As You Like It

So as this is the first of a new batch of lectures, it's worth me going over again how these lectures work. They're each on a single play. What I try and do is to collect some of the critical and kind of methodological issues about the play by focussing on a single question,

sometimes quite silly or a naive question about the play. And what I'm trying to do really is not to give you a reading of these individual plays, but to give you a range of ways of thinking about them that you might be able to follow up in your own work. What I'm really trying to do is to stimulate you going off in one of the directions that I might just touch on rather than to work to grind through a whole thing that you would write down and then and then try and reproduce.

So there's not a huge amount of factual content, I don't think, in the lectures, although I'll start always with a kind of summary of the plot, some so that if you don't know the play already, you can at least try and follow what it is I'm talking about. So the first play I talk about is as you like it, as you like, it's probably written and performed in only sixteen hundred. Am I going to come back to the historical context of the play in a minute.

And as you know, it's first published in the posthumous collected edition of Shakespeare's plays in sixteen twenty three. And the question I want to ask about this play is what happens in as you like it? What happens in as you like it? So I'll stop by summarising as you like it, which may look as if it's going to give us the answer to that question immediately.

Tony, as you like, the Duke. Frederick has exiled his older brother, Duke Senior, but kept his daughter Rosalind, his that's Duke senior's daughter, Rosalind, at court to be a companion to his own daughter, Celia. Meanwhile, Orlando, who is being persecuted by his older brother Oliver after the death of their father, comes to court set up by Oliver in a wrestling match, which surprisingly he wins. And he also earns Rosalind's love in the process.

Rosalind is banished from court by her uncle, and she escapes to the forest dressed as a boy Ganymede along with Celia, her cousin, and therefore touchstone in the forest is also Duke Senior's exiled court. But he must be quite a large forest. They don't encounter each other for a while. Rosalind and Celia set themselves up with a cottage and some sheep. Orlando goes round, pinning terrible poetry to trees.

Duke Seniors Lords philosophise about the natural life. There are a lot of speeches and a lot of songs. In the end, for couples are united and the duke is restored. That's it. So I've tried to summarise the plot of the play in a way which I hope suggests that an easy answer to the question what happens in as you like it is not very much.

James Shapiro talking about the play as part of his brilliant survey of the 50 99, a kind of a. Mirabilis in Shakespeare's career, calls it a relatively plotless play, which is quite a polite way of putting it relatively plotless, i.e., nothing happens in part. Shapiro blamed the thinness of the plot in the play's source, Thomas Lodge's novella, Rosalind. So Shapiro says there's not much happens in Rosalind Diver, so there's not much for Shakespeare to work with.

I'm not completely sure that would let Shakespeare off the hook. Shapiro's book reminds us that as you like, it belongs to a period of huge creative energy for Shakespeare. And that's part of the reason why my sense that not much happens in view like it seems to me, something interesting rather than something that nothing interesting.

So as you like, it belongs to the moment of the new Globe Theatre, and it's adjacent, very closely adjacent in Shakespeare's writing to Henry the Fifth, to Julius Caesar and to Hamlet. Put a lot of sideways comparisons with Hamlet. I'd like to make as we go through the lecture, we might think more helpfully consider it alongside this group of chronological plays rather than is more usual with other romantic or cross-dressing comedies.

And here, the addition of Shakespeare that you're using is actually can can shape the kinds of things you are able to see. If you're using a collected edition of Shakespeare, which uses the First Folio designations that will divide the plays by histories, communism, tragedies. They will look like the groups that it's most obvious to think of the plays in generic groups.

But if you look at a collective division like, say, the Oxford Edition, that's an addition which prints the plays, prints the works in the their putative order of composition. So that gives us a kind of chronological approach which enables you to look at things which are which might have been written around the same time and to think about the time of writing, the time of performance as the category of analysis rather than the zone.

