Love and Disillusionment: As You Like It and Twelfth Night

Shakespeare ◽  
1993 ◽  
pp. 120-135
Author(s):  
Susan Bassnett
Keyword(s):  
Twelfth Night ◽  
As You Like It

scholarly journals Deconstruction of the Construction: Derridean Study of Selected Shakespeare’s Comedies

2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 90-120
Author(s):  
Seyyedeh Zahra Nozen ◽  
Pegah Sheikhalipour
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
The Other ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Cultural Norms ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
Twelfth Night ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
As You Like It ◽  
Historical Figure ◽  
The One

Since it was first introduced by Jacques Derrida in the late 1960s, deconstruction, as a method of reading, has been applied to literary texts by critics to reveal the hidden messages of texts and provide opportunities to rethink textual and cultural norms and conventions. While the western tradition has always prioritized tragedy over comedy due to its elegance and graveness, this research tends to focus on comedy as an entity in itself. Tragedy, especially in the Shakespearean sense of the word, has been considered by critics as a “construction” that is well-wrought and perfect in nature. Comedy, on the other hand, is notable for laughing at the laughable and mocking the unfit. Put differently, there has always been a latent, freewheeling “deconstruction” within comedy, especially the Shakespearean. There is, thus, an attempt here to prove, on the one hand, how comedy can be put forth not as an inferior genre but as a supplement to tragedy and, on the other, how comedy moves toward deconstruction and how it tends to subvert or deconstruct the constructions. Investigating a selection of Shakespeare’s comedies including As You Like It, The Merchant of Venice, and Twelfth Night, this study compares and contrasts Shakespearean comedy in light of some Derridean concepts. Along with it, Shakespearean ideas and concepts which are interconnected with those of Derrida are introduced and are buttressed through some meticulously chosen excerpts. Bearing in mind that Derrida is in a habit of deconstructing the so-called established creeds, Shakespeare’s texts are exposed to a deconstructive reading to examine how deceptively simple ideas are dealt with in his selected comedies. Also, as numerous enigmas have for years revolved around the personality of William Shakespeare, this study also aims to take up certain critical idioms of the Derridean canon, elaborate on them and then relate them to the selected plays from the Shakespearean oeuvre in order to disclose some personal aspects of Shakespeare’s personality as a historical figure.

scholarly journals Examining Rosalind/Ganymede’s and Viola/Cesario’s Disguised Bodies in Shakespeare’s As You Like It and Twelfth Night

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 78
Author(s):  
Tri Murniati
Keyword(s):  
Human Body ◽  
Primary Data ◽  
Twelfth Night ◽  
As You Like It ◽  
Primary Data Source ◽  
New Meanings ◽  
Data Source

In this article, I explore the disguised body in two of Shakespeare’s comedies As You Like It and Twelfth Night. Since the human body can be problematized, it is worth trying to examine Rosalind’s and Viola’s disguised bodies under the lens of Erving Goffman’s dramaturgy theory. This theory examines how people present themselves differently depending on their circumstances. In contextualizing the exploration of the disguised bodies, I employ the script of As You Like It and Twelfth Night as the primary data source. The result shows that both main characters in the plays disguise themselves as men and their disguised bodies symbolize new meanings namely safety and freedom. Rosalind’s and Viola’s symbolic bodies have transformed into agentic bodies from which these bodies enable them to help the men they love. The agentic quality of Rosalind’s and Viola’s bodies lies in their ability to manage, control, and present their bodies by whom they interact.

