As You Like It

Summary:

Rosalind, the daughter of the deposed Duke Senior, is forced to flee the court of her usurping uncle along with her cousin Celia. At the same time, Orlando, a subject of the dukedom who’s recently fallen head over heels for Rosalind, is forced to leave his home after being persecuted by his older brother. Both parties end up in the Forest of Arden where the exiled Duke happens to be living alongside a collection of loyalist lords. Rosalind, in disguise as a young man named Ganymede, continues her pursuit of Orlando, leading him on a merry romantic chase through the woods. Eventually, Rosalind and Orlando are united, Orlando saves his brother’s life and earns his love and respect, and Duke Senior is restored to his rightful throne. The play ends with the literal god of weddings descending from the heavens and overseeing the nuptials of no less than four pairings.

What It’s About:

Do not trust appearances 

As You Like It is certainly one of Shakespeare’s lighter plays. That’s not to say there isn’t a lot going on in the text, but especially on the heels of something as weighty and dramatic as Julius Caesar, there’s a certain effervescent quality to the play. As with a lot of Shakespearean comedies, you get hit with a number of familiar tropes - notably cross-dressing, an extremely witty Fool character, and of course more weddings than you can shake a stick at. As You Like it may have the distinction of being the easiest resolved play though. The driving non-Romantic tensions of the play are twofold; the first, that Rosalind’s father, the Duke Senior, has been deposed by his younger brother, and the second, that Orlando is persecuted and denied his rightful inheritance from his older brother. Both of these are resolved entirely offstage; the Duke’s brother has a sudden religious conversion, and Orlando saves his brother’s life from a lioness (again, entirely offstage), and is welcomed back with open arms. I know my summary up there seems to just end, but the issues of the play really just are that simply resolved.

This is not to say that the play is bad - quite the opposite. All that energy saved on plotting goes into developing some of Shakespeare’s most memorable characters, not least of which is Rosalind, who has the distinction of having the most lines of any female character in Shakespeare’s plays. And not just lines - really good ones at that. Rosalind has an absolute razor wit, and in a play that thrives on word games, jokes, and mistaken identities, she always seems to be at least two steps ahead of everyone else. She spends a good chunk of the dramatic action of the play disguised as a male youth named Ganymede, and through this false identity gets to play with and against a huge variety of traditional stereotypes about gender - lending some social commentary that remains relevant even to this day.

Most notably, Rosalind’s romance with Orlando in the forest is a gold mine for directors looking to play with the typical limits of a heteronormative relationship. The two meet before they are both banished and fall instantly in love. However, they flee their homes separately, and so when Rosalind comes upon a lovesick Orlando in the forest pinning bad love poetry to trees, she’s already in disguise as Ganymede and goes unrecognized. In an attempt to ‘help’ the lovelorn youth, she offers to ‘pretend’ to be Rosalind, so he can practice his wooing. The two then proceed to flirt for three acts of the play, engaging in a merry little dance as Rosalind strips the romantic Orlando of some of his delusions around courtly, romantic love. The question for the director is: does Orlando catch on to the ruse, or as he flirts with what he thinks is a young man, is there a homoerotic tension that develops there? And if you think that this is just casting Shakespeare’s prose out of context in a modern light, keep in mind two things. First, the name ‘Ganymede’ was an Elizabethan slang term for a young man who was the object of an older man’s affections. And second, in Shakespeare’s time the actor playing Rosalind would have in fact been a man - something alluded to in Rosalind’s speech at the end of the play, and that adds a whole additional level of gender trickery.

If This Were A Movie:

As You Like It is a very good example of what was called in Shakespeare’s time a ‘Pastoral’ play - noted for its focus on an idyllic countryside. These plays idealized a rural, simple lifestyle, one closer to nature (and, implicitly or otherwise, God) and frequently featured characters escaping from their busy lives at court or in the city to learn some valuable lessons about living humbly from a shepherd. Of course, Shakespeare is Shakespeare and can’t help but put some spin on it - the only shepherds we meet are involved in a bitter love triangle with Rosalind at the center - but on the whole, the form still holds. Our heroes abandon their turbulent lives at court to escape to a simpler existence, where everything is quite literally solved by magic.

At a glance, it seems like this is a genre that hasn’t quite made it to modern times. This isn’t quite true of course - you could argue that the distinction of ‘Real America’ so popular in the media these days is a direct descendant of this line of thinking. But nonetheless we don’t have an entire genre of film and television dedicated to it anymore.

Or do we? After all, I can think of a genre where characters flee to a rustic lifestyle to escape their big city problems. I can think of a genre where problems, such as they even exist, always seemed to be solved in the easiest way possible, as if by magic. I can think of a genre that always seems to end in a wedding. That’s right friends, As You Like It was Shakespeare’s Hallmark movie.