So positioned around the middle of Shakespeare's two decade career as a dramatist as you like, it is inclined to telling rather than showing and to set piece declamation. Rather than action. I think it's appropriate that the play's most famous lines are just such a set piece. The famous Seven Ages of Man speech delivered by the melancholy Jaquiss Lord of Juk Senior's court. More or less sing along with this with me. 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. Jaquiss goes on, as you remember, to enumerate the infant Newling and puking the schoolboy creeping to school like a snail, the lover, the soldier, the justice, the leveland slippered pantaloon. And finally, the second childishness of old age. It's a wonderful, much quoted, massive theatrical speech. It's useful for us.

And we're trying to think about a Shakespeare or a set of characters who know they are in plays. But it's one that I think is written with an eye to the commonplace book. Those collections of quotable sayings which an educated Elizabethans kept ransacking their reading, the things that could be taken out of any kind of narrative context and used as a kind of rhetorical exemplar or a piece of moral wisdom about some particular topic.

These gems that needed no wider context to make any kind of sense making actually encouraged a particular kind of writing, which had sort of already embedded quotations. And Jaquiss is giving us a quotation and we've picked it up and quoted it. We've been cued to do that. Perhaps in this sense, our modern preoccupation with the structure and unity of early modern works of literature is very anachronistic for contemporaries.

The point of them was that they were full of quotations that could be ported easily out in the play itself. Jaquie speech is distinctly under motivated. There's kind of no point for it and it serves to halt rather than to advance any plot. So like the many songs with which the play is punctuated, that's to say Jaquie speech is a hiatus or a pause. It's not furthering songs songs in them. This is this is a play which probably the largest number of songs of any Shakespeare play.

And you'll know if you if you've seen a play in the theatre, how long songs take. There really are very of a very slowing decelerating kind of force in the theatre. And that's mostly their point is to give us is to give us a pause. If you think about the music that Porsche has play in The Merchant of Venice before the someo chooses between the Cascades, that's a deliberate putting off the moment of choice. The point of the song is it kind of freezes things.

It's a kind of freeze frame. So in all that case, then Jaquie speech on the seven ages of Man seems to me an appropriate epitome of the play's own tendency towards Stacie's rather than momentum to moments of contemplation rather than moments of action. In an extended conversation about the implications of time. Orlando tells Rosalind that there's no clock in the forest, there's no clock in the forest, suggesting that the forest of Arbon exists in a kind of suspended animation.

Now he to outline some of the ways in which this tendency to Stacie's is part of the plays that the genre of pastoral and to make some connexions with other pastoral texts. And then I want to try and think about the play itself again to revisit some of the ways in which its dramatic structure, even its umpty dramatic structure, plays out. So I should reiterate, I think the is up to Stacie's in this play.

It's deliberate, or at least I think it's purposeful. It highlights some structural issues about comedy as a genre. And as I said, it's something we can interestingly compare with those other contemporaneous plays I listed a moment ago. It has some affinities with the tendency to speechify in Julius Caesar or with the curious anticlimax of Henry the Fifth, which ought to be building up to a big battle scene. The battle of action call, but somehow never does or both.

Clearly, I suppose, with the kind of frustrated movement forward which is so characteristic of Hamlet. And I have come back to the ways this preference for verbal over physical action might be connected with the particular moments of the play's composition. But first, let's think generically for a minute as you like it.

In Shakespeare's most sustained take on the genre of pastoral, NASA's genre, which is associated primarily not with the active genre of drama, but with more contemplative or static genres, especially poetry and prose fiction. Pastoral, as one definition puts it. You can find a similar definition in any dictionary of literary terms, tends to be an idealisation of shepherd life. And by doing so, creates an image of peaceful and uncorrupted existence.

A kind of prelapsarian world. That's what's important about pastoral, but it's a kind of Edenic world. This is a world before the fall. It displays a nostalgia for the past. And for some state of harmony which has been lost. A dominating theme of much pastoral is the search for a simple life away from the court or the town away from corruption, more strife or politics. Now, we can see from this description of pastoral that inertia is actually intrinsic to it.

This is a genre which is retreating from the active life, which is a descriptive rather than active, nostalgic and looking backwards rather than narrative or progressive. And you know this already, if you've had to read the Arcadia Shepperd's calendar, not not kind of page turners, really, I think you could agree. Pastoral had its origins in Virgil's act clogs and flourished in the humanist culture of Tudor, England.

