Chapt 6 Reading As You Like It Reading

Chapt 6 Reading As You Like It • Reading As You Like It: Themes and Issues • Love in As You Like It: Romantic Poetry / marriage • Disguise and Gender Confusion • Dramatic and Literary Conventions: Soliloquy / Pastoral • The Individual and Society • Comedy and its function in AYLI • AYLI in Performance • The Play in Process: From Workshop to Rehearsal to Performance Playing Shakespeare/ Playing Gender

Chapt 6 Reading As You Like It • As You Like It is a comedy which created many controversies among critics: • Ben Jonson, Bernard Shaw and Tolstoy consider Shakespeare’s tragedies and history plays more artistic than his comedies. • Aristotle considers tragedy more superior to comedy. • Yet AYLI was always a box-office among theater goers. • Theatrical function: the actual performance • Dramatic function: the impact of the lines and appearances in the course of the play eg: although Phoebe is a minor character, her dramatic function is manifold. She intensifies the comic confusion by falling in love with Rosalind disguised as Ganymede.

Chapt 6 Reading As You Like It • Literary and dramatic conventions employed by Shakespeare include • A parody of Petrarchan discourse in AYLI as in his sonnet 130 • Use of soliloquy and pastoral • Use of comedy

Chapt 6 Reading As You Like It • Two worlds prevail in AYLI: The real world of the Duke’s court and the ideal world of the Forest of Arden • The first world is characterized by intrigue and discord on the familial and state levels (Orlando and Oliver’s disputes; Duke Frederick and his banished brother, the old Duke; Duke Frederick’s animosity for Sir Rowland de Boys) • The ideal world is a better world where courtly rules are inapplicable, love prevails and old disagreements are mended.

Chapt 6 Reading As You Like It • There is a plot and a subplot: The major plot is the duke’s discord with his elder brother and the subplot is the brother Orlando and Oliver’s quarrel. • Paradoxically, the world of the court is not as orderly as it seems to appear. Frederick’s court is also turned upside down • ( Read p: 204 -5 SC and p: 64 AYLI )

Chapt 6 Reading As You Like It • The intrigue and loss of order at the court made Rosalind and Celia for the forest where they acquired a certain liberty (quote p: 70 AYLI) where the banished old duke roams with his merry company. • When Orlando was induced into a duel with Charles, the Duke Frederick showed compassion for him due to his weaker physique compared to his opponent (p: 60 AYLI) • However, when Orlando won the duel, Duke Frederick showed his contempt at his true identity (p: 62 AYLI)

Chapt 6 Reading As You Like It • Shakespeare uses a shift from prose to verse to connote this change of temperament of the duke, from a relaxed bearing to tension and stiffness. (read comment by A. Jarvis; p: 207 SC) • Stage directions emphasize certain dramatic aspects of the written text, like putting close Rosalind and Orlando who share the same lot (opposition to the duke)

Chapt 6 Reading As You Like It • Love in AYLI: • Shakespeare conforms to dramatic literary conventions of Eliz period: All the pairs of lovers in the play regard love as idealistic. • Rosalind and Orlando’s love is ideal • Silvius and Phoebe’s love is romantic, Petrarchan, unreciprocal. (quote p: 107 -9 AYLI) • Touchstone and Audrey’s love is lusty and passionate. • Celia and Oliver’s love is a romantic ‘coup de foudre’ ( quote, p: 128 AYLI) •

Chapt 6 Reading As You Like It • Romantic poetry in AYLI: • Every lover resorts to poetry to express his love • Orlando clumsily compiled mediocre lines and hang them on the trees to show his infatuation with Rosalind, the women were skeptical about it (quote p: 94 -5 AYLI) • Phoebe uses poetry to express her love for Ganymede and satirizes Silvius declarations of love to her (p: 107 -8 AYLI)

Chapt 6 Reading As You Like It • The function of marriage: • Marriage controls natural sexual appetites in civilized societies and so does it in AYLI, since all pairs of lovers ended being married • Rosalind, in her male disguise as Ganymede, arouses homoerotic tendencies. These tended to fade with the final marriages and thus the stress on the natural flow of life in heterosexual relations. • Veering from realism to romanticism (quote p: 129 AYLI)

Chapt 6 Reading As You Like It • The play ends with a masque (music and show) along with the epilogue, we are asked to take it and to interpret it as we like it • The final marriages represent a civil restoration from the pastoral life to the social communal life. Shakespeare is echoing Ibn Kuldun that “Man is sociable by nature”. One cannot remain in the forest, exiled from the civilized world forever. Thus the move from country to town. • Gender confusion of man loving man and woman loving woman is not valid anymore. This is anarchy and with the return to town, the order of natural heterosexual relationship is restored.

Chapt 6 Reading As You Like It • Disguise and gender confusion: • Dramatic irony and mistaken identity is at the core of disguise in Shakespeare’s works. • The disguise in AYLI relates to gender issues regarding love and it intensifies the tension between appearance and reality, nature and nurture. • When Rosalind disguised as Ganymede, her confidence increased and she adopted not only the looks of masculinity, but its attributes as well. She took the lead and became more active than Celia. (quote p: 76 AYLI)

Chapt 6 Reading As You Like It • Gender is a construct, since a doublet and hose signify masculinity and petticoat signifies femininity. It is just a matter of accoutrement, not of characteristics, of mere appearance! • During Shakespeare’s time, women were subservient, they were not entitled even to act on the stage. Thus, Rosalind’s male disguise allowed her to reveal her true personality and her views with no restrictions, and was the counselor of Orlando, was endowed with sagacity and judiciousness. These were thought to pertain to men only at that time.

