As You Like It

This article refers to the play. For other uses, see As You Like It (disambiguation)

Scene from As you like it, Francis Hayman, c. 1750.

William Shakespeare's As You Like It is a pastoral comedy written in 1599 or early 1600.

Performance and Publication

The play was entered into the Register of the Stationers Company on August 4, 1600; but it was not printed till its inclusion in the First Folio in 1623.

There is no certain record of any performance before the Restoration. There is one possible performance, however, at Wilton House in Wiltshire, the country seat of the Earls of Pembroke. William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke hosted James I and his Court at Wilton House from October to December 1603, while London was suffering an epidemic of bubonic plague. The King's Men were paid £30 to come to Wilton House and perform for the King and Court on December 2, 1603. A Herbert family tradition holds that the play acted that night was As You Like It.

In the Restoration era, the King's Company was assigned the play by royal warrant in 1669. It is known to have been acted at Drury Lane in 1723, in an adapted form called Love in a Forest; Colley Cibber played Jaques. Another Drury Lane production seventeen years later returned to the Shakespearean text (1740).

Notable recent productions of As You Like It include the 1936 Old Vic Theatre production starring Edith Evans and the 1961 Shakespeare Memorial Theatre production starring Vanessa Redgrave. The longest running Broadway production starred Katharine Hepburn as Rosalind and Ernest Thesiger as Jacques and was directed by Michael Benthall. It ran for 145 performances in 1950.

Character List

• Duke Senior - in banishment
• Duke Frederick - his brother and usurper
• Amiens - attending lord
• Jaques - attending lord
• Oliver - eldest son of Sir Rowland de Boys
• Jaques de Boys - second son of Sir Rowland de Boys
• Orlando - youngest son of Sir Rowland de Boys
• Le Beau - a courtier attending on Duke Frederick
• Charles - a wrestler at court
• Adam - an old servant to Sir Rowland de Boys
• Dennis - a servant to Oliver
• Touchstone - a court fool
• Sir Oliver Martext - a country curate
• Corin & Silvius - shepherds
• William - a country fellow
• Hymen - god of marriage
• Rosalind - daughter of Duke Senior
• Celia - daughter of Duke Frederick
• Phebe - a shepherdess
• Audrey - a country wench

Source: "As You Like It" Ed. Frances E. Dolan, Penguin.

Setting

The play is set in a duchy in France, but most of the action takes place in a location called the 'Forest of Arden', which is a toponym for a forest close to Shakespeare's home town of Stratford-upon-Avon. The Oxford Shakespeare edition rationalizes this geographical discrepancy by assuming that 'Arden' is an anglicisation of the forested Ardennes region of Belgium, and alters the spelling to reflect this. Other editions keep Shakespeare's 'Arden' spelling, since it can be argued that the pastoral genre depicts a fantastical world in which geographical details are irrelevant.

Furthermore, Shakespeare's mother's name was Mary Arden, and the name of the forest may also be a pun on that.

There once was a retarded fucker who lived in some shithole called "London". His name was Bastard and he was such an ugly ass guy, that no girl would ever fall in love with him. So, seeing that no girl liked him, he began looking at guys. He was one gay-son-of-a-bitch! he looked at guys and he touvhed them in weird places. He is known for raping a little buy named, steve.

   One day, shakespear saw the little mother fucker, and asked what was wrong. Steve was smiling and said that he was raped by some horny ugly bastard across the street. This made shakespeare really happy. He went across the street and saw Bastard. Once they saw each other, it was like love at first sight. They raped each other near the garbage cans and rolled around in front of everyone. It is said that even today, you can see them fucking each other near those smelly garbage looneys.

Critical response

Critics from Samuel Johnson to George Bernard Shaw have complained that As You Like It is lacking in the high artistry of which Shakespeare was capable. Shaw liked to think that Shakespeare wrote the play as a mere crowdpleaser, and signalled his own middling opinion of the work by calling it As You Like It — as if the playwright did not agree. Tolstoy objected to the immorality of the characters, and Touchstone's constant clowning. Despite these high-profile naysayers, the play remains one of Shakespeare's most frequently performed comedies.