And by the 50 90s, when Shakespeare's writing, as you like it, a series of tropes, possible tropes had been quite clearly established. Noble shepherds debating in speeches and in song. The difference between court and countryside, uncaring mistresses, disdainful women, generally poetic competitions, etc., but bad weather often. So we might think again of Spenser's Shepard's calendar published in fifty seventy nine.

The absent love object in the Shepherds calendar is called Rosalind. We know that Shakespeare's major sources Lodge's novel novella. But Rosalind comes in as well via the Shepherds calendar. We might think about Sydney's Arcadia with the theme of pastoral cross-dressing. So pastoral is like the early modern theatre itself, an urban genre, a genre which which works out of towns and cities, which is generated by those kind of connotations.

And one in which rural life is idealised and allegory ised. Virgil, who's backlogs are foundational to the genre of pastoral use. These bucolic stories to imagine a golden age at once fictional but also highly political. And this curious combination of engagement with politics and escapism from politics structures, pastoral right from the start, right from Virgil and goes through. And I think we'll see it in as you like it.

Also in the Shepherds calendar. Spencer is preoccupied with the politics of the Elizabethan court, shadowing both his own poetic autobiography and his engagement with radical Protestantism. In these stories of Shepherd singing their unrequited love's against inclement weather, so crucial to the discussion of pastoral is the idea that it embodies a notion known as Otim OTM. Otim is a Greek word which signals something like leasure. It's opposed in Greek and Roman philosophy to negotiation.

That's active public life. So the distinction between Otim Leisure and Nikodim active life is perhaps liberalised here for as in as you like it in the distinction between the forest and the court. If pastoral favours the contemplative virtues associated with Otim, then it also it also tends to enact them form and content are aligned. Pastoral is about leisure and is leisure is about leisure. It is leisurely. If something happens in a pastoral, it tends to happen verbally.

Pastoral shepherds entertain themselves with singing contests. Action is contained within reportage or prophecy. And for the Elizabethans Pastoral is a really high status genre. Pastoral shepherds are noble beings, but one in which socially marginalised peoples might also get a voice. As Phillip Sydney puts it in his apology for poetry, Pastoral can show the misery of people under hard Lord's or ravening soldiers and what blessedness is deprived to them that lie lowest from the goodness of them.

That's it. Highest sometimes under the pretty tales of wolves and sheep can include the whole considerations of wrongdoing and patients. So he suggests that pastoral gives a voice to people who are not in a kind of privileged position. The alternative view we get in Shakespeare quite often is that people who are burdened with carers, burdened with the cares of office, would like to become shepherds.

Richard the second says that Henry the sixth also says that there are lots of people who who idealise this idea of the shepherd life without care. Christine Edzard, 1992 film of As You Like It in Modern Dress brought out, I think the political implications of this view from Sydney. Rosalind, wearing jeans and a beanie hat, joined an alternative community of outsiders. Arden was a kind of urban cardboard city in which all spray painted graffiti poems onto concrete barriers.

Not as bad as I made it sound. So the idea of an allegorical reading of pastoral, either politically or ethically in Sydney suggests here or in Spencer where he's thinking about the religious connotations of shepherds and the flock. This is a common one. So the idea that pastoralism is an allegory. So it looks as if it's an escape from real life, as it were. But in fact, it's just an allegory of it.

And that brings us back to the idea that even as pastoral landscape figures itself as an escape from the everyday world, it's actually the shadow or double of that world. Okay, so that's quite a long excursions into pastoral as a genre.

How does that actually help us with as you like it? Well, I think like the accounts of pastoral I've just been proposing as we like it plays with ideas of distinctness and convergence between its two worlds or two settings, because the forest of has been so compelling and so sort of fruitful a setting imaginatively, we tend to think that the whole of us would like it takes place in the forest of Arbon, but in fact the whole long first act of the play takes place in court.