The Line From The Play That You Know:

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 - 2.7.139-142

Arguably one of the single most famous lines in all of Shakespeare’s work, and certainly one of the most quoted, finds its home in this play. It’s delivered by Jacques, who along with Rosalind gets all the best lines and is one of the breakout roles in the play. Jacques is a melancholy and generally morose fellow, and he typically is played with a dry and deadpan delivery - the straight man to all the madcap antics the rest of the characters get up to. The speech itself lays out how a person plays many parts from birth to death, with each stage from childhood to obsolescence characterized as an ‘act,’ like you’d find within a play.

The Line You Should Know:

For I must tell you friendly in your ear,

Sell when you can; you are not for all markets. 3.5.59-60

No one writes an insult like Shakespeare. The above is delivered, unsurprisingly, by Rosalind to the shepherdess Phoebe, who’s fallen madly in love with Ganymede, her false identity. Phoebe is in turn pursued by Silvius, another young shepherd who lives in the forest, and Rosalind is advising Phoebe to stop scorning his advances and take what she can get. As mentioned above, Rosalind gets most of the best lines in the play (that don’t go to Jacques), and truly does seem to spend most of her stage time making jokes at everyone else’s expense.

Notable Adaptation:

I have to confess I’m not very familiar with the filmic adaptations of As You Like It - there’s only a handful circulating, to generally average reviews. Instead, I’d like to direct you to this recording of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s performance of the play from 1985 (I think, it’s a bootleg so hard to track down an exact date). This recording is most notable for featuring Alan Rickman in the role of Jacques. If you haven’t, I strongly encourage you to scroll back up and give it a listen. He’s absolutely flawless, and one of those perfect castings you lament not getting the chance to see. He finds the character’s voice perfectly, and I have to confess even before I knew he’d played the role, I was already reading Jacques in my head with Rickman’s signature dry delivery and absolute deadpan.

General Notes:

I doubt you’re reading along with these blogs - I don’t know if I’ve come out and said this, but this entire project is essentially a side effect of me wanting to read every Shakespeare play, and I can’t imagine there’s too many people out there who are keen to sign up for that - but if you were to ever make an exception I’d say you could do a lot worse than picking up As You Like It. I haven’t read it since college, and as I was going through it again I was genuinely shocked at just how readable it is. Now, part of this is that over the course of this experiment I’ve gotten a lot more used to Shakespeare’s language, but I also think that the play itself is just genuinely very accessible. There’s not too much plot to follow - as mentioned it all gets tied up rather nicely - and what’s left is just a very good writer getting to really settle into writing dialogue for some characters he clearly loved. 

And make no mistake - Shakespeare’s fondness for Rosalind shines through on the page. It’s been said you can pick out a writer’s favorite characters by noting who gets the best lines, and if that’s the case then those two stand head and shoulders above the rest. Rosalind, as mentioned, is the rhetorical center of the play, the clear protagonist who not only stays ahead of everyone, but frequently drags the plot along with her, moving the play through its paces simply by dragging it around in her orbit. Of particular note is the ending, and specifically how some modern directors chose to frame it. As the various plots are wrapping up and no less than four weddings are coming to fruition, the literal god of marriage makes an entrance and performs the ceremonies, pairing people off and blessing their respective unions. Now, at a glance this is just a bit of wacky, deus-ex-machina hand-waving, but some modern directors chose to take a different approach. Instead, the have Rosalind dress up a character who appeared earlier in the play as this so-called god of marriage, and wheel him in on a ludicrous contraption as part of a grand con Rosalind seems to be running. It certainly casts the ending in a different light, but considering she’s manipulated three of these four couples into existence, it’s certainly not out of character for her to keep running circles around the rest of the cast.

Some critics of the play, claiming this as one of his lesser works, have levied the idea that Shakespeare essentially wrote As You Like It as a cash in. Pastoral plays were fairly popular, and to their way of thinking this was a simple kind of crowd pleaser. They argue he even hid a clue to this in the title of the play; As YOU (the audience) Like It. While it’s impossible to know, I certainly don’t put a lot of stock into the theory. Yes, the play is accessible, and yes, crowds probably did like it, but I think Shakespeare clearly liked it pretty well too, or else he wouldn’t have poured so much into what is unquestionably one of his strongest female protagonists (to say nothing of feed some incredible speeches to Jacques). Moreover, the play is still a pastoral play - it is breezy and consequence free. Problems are easily solved, rulers are restored to their rightful seats, four couples end up happily married - blessed by a god no less - and the whole ordeal ends happily for everyone. If you had to live within the world of the play, is that not how you’d like it?

A Monologue For the Road
It is not the fashion to see the lady the epilogue,

But it is no more unhandsome than to see the lord the pro-

Logue. If it be true that good wine needs no bush, ‘tis true

That a good play needs no epilogue. Yet to good wine they do

Use good bushes, and good plays prove the better by the help

Of good epilogues. - 5.4.190-195