The elaborate gender reversals in the story are of particular interest to modern critics interested in gender studies. Through four acts of the play, Rosalind — who in Shakespeare's day would have been played by a boy — finds it necessary to disguise herself as a boy, whereupon the rustic Phoebe (also played by a boy), becomes infatuated with this "Ganymede", a name with homoerotic overtones. In fact, the epilogue, spoken by Rosalind to the audience, states rather explicitly that she (or at least the actor playing her) is not a woman.

Language

Act II, Scene 7 features one of Shakespeare's most famous monologues, which states:

"All the world's a stage

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances,

And one man in his time plays many parts,

His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,

Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms:

And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel

And shining morning face, creeping like snail

Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,

Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad

Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,

Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,

Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,

Seeking the bubble reputation

Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,

In fair round belly with good capon lin'd,

With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,

Full of wise saws and modern instances;

And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts

Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,

With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,

His youthful hose, well sav'd, a world too wide

For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,

Turning again toward childish treble, pipes

And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,

That ends this strange eventful history,

Is second childishness and mere oblivion;

Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans everything."

This famous monologue is spoken by the melancholy Jaques. Comparing life to a play, it goes on to catalogue the seven stages of man's life: infant, school-boy, lover, soldier, justice, pantaloon, and second childhood, "sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything", sans meaning "without".

As You Like It also features much humorous and clever wordplay, occasioned by chance encounters in the forest, and several entangled love affairs, all in a serene pastoral setting which makes it often especially effective staged outdoors in a park or similar site.

Pastoral form

The theme of pastoral comedy is love in all its guises in a rustic setting, the genuine love embodied by Rosalind contrasted with the sentimentalized affectations of Orlando, and the improbable happenings that set the urban courtiers wandering to find exile, solace or freedom in a woodland setting are no more unrealistic than the string of chance encounters in the forest, provoking witty banter, which require no subtleties of plotting and character development. The main action of the first act is no more than a wrestling match, and the action throughout is often interrupted by a song. At the end, Hymen himself arrives to bless the wedding festivities.

The stock characters in conventional situations were familiar material for Shakespeare and his audience; it is the light repartee and the breadth of the subjects that provide texts for wit that put a fresh stamp on the proceedings. At the centre the optimism of Rosalind is contrasted with the misogynistic melancholy of Jaques. Shakespeare would take up some of the themes more seriously later: the usurper Duke and the Duke in exile provide themes for Measure for Measure and The Tempest.

Radio and Film

See also As You Like It, on screen.

According to the history of radio station WCAL in the U.S. state of Minnesota, As You Like It may have been the first play ever broadcast. It went over the air in 1922.

As You Like It was Laurence Olivier's first Shakespeare film, though he only acted in it, rather than producing and directing. Made in the UK and released in 1936, the film also starred director Paul Czinner's wife Elizabeth Bergner, who played Rosalind with a thick German accent. Although it is much less "Hollywoody" than the 1930's versions of A Midsummer Night's Dream and Romeo and Juliet, and although its cast was made up entirely of Shakespearean actors, it was not considered a success by either Olivier or the critics.

In 1992 Christine Edzard made another film adaptation of the play. It features James Fox, Cyril Cusack, Griff Rhys Jones and Ewen Bremner. The action is transposed to a modern and bleak urban world.

A new film of As You Like It was released in 2006, directed by Kenneth Branagh [1].

External links

• As You Like It - searchable e-text
• As You Like it - HTML version of this title.
• As You Like it - plain vanilla text from Project Gutenberg
• Ian Johnston, "Variations on a Theme of Love: An Introduction to As You Like It" an introduction to the play and to pastoral comedy as a genre
• Lesson plans for As You Like It at Web English Teacher