And it's not until Act two scene for more than a third of the way through that Rosalind announces, Well this is the forest of Ardern. That's an interesting contrast. Maybe we might think with Twelfth Night, Shakespeare's other major cross-dressing comedy where Vilo appears only really for a few moments. As a woman and then it's into her disguises. Azara, for the whole of the rest of the play, Rosalind has a long time being before she comes in as Ganymede.

So it's easy to construct a vision of the play in which the court and the forest are absolute opposites. Nago tiem to Otim to use those terms that I introduced before, urban to rural, romance to pastoral met male to female. Juk Senior in his first entrance in Act two draws just this comparison between the forest world and the court world. Now my co mate, some brothers in exile, have not old custom made this life more sweet than that of painted pomp painted pompous.

The idea of what the court is like are not these woods more free from peril than the envious court. Here we feel not the penalty of Adam. So the pastoral attempts to to recreate a fallen Eden here we feel not the penalty of Adam. And this is prelapsarian. This is before everything went so wrong. And it must be significant in this regard that the play's own figure, Adam, is an old man. The attempt to recreate the fall in Eden is both ambitious and already doomed to failure.

Now, seeing pastoral as one pole in a binary system of ideological opposites fits with a common way of conceptualising dual locations in Shakespeare, we might compare Rome and Egypt in Antony and Cleopatra or Belmont and Venice in the Merchant of Venice, for example. So there's lots of criticism about those two plays and others which say the two locations stand for quite distinct of worldviews that compare their separate alternative views of of the world and of what's possible.

And of course, that is not entirely wrong. There are ways in which these dual settings are opposites. But in as you like it, as I think in these other plays, there are ways in which the edges between the two worlds are definitely blurred in a practical way. We don't simply move from court to forest. There are a number of scenes which to impro between them.

And although the modern states, the 20th century stage has made a kind of visual recreation of the forest of art and one a great sort of stage trick. So we've seen very, very realist or very elaborate stagings with trees and animals. A real deer brought on stage in the Edwardian period, a stuffed deer, which you can still see in the props museum in Stratford through in most of the productions at Stratford-Upon-Avon in the 20th century.

So all this work to create a kind of realistic forest is, of course, completely anachronistic on the early modern stage on the globe there to stage, there would have been no visual difference between the court and the forest. So that work the work of staging to establish the locations as completely distinct is a modern one rather than an early modern one. The difference between Arden and the court in the Globe Theatre would have been entirely verbal.

Rob Rosalind's declaration. Well, this is the forest of Ardern is not descriptive in that context then, but performative only saying this is the forest of art makes it so not state trees or grass or other props. So this idea that the two locations didn't look different and may not signal entirely oppositely has been a more has been picked up in more recent production.

The idea of the ambiguity deep in the pastoral genre that the pastoral space closed both is and is not an escape from the real world. I think it's quite it's been quite an interesting thing for modern directors. And I'm just gonna give one review of Adrian Noble's 1985 production for the RISC to give an idea of how this might work. This is Roger Warren writing about Noble's production. The usurping court doubled as the forest court simply wrapping white dust sheets around their evening dress.

When Rosalind, Celia and Touchstone arrived in Arden, they drew behind the more white sheeting that covered the court furniture. Later, this furniture was replaced by identical green versions. At times, Arben seemed merely a country of the mind, a spiritual voyage of discovery by Duke, Frederick, Rosalind and Orlanda, but not the others. As when touched home was twice stuck in a very real pool.

So this idea that the forest is merely the sleeping or subconscious or dust wrapped court draws on a familiar adjacent interpretation of Midsummer Night's Dream, which you're probably familiar with in that play. So the story goes the fairy queen and keep her fairy king and queen. Oberon and Titania are echoes dream versions, subconscious versions of their Athenian counterparts, Theseus and Hippolyta.

They're often played by the same actors to emphasise the link. These are the same people in a just in a different context. Dublin was also used by Noble in this. You like your production to link the two Dukes, Duke, Frederick and Duke Senior, making them dark and light sides of the same personality. And it may in fact be that this was originally the case in the early modern theatre.

