Reification and Utopia in As You Like It: Desire and Textuality in the Green World

1996 ◽  
pp. 181-212
Author(s):  
Hugh Grady
Keyword(s):  
As You Like It ◽  
Green World

scholarly journals COMMEDIA DELL'ARTE AND ITS IMPACT ON SHAKESPEARE’S PASTORAL COMEDY AS YOU LIKE IT

2021 ◽  
Vol XII (35) ◽  
pp. 63-85
Author(s):  
Milena Kaličanin ◽  
Hristina Aksentijevic
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Romantic Comedy ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
As You Like It ◽  
The World ◽  
Earth Goddess ◽  
Green World

The paper explores the origins, development and basic genre features of сommedia dell'arte. The first part of the paper deals with the archetypal comic elements of сommedia dell'arte. The historical significance of this type of comedy, as Pandolfi (1957) stresses, lies in the fact that it unequivocally confirms the autonomy of theatrical art by imposing the neverending quest for the freedom to critically examine all the aspects of social life without any dose of censorship or limitations. Its comic pattern has the roots in the grotesque and absurdity of real life, which allows for the actors to fully affirm their artistic aspirations. Shakespeare’s romantic and pastoral comedy focuses on the final reconciliation or conversion of the blocking characters rather than their punishment: the rival brothers Oliver and Orlando are reconciled; Duke Frederick is miraculously converted. This was also a theme present in the medieval tradition of the seasonal ritual play, as Frye notices and claims that “we may call it the drama of the green world, its plot being assimilated to the ritual theme of the triumph of life and love over the waste land...Thus the action of the comedy begins in a world represented as a normal world, moves into the green world, goes into metamorphosis there in which the comic resolution is achieved, and returns to the normal world” (Frye 1957, 182). The Forest of Arden in As You Like It represents an emanation of Frye’s “green world”, which is analogous to the dream world, the world of our desires. In this symbolical victory of summer over winter, we have an illustration of “the archetypal function of literature in visualizing the world of desire, not as an escape from ’reality’, but as the genuine form of the world that human life tries to imitate” (Frye 1957, 184). In addition, the marriage between Orlando and Rosalind takes place in the Forest of Arden not by a coincidence. This is Shakespeare’s vision of the final unity and healing only to be accomplished in the ‘Mother’ Forest, as Hughes terms it (1992, 110), which ultimately represents a symbol of totality of nature and men’s psychic completeness. In Frye’s reading of Shakespeare’s green world, an identical idea of the heroine as the lost soul is expressed: “In the rituals and myths the earth that produces the rebirth is generally a female figure, and the death and revival, or disappearance and withdrawal of human figures in romantic comedy generally involves the heroine” (Frye 1957, 183). Thus, Rosalind represents the epitome of the matriarchal earth goddess that revives the hero and at the same time brings about the comic resolution by disguising herself as a boy (for those members of the audience and/or readers who regard the play as an instance of Hughes’ passive ritual drama and thus primarily enjoy the process of the young lovers’ overcoming various impediments on the way to a desirable end of the play).

Place, Being, and Agency

2021 ◽  
pp. 93-119
Author(s):  
Kent Cartwright
Keyword(s):  
Sense Of Place ◽  
Transformative Experience ◽  
Extended Treatment ◽  
As You Like It ◽  
Multiple Dimensions ◽  
Green World

Chapter 3 identifies the special world of Shakespearean comedy in terms of the multiple dimensions of place, something that seems especially pertinent to the comic genre. Shakespeare’s comedies deploy the Renaissance sense of place as capable of being either mundane or magical. Reflecting that dialectic, the association of place with Italy in the comedies calls upon popular notions of that locale as full of contradictions yet open to the possibility of transformation. The comedies often organize locale in terms of a contrast between “regulative” and “protean” places (the latter recalling Frye’s “green world”). Protean environs are enchanted and can enchant, as in As You Like It (which receives extended treatment); they make change and transformative experience possible; and yet they exhibit different degrees of agency in different plays. Notwithstanding its power, the protean world is a nice place to visit, but one would not want to live there. The chapter concludes by assessing the power of place to affect action and meaning in a range of comedies.

Comedies of the Green World

2018 ◽  
pp. 519-536
Author(s):  
Lisa Hopkins
Keyword(s):  
New World ◽  
The Other ◽  
Twelfth Night ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
As You Like It ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
First Contact ◽  
Green World

The green world is the space where different peoples meet each other: Illyrians and Messenians in Twelfth Night, humans and fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, courtiers and country-dwellers in As You Like It. In essence these plays are all first contact narratives in which each group sheds light on the other. As You Like It offers echoes of the English colonial enterprise and the push to conquer Guiana. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the wood outside Athens proves to be the repository of England’s hidden self, containing its past, both classical and Celtic. Above all Twelfth Night offers images of both a new world and of a new. This essay traces the dynamics of the encounters in each of these three plays, but focusing on Twelfth Night, the comedy in which comedy itself is interrogated as it is forced to confront its own limits and functions.

