boys in Shakespeare’s time.
Ganymede and Aliena go to the Forest of Arden and settle there in the cottage of an old
shepherd, Corin.
Also in the Forest is the exiled Duke Senior with his followers, including the melancholy
Jaques. Jaques is a melancholy philosopher. A loner who reflects cynically on life. He speaks
the famous All the World’s a Stage speech. In some ways he resembles Feste in Twelfth
Night.
But Orlando has also turned up in the Forest with his faithful old servant, Adam. He has
fallen passionately in love with Rosalind and carves her name on the trees. Rosalind meets
him in her disguise of Ganymede and in a witty dialogue teaches him how to be a better lover
while acting out the role of Rosalind. So she is Rosalind disguised as a man, disguised as
Rosalind. HE DOESN’T RECOGNIZE HER! Orlando is in love with Rosalind even while he
willingly participates in a romance with the beautiful Ganymede, a girlish boy who perhaps
appeals to Orlando more than does the woman he supposedly loves. Male homoeroticism
during the Renaissance, which Shakespeare explores liberally in his works, was a logical
consequence of the fear of female sexuality.
Silvius, the shepherd is passionately in love with Phebe the shepherdess who spurns him
because she’s fallen in love with Ganymede/Rosalind. Rosalind rebukes her very sternly.
Yet another couple in the Forest are Touchstone the jester and the simple country girl,
Audrey. Touchstone is in love with her and they have some typical tedious Shakespeare
style comic scenes with lots of puns but I’ll spare you the details.
Then Oliver, Orlando’s nasty brother turns up, hunting for Orlando to get rid of him But
Oliver is rather surprisingly attacked by a lioness and Orlando saves his life. As a result they
are immediately reconciled and all is forgiven and forgotten.
In Act V everything ends happily. Oliver sees Aliena alias Celia and immediately falls in
love with her. They agree to marry. Ganymede is transformed back into Rosalind and she
and Orlando marry. Phebe, realizing that Ganyede was a woman, agrees to marry Silvius and
Touchstone and Audrey marry. So there are four couples and their weddings are blessed by
the goddess, Hymen. Then it’s learned that Duke Frederick has repented and is restoring
Duke Senior to his dukedom while he adopts a religious life.
Jaques decides to remain in the Forest alone and reflect on life.
The play ends with a witty epilogue spoken by Rosalind, hoping that the play may please.
The last seven lines are very interesting.
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: and, I am sure, as many as have good
beards or good faces or sweet breaths will, for my
kind offer, when I make curtsy, bid me farewell.
In other words, the actor playing Rosalind is reminding us of a couple of things:
1.
He is not actually a "woman." He's a male actor, who plays the role of a woman who
cross-dresses as a boy and who lets Orlando pretend to woo "him."
2.
The men in the audience may very well be attracted to him and/or his gender-bending
character.Why does this matter? Well, even though Shakespeare ends the action of the play by
marrying off four heterosexual pairs, the epilogue reminds us that, when it comes to physical
attraction, the erotic possibilities in the play are endless. Shakespeare is also reminding us that
gender roles can be pretty slippery.
The play is about love in all its forms - love at first sight - Rosalind and Orlando, Oliver and
Celia, Phebe and Ganymede/Rosalind and it’s also about love between women as in Rosalind
and Celia’s deep bond. Touchstone and Audrey’s comic scenes are a parody of romantic love.