This practicality that one actor plays the two dukes would explain a strange anticlimax in as you like, its final act. We are promised that Duke Frederick is going to come into the into the forest with with armed men. But that arrival is postponed. A new character, a brother to a landowner, Oliver enters with the surprising news that the skirts of this Wildwood. He came where meeting with an old religious man after some question with him was converted both from its enterprise and from the world.

His crown bequeathing to his banished brother and all their lands restored to them again that were with him exiled. So do Frederick has this unlikely conversion in the in the as he enters the forest and so never has to appear on stage, sometimes on stage. This is presented as a self consciously and comically unlikely plot twist, which is almost Alltop on the spur of the moment to think. What are we going to do? The plot needs this guy to split into two figures.

How are we going to explain the fact that the other one doesn't come? And I've seen it done very funnily where Jack Senior is on stage thinking how how is this going to work? Get me out of this. Why am I coming in? According to people at the same time. So the idea that the play is written to play off an idea of doubling, I think is quite a compelling one. A playful acknowledgement of the overlapping rather than distinct jurisdictions.

The two groups are really just the same person after all. Just ask the two courts are really just the same. It's also then a way of collapsing that pastoral project if the same Duke leads both the court and the forest communities. We can see that there are in some sense the same place.

On the other hand, if we maintain the idea that the two groups are distinct persons, the idea that the forest is morally regenerated, that it has this miraculous power to convert people from price influence idea of the GreenWorld, that's more sustainable. More interestingly, perhaps nobles are done in that production that we're discussing with both a metaphore or a state of mind to the noble characters. And a real place to the more lowly ones. Touchstone is dumped in a real pond.

Let's just take a minute to explore the distinction between pastoral as a real place and as as a metaphor for the unreal haze of pastoral is part of Shakespeare's depiction of the forest of Ardern. We've already seen that pastoral is an urban projection or idealisation. It's less a description of the real countryside than a literary fiction.

And certainly left wing critics from Raymond Williams onwards, truly historicism have been suspicious of pastoral as a genre which evades the kind of realities of landownership and all those kinds of things. I think back to those new historicist views of romantic poetry jam. But that very compelling article on them, Tim, was with Tim Tanabe, which says, Why this works with wipe-out.

From this view, this pastoral sort of idea, view all the people who work there and who are kind of involved in it, of industrial production at Ground Tintern Abbey. That's all part of a suspicion of pastoral as a kind of Upper-Class conspiracy, which which writes out. What if we like to be a country person? A bit like a kind of modern idea of Norfolk or something that would go that. You know, there's a kind of gentrified idea of the countryside and a much, much grittier one underneath.

So that would suggest that Shakespeare First Varden is less a description of the real countryside than a literary fiction. It draws on literary models rather than as critics and sometimes romantically implied. Drawing on Shakespeare's own country childhood, the literary generation of the forest is clear from names like Coryn, Phoebe and Silvius. These are not everyday names. These are pastoral names is a fictional names.

Charles the Wrestler reports that the exiled Duke lives, quote, in the forest of Ardern and Mary, sorry. And many married men with him. And there they live, like the old Robin Hood of England. And fleet the time carelessly as they did in the golden world. They live like the old Robin Hood of England. And the idea combines a native folklore idea of Robin Hood with that powerful myth of the golden age of peace and harmony,

which comes from book one of of it. It's a very typical Shakespearean conflation of the native and the classical. Now, I think the forest of Ardern is just such a curious hybrid, a hybrid between the native and the classical or between the semi realistic and the fictive. It's at once the never never land of pastoral fantasy and the real place, just as sheep in the play are at once the traditional decoration of the pastoral backdrop and real dirty physical animals.

Corrinne refuses touchstones, courtly gesture of kissing hands, saying it would be on cleanly if courtiers were shepherds. Because we are still handling our ewes and their cells, their skins, you know, our greasy. So for carrying the sheep are real things that have to be dealt with. They're not they're not just decorative. They're not just pretty, but confusion over the status.

The kind of ontology, if you like, of the forest of Ardern extends to its naming in the play in that folio text of sixteen twenty three. The first text, as I indicated, the name of the forest is spelt out in a r d e n a name obviously familiar to Shakespeare. It's his mother's maiden name and the name of a Warwickshire woodland close to his birthplace. It does has a claim to be a real place with real associations.

