Irish Bards in Shakespeare’s Richard III and As You Like it

Shakespeare alludes twice to Irish bards. In Richard III, the king mentions a prophecy by one of his imminent death; in As You Like It, Rosalind jokes on how Irish bards can supposedly rhyme rats to death. Both refer to supposed bardic powers of seeing the future and of ritual cursing of enemies. A survey of the literature shows satire and prophecy as going back to ancient times. There is in addition ample material on the (sometimes deadly) effects of satire in medieval and later Ireland, where it is known from chronicles, legal tracts, handbooks of poetry, and various surviving poems. There are in addition comic tales on how bards exploited their power, including an eleventh-century one on King Guaire's Burdensome Company, wherein the poet Senchán rhymes to death certain mice that had spoiled an egg reserved for him. Shakespeare's references can thus be related to traditions well-known in Gaul and medieval (or early modern) Ireland and Scotland.

Place, Being, and Agency

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.

Pastoral Instruction in ‘As You Like It’

This chapter evaluates William Shakespeare’s As You Like It. If critics of As You Like It agree on one thing, it is that the play is pastoral-romantic by genre. However, there are some problematic features of As You Like It, which have been called antipastoral. Shakespeare by no means flouts or satirizes pastoral convention, but merely selects a particular shade of mixed, realistic pastoral, in the interests of a particular strategy. A complex departure from pastoral is made by the prominent introduction of hunting. A fundamental characteristic of pastoral was its apparent artlessness: pastoralists went to great lengths to avoid the implication of knowledge in their shepherds. Shakespeare uses this convention to amusing effect when he makes the ultrapastoralist Jaques pretend that he is innocent of even the most ordinary technical terms of poetry. In the mixed pastoral romance, a very limited instructional element entered, in that the temporary shepherds were initiated into the value of stoicism and heard idealistic speeches about love. But in As You Like It, the educational element bulks so large as to become the main activity. The chapter then considers how As You Like It contains many references to time and objective measures.

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

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.

Um Veríssimo shakespeariano numa Noite de Reis

Em fins do século XVI, William Shakespeare escreveu, além de outros textosdramáticos, três comédias que giram em torno da inebriante e complicada experiênciade se estar apaixonado – Much ado about nothing (1598), As you like it (1599-1600) e Twelfth Night (1601). Nas três, personagens femininas ocupam papel de destaque e se tornam a força motriz da trama, superando desafios. Em 2006, a Editora Objetiva publicou o romance A décima segunda noite, do escritor, cronista, cartunista, tradutor, roteirista e dramaturgo Luís Fernando Verissimo (1936-), uma releitura bem humorada da comédia shakespeariana, Twelfth Night or What you Will. O novo texto confirma a relevância das personagens femininas da comédia inglesa e possibilita que o leitor se divirta com as identidades trocadas por meio dos disfarces de gênero. Este quinto romance do escritor gaúcho é o segundo da coleção ‘Devorando Shakespeare’, que pretendia publicar recriações do dramaturgo inglês. Aqui, num movimento de convergência de duas de suas paixões – a capital francesa e a produção do dramaturgo inglês – o escritor gaúcho desloca o lócus dramático da Ilíria balcânica, para a Paris dos anos 70, lócus onde se constrói o híbrido, onde se cruzam os lugares realmente vividos por diferentes sujeitos oriundos dediversos estratos sociais que se unem através do sentimento de solidariedade de grupo, próprio da condição do exílio. De maneira sensível e inteligente, o romancista insere em seu texto um narrador particular: o papagaio Henri, que constrói sua narrativa a partir do poleiro onde o colocam, no salão de cabelereiros Ilíria, de propriedade de Orsino.