Shakespeare's Cinema of Love

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. S. White
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
Romeo And Juliet ◽  
Scholarly Book ◽  
Twelfth Night ◽  
Love Stories ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
As You Like It ◽  
Modern Media ◽  
Original Argument

This entertaining and scholarly book takes as its theme the original argument that Shakespeare’s generic innovations in dramatizing love stories have found their way, through various cultural channels, into the films of Hollywood in the first half of the twentieth century and, more recently, Bollywood. It does not deal primarily with individual cinematic allusions to Shakespeare’s plays, nor ‘the Shakespeare film’ as a distinct, heritage genre, nor with ‘adaptation’ as a straightforward process, but rather the ways in which the film industry is implicitly indebted to the generic shapes of a number of Shakespearean forms based on comedy and romance dealing with love. Particular plays such as The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, As You Like It, and Romeo and Juliet all powerfully entered the genres of mainstream movies through their compelling emotional structures and underlying conceptualisations of love. Drawing on dozens of examples from films, both mainstream and less familiar, the book opens up rich, new ways of understanding the pervasive influence of Shakespeare on modern media and culture, and more generally on our conventions of romantic love. It is such connections that make Shakespeare a potent ‘brand’ and international influence in 2016, even 400 years after his death.

Green Comedy

2018 ◽  
pp. 249-262
Author(s):  
Steve Mentz
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Natural Order ◽  
Natural Structure ◽  
Twelfth Night ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
The Past ◽  
As You Like It ◽  
Order And Disorder ◽  
Ecological Thinking

The marriage-driven and reconciliatory structures of Shakespeare’s comic form resemble traditional ecological understandings of the interconnections in nature. Over the past forty years, literary ecocriticism has explored parallels between the way literary texts are formed and ecological structures. One seminal claim that helped launch the ecocritical movement in the 1970s was biologist Joseph Meeker’s assertion that comedy is the genre of ecological harmony. This chapter tests Meeker’s adaptive theory by looking at As You Like It, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, and Two Gentlemen of Verona. Putting Meeker’s sentimental notions of natural harmony in touch with post-equilibrium ecological thinking and twenty-first-century ecocritical work that recognizes catastrophe as a ‘natural’ structure produces a more dynamic notion of comedy. By juxtaposing green pastoral spaces with their blue oceanic opposites, Shakespeare’s comedies offer global and expansive notions of natural order and disorder, ones better suited to an age of ecological disaster.

Song in Shakespeare

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gavin Alexander
Keyword(s):  
Rhetorical Theory ◽  
Twelfth Night ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
As You Like It ◽  
Measure For Measure ◽  
The Way

This chapter explores the place of song within Shakespeare’s plays. It also considers Shakespeare’s songs as texts, because their ontological oddity—the way they raise questions about what they are doing in their dramatic setting—is bound up with various kinds of textual oddity. Songs in As You Like It, Othello, Measure for Measure, and Twelfth Night are examined closely and related to the classical rhetorical theory of prosopopoeia or personation. Song is used by Shakespeare to explore the ways we understand and perform identity. The characters in a song, the characters in a play, the actors who played them, the writers and musicians, the scribes and printers, the oral and literary traditions that produced the plays as written, as variously performed in Shakespeare’s day, and as printed—all determine and inflect the words of Shakespeare’s songs. We must situate the personae that speak or sing in his songs between all these various agencies.

scholarly journals Identity in Shakespeare

2012 ◽  
pp. 33
Author(s):  
Jay L. Halio
Keyword(s):  
King Lear ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
Romeo And Juliet ◽  
Twelfth Night ◽  
Her Family ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
As You Like It ◽  
Course Of Action ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
Antic Disposition

This paper surveys the problems of identity in a number of Shakespeare’s plays, such as The Taming of the Shrew, The Comedy of Errors, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, The Merchant of Venice, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and Othello. In these plays as in many others, Shakespeare explores the complexity of identity, not only through the use of disguise, as in the major comedies, but also through the problems of self-knowledge. The latter issue is prominent and explicit in King Lear when, for example, Lear asks “Who is it that can tell me who I am?” The opening words of Hamlet, “Who’s there?” introduce the problem from the outset, and much of the play is given over to characters trying to discover who the others in the play really are. Is the Ghost an honest ghost, or “a goblin damned?” Is Hamlet really mad or just putting on an “antic disposition” as he struggles to discover his proper course of action as his father’s avenger? Is Kate really a shrew, or just made to act like one by her family and others?

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