And under this heading we might think about corroborating rustic features like oak trees, willows, sheep and deer. So so far, so England. But some editors drawing on the play's source lodges romance. Rosalind, amend the spelling to our den a r d e double n e. S suggesting either a location in Flanders of that name or in France that has more distant and more romance qualities,

and especially the tiny a tiny difference. But whether you call the forest a kind of English name or a European kind of romance name does shape, I think what we expect it is possible to happen that it's a difference which betrays something of the of the paradox of the forest in as you like it, as both local and literary, familiar and strange, within the forest. That ambiguity continues. We've already seen that Juk Senior and his men are associated with the story of Robin Hood.

But if you notice that phrase Robin Hood of England, which suggests we're not in England, otherwise you would just say Robin Hood. So Robin Hood is both kind of recognised and distance in that in that phrase, Orlando's Frenchified romance name DeBois suggests. Du Bois of the Woods. The trope of the civilised outlaws in in living in the forest is a stock story of romance, and it belongs to a pleasurably artificial and fictive world.

And see again, in two gentlemen of Verona, for instance, you people who are outlaws in Shakespeare are of very decent, law abiding people who've just got on the wrong side of tyrants or something. So that artificial fictive forest of our Dan perhaps includes snakes, olive trees and lionesses. It's full of storybook exotica. So I suppose what I can say is that there's a kind of there's a native all or realistic or English sense of Ardern and then this kind of fictional romance,

alien sense of it. We might think that what the forest allows its highborn characters is the fiction of being in a pastoral. It's rather like Marie Antoinette dressing as a shepherdess in the grounds of their sight. But the fiction of pastoral is always undercut in the play. I think Shakespeare's use of the genre is Terrick and self-conscious moments of artificiality tend to be undercut by bathos or by realism.

If we take the overblown syntax of Orlando, run, run Orlando KAB on every tree, the fair, the chaste and unexpressed, she we can see it's immediately undercut by the next scene, which is the scene between Coryn and Touched and talking about how dirty she pa Rosalind is a realist when she scolds Orlando. Men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love. Men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for not for love.

She presents herself as a realist about the species you go back to look at. It explicitly distances her from romantic of heroic prototypes like Troilus and Cressida, or Hero in the end that she's trying to bring these storybook figures down to earth and say that's not what it's like in real life.

Men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love. But at the same time, in the forest, she is a prime pastoral fantasist, playing the landowner in a distant echo of contemporary concerns about the enclosure of common land for sheep farming by wealthy landlords. Shakespeare, I think, toggles here between pastoral and satire, or perhaps more accurately, he articulates the satiric potential which is always there in pastoral.

At some level, these shepherds must know they look stupid. So Ardern Den is a pastoral paradox, a real place with a recognisable proximity to everyday life and the distant fictional place. Or to put it another way, it's a location in which urban wannabes go up at real country people and vice versa for the Upper-Class characters. The forest is a pastoral, not for the for the regular inhabitants.

And so if we can see Ardern as the play's weekend cottage, then its main purpose for the play's caught exiles is to waste time. It's quite an important point I'd like to make about the Time-Wasting places to fill up the time created by the comedy. And again, I think we can see a structural parallel with Hamlet at one level. Hamlet has to delay his revenge because without delay there would be no play without the structural device of delay. Revenge is justified. A fight is not five acts.

Psychological explanations of why Hamlet delays taking revenge start from the wrong end, so to speak. We have to find a reason for him to take revenge rather than we have to justify the fact that he will take revenge rather than find his reasons first. He isn't so much delaying, that's to say, as filling up the time until the end of the play when he can take revenge because he's something similar in comedy.

We all know that Shakespeare's comedies and in marriage comic partners usually meet early in the play. So the play sets up right, usually right at the beginning. What's going to happen at the end? And then has to spin out the fact that it can't happen straight away otherwise with us just all go home. So the structure of comedy is thus a structure of delay or time filling. Dramatic pleasure is in having the desired unknown outcome deferred in as you like it.