“All in a Garden Green”: Shakespeare's Staging of Garden Imagery

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-252
Author(s):  
Deborah Solomon
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
The Public ◽  
The World ◽  
Audience Interaction ◽  
The Many ◽  
Green World

This essay draws attention to the surprising lack of scholarship on the staging of garden scenes in Shakespeare's oeuvre. In particular, it explores how garden scenes promote collaborative acts of audience agency and present new renditions of the familiar early modern contrast between the public and the private. Too often the mention of Shakespeare's gardens calls to mind literal rather than literary interpretations: the work of garden enthusiasts like Henry Ellacombe, Eleanour Sinclair Rohde, and Caroline Spurgeon, who present their copious gatherings of plant and flower references as proof that Shakespeare was a garden lover, or the many “Shakespeare Gardens” around the world, bringing to life such lists of plant references. This essay instead seeks to locate Shakespeare's garden imagery within a literary tradition more complex than these literalizations of Shakespeare's “flowers” would suggest. To stage a garden during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries signified much more than a personal affinity for the green world; it served as a way of engaging time-honored literary comparisons between poetic forms, methods of audience interaction, and types of media. Through its metaphoric evocation of the commonplace tradition, in which flowers double as textual cuttings to be picked, revised, judged, and displayed, the staged garden offered a way to dramatize the tensions produced by creative practices involving collaborative composition and audience agency.

Shakespeare's Representation of Weather, Climate and Environment

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sophie Chiari
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Romeo And Juliet ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
As You Like It ◽  
Ability To Act

While ecocritical approaches to literary texts receive more and more attention, climate-related issues remain fairly neglected, particularly in the field of Shakespeare studies. This monograph explores the importance of weather and changing skies in early modern England while acknowledging the fact that traditional representations and religious beliefs still fashioned people’s relations to meteorological phenomena. At the same time, a growing number of literati stood against determinism and defended free will, thereby insisting on man’s ability to act upon celestial forces. Yet, in doing so, they began to give precedence to a counter-intuitive approach to Nature. Sophie Chiari argues that Shakespeare reconciles the scholarly views of his time with more popular ideas rooted in superstition and that he promotes a sensitive, pragmatic understanding of climatic events. She pays particular attention to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It, Othello, King Lear, Anthony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest. Taking into account the influence of classical thought, each of the book’s seven chapters emphasises specific issues (e.g. cataclysmic disorders, the dog days’ influence, freezing temperatures, threatening storms) and considers the way climatic events were presented on stage and how they came to shape the production and reception of Shakespeare’s drama.

Shakespeare Afoot

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Kerrigan
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Richard Iii ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
As You Like It ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Way

That Shakespeare adds a limp to the received characterization of Richard III is only the most conspicuous instance of his interest in how actors walked, ran, danced, and wandered. His attention to actors’ footwork, as an originating condition of performance, can be traced from Richard III through A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It into Macbeth, which is preoccupied with the topic and activity all the way to the protagonist’s melancholy conclusion that ‘Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player | That struts and frets his hour upon the stage’. Drawing on classical and early modern accounts of how people walk and should walk, on ideas about time and prosody, and the experience of disability, this chapter cites episodes in the history of performance to show how actors, including Alleyn, Garrick, and Olivier, have worked with the opportunities to dramatize footwork that are provided by Shakespeare’s plays.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernard Capp
Keyword(s):  
Sibling Relationship ◽  
King Lear ◽  
As You Like It ◽  
Parents And Children ◽  
The Family

This chapter introduces the issues, surveys briefly the existing literature, and sets out the scope of the book. It summarizes contemporary views on the appropriate relationship between siblings, especially the rights and responsibilities of an elder brother towards his sisters and younger brothers. Contemporaries saw these as grounded in both nature and scripture, but recognized too the strength of sibling rivalries and resentments over favouritism and inheritance. These were often explored in contemporary drama, such as Shakespeare’s As You Like It and King Lear, and in social commentaries and polemic. The imagery of brotherhood and sisterhood pervaded the language as well as literature of the period, both as tokens of friendship and (in the case of elder/younger brothers) of oppression within the family. In language as in life, the sibling relationship was a heated and divisive issue for both parents and children.

Women, Power & the Decline of the West: Richard Sherwin’s Ethical Wisdom, Krzysztof Koslowski’s Tricolor-Red, & Machiavelli’s Mandragola

Pólemos ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 185-201
Author(s):  
Andrew Majeske
Keyword(s):  
The West ◽  
Benito Mussolini ◽  
Western Literature ◽  
As You Like It ◽  
Moral Crisis

Abstract This essay initially identifies and explores issues relating to relativity and relativism in cultural and political matters. It highlights the problematic character of the prime virtue that liberals claim to be the product of this relativistic outlook, tolerance, and points out that relativism equally supports illiberal agendas, as emphasized by Benito Mussolini. The essay then examines Shakespeare’s profound treatment of relativity in his As You Like It, focusing especially upon Rosalind and Orlando’s riddle exchange in Act 3, Scene 2, and the related sequencing of Orlando’s poems. In closing, the essay attempts to show how the West could benefit from revisiting great works of Western literature such as As You Like It, as it grapples with its moral crisis, works which plumbed the depths of the very problems we face today. But we will only garner from these texts the lessons we truly need to learn if we set aside, if only provisionally, the historicist assumptions which have blinded us to the contemporary pertinence and value of an older wisdom which by all appearances is more profound than our own.

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