Chapt 6 Reading As You Like It • Women subjugation is deemed a loss to society and humanity because her inactivity put her on the shelf, when she is in a position to make the society benefit from her dynamic involvement. Echoing Mary Wollstonecraft. • Rosalind’s disguise liberates her and she starts parodying masculine attitudes to women’s loquaciousness. (quote p: 97) • Rosalind’s overt expressions about women’s attitudes annoyed Celia (quote p: 117 AYLI p: 216 SC)

Chapt 6 Reading As You Like It • Celia considers Rosalind’s disguise and subsequent paroles about women a threat to the secure assumptions about men/women relationship. • Rosalind undermines gender expectations and shows the reality of love and marriage (quote “Men are April when they woo. . ” p: 116 AYLI) • Phoebe fell in love with Rosalind disguised as Ganymede. Rosalind parodies men’s attitude towards women with her cruelty of address to Phoebe. (quote p: 109 AYLI p: 217 SC)

Chapt 6 Reading As You Like It • Rosalind’s disguise is multi-layered: • We have the young man acting the role of a woman disguised as a man, pretending to be a woman for Orlando to woo and then returns to being woman at the end!! But is still in reality a boy ‘the page on stage’ (M. Shapiro 1976) • There is a comic value in these layers of disguise and gender confusion on a grand scale • Gender expectations are undermined when Rosalind speaks as Ganymede. She insists on masculinity and adopts a masculine voice. • Many modern critics tinged Shakespeare with misogyny and chauvinism, whereas he was satirizing gender expectations in his epoch and showing that gender is merely a construct.

Chapt 6 Reading As You Like It • Dramatic and literary conventions: • The use of soliloquy in AYLI: • Soliloquies reveal nature and nurture of characters to the audience. Eg: Orlando did not have a chance for a good education (nurture) ; yet, his (nature) is noble (quote, p: 55 Oliver’s soliloquy AYLI) • The only other soliloquy in the play is the epilogue spoken by Rosalind. It's rare to see Rosalind nowadays played by a boy, although there have been all-male productions in modern times. And so the epilogue is often omitted or edited. As it stands, the boy actor's offer to kiss the desirable grown men in the audience ("If I were a woman") gives the last words of the play an ironic and erotic resonance that challenges gently the heterosexual weddings we have just celebrated.

Chapt 6 Reading As You Like It • Dramatic and literary conventions: • Pastoral and political critique in AYLI: • Pastoral romances were ‘en vogue’ in the Renaissance period. • (quote Wynne-Davies p: 221 SC) • Pastoral can act as semi-allegories which according to Annabel Patterson facilitates explicit criticism • A. Latham argues that AYLI can be attributed to the troubled period of Queen Elizabeth’s reign in 1559 -1601, when the earl of Essex attempted two coups d'état. • Not only social critique, but political critique may be embedded in the pastoral

Chapt 6 Reading As You Like It • Dramatic and literary conventions: • Pastoral and political critique in AYLI: • The pastoral form can serve a political function. In AYLI, it shows the corruption of Duke Frederick’s court and shows how Orlando is part of the older code of honor and chivalry. His virtues can envenom him in this world of intrigue, discord and envy. (quote p: 73 AYLI ) • Even the servant Adam is loyal and virtuous by nature, a trait which disappeared from the ‘civilized’ world. (quote p: 75 AYLI) • At the end of the play, the old disagreements were mended and not a new order prevails, but rather a re-establishment of the old order. The usurped dukedom returns to the Duke Senior.

Chapt 6 Reading As You Like It • Dramatic and literary conventions: • Is country life better than town life? • Country life is only good relatively to the life at the court which is full of bitterness. This is obvious in Armiens’ reply to the Duke Senior (quote p: 70 AYLI) • Pastoral and its anti-pastoral or its antithesis: • The pastoral is not so ideal as it seems. The shepherd Corin asserted that he has a master that he serves who is an absent landlord, who cares not about his servants → Hierarchy prevails as in towns in this so-called ideal pastoral life.

Chapt 6 Reading As You Like It • Dramatic and literary conventions: • Touchstone does not hold a high esteem for the country life either (quote p: 76 AYLI) • Later, (p: 90) he admits to its good side and to its bad side, eg: it is in the open air, but it lacks the wealth of the court life. • Contrast between civilization (court) and nature (forest). This embeds the tension between individual and society

Chapt 6 Reading As You Like It • The individual and society: • Jacques the melancholy is a mere observer, puts himself on the margin and comments sadly upon all that is around him with no involvement • At the end when everybody leaves the forest, he stays behind. Unlike all the group in the forest, he does not recognize civilized life in the community. He keeps on his relentless search for individual experience

Chapt 6 Reading As You Like It • Jacques has an anti social view of humanity and remained unpartenered throughout , and so decided to remain in the forest. His melancholic, pessimistic view to human life kept him isolated and alienated from the rest. He was ‘anti-pastoral, anti-love’ • Orlando sees the forest a barren land ‘desert’ and finds no spirituality as in the ‘bells that knoll to the church in town’ • Community life is more important than individual life.

Chapt 6 Reading As You Like It • Comedy and its function in AYLI: • Comedy releases tension • Freud: We laugh about things on the stage when the misfortune does not affect us. This is not just personal, it is communal as well particularly in the holidays enjoyed by all, which constitute a release from the everyday world. • The structure of the Shakespearean comedy: • Quote Kernan’s suggestion of the three movements in AYLI, (p: 233 SC)