We know right from the wrestling scene at court that Orlando and Rosalind will get together. There's no reason for them not to do so. So the play has to invent a series of diversionary or procrastinator scenes to put off the inevitable. We know, too, that the good will be restored. That's what happens in comedy. And similarly, it can't happen immediately. So comedies does epitomise the literary pleasure of withheld or deferred gratification.

The play's title, which George Bernard Shaw thought was Shakespeare's own acknowledgement that the comedy was piffling and trifling and nothing much to bother with. In fact, I think encapsulates the way it is meshed with audience expectation and desire. We all know this is as you like it. You want to know what's going to happen. We don't want it to happen yet. That's comedy. So back to our opening question then.

What happens in as you like it? Answer three hours a diversion until it's time to have the ending. And when the ending comes, as if to point out the foolishness of this theatrical contract, the ending still manages to look rushed. We've had plenty of time to prepare for it, but it's still we're still in a hurry. Oliver and Celia are jammed together.

Due prejudice, offstage conversion that we've already talked about looks frankly, as if no one has given it a moments prior thought and the atmosphere of Arden begins to unravel. An editor needs to say to Shakespeare, where did this lioness come from? Why have you introduced a character who has the same name as a. We've already got this is the plane falling out of control. It's time to finish its time. It is time to it is time to finish.

And Heimann, the goddess of marriage, has also brought in at the end of, as you like it, to solemnise these four marriages. And there's a question mark just in brackets about whether Rosalind appears in her female costume for this for this marriage in its final moments, that by bringing in Highman a goddess, the play throws away its vestiges of realism. In the last camp, paroxysm design must make conclusions as Heimann of these most strange events.

Here's eight that must take hands to join in Hyman's bands. So I'm arguing, I think, that the forest of Ardern is a kind of holding pattern Restasis a kind of kettling and that its purpose is to waste time and that this is pointed out to us all through the play by its own frequent disquisitions on the nature of time.

If you search an online text, the Internet, Shakespeare editions or the Internet Shakespeare archive, a good, reliable text for their search in online text for the word time or various words, our search. You see it. It comes with great frequency. There are 50 uses of the word time in this play. Charles tells us that men fleet the time carelessly. Jaquiss reports he's meeting with Touchstone, with the clam saying From hour to hour, we ripe and ripe.

And then from hour to hour, we've rocked and rocked. Rosalind tells Orlando how time ambles, Trott's gallops and stand still with different people. We could say that comedy is opposed to linear notions of time and to the overinvested teleology of tragedy. I've thought about this in other lectures, most notably in Richard the Third.

But what? As you like, as you like, it seems to know more clearly, and to show more explicitly than the other comedies has to say is that in the best sense, it is a waste of time. I like this place, says Celia Avadon, and willingly could waste my time in it. As you like, it identifies comedy itself as a kind of time out from the real world, a pleasurable spaces, a moment away from movement and activity.

You might think of the playwright Thomas Haywood, who, in a defence of the theatre against its Puritan detractors, gives us a similar view of what theatre is for. Theatre is to recreate or recreate that word. I mean, I think both means form again and give leisure to recreation in our sense.

And recreation to recreate, such as of themselves are wholly devoted to melancholy, which corrupts the blood, or to refresh such weary spirits as a tired with labour or study to moderate the cares and heaviness of the mind that they may return to their trades and faculties with more zeal and earnestness. After some soft and pleasant retirement, the idea that the theatre itself is a kind of forest of Ardern that we go to to waste a bit of time, renew ourselves and then go back to real life.

I want to finish with two different approaches to the play, which might give us a slightly different take on these static qualities. And one is to think about it historically and the other is to think about it anachronistically. Let's think about it historically. First, who could argue that as you like, it is one of Shakespeare's earliest satires of frontal promote talks about it as the most topical of Shakespeare's plays.

It's really interesting. We tend to think of the history plays as topical immediately to do with Elizabethan politics and so on commode in in in Shakespeare's language says is as you like it, which is the most topical in reference. What it's topical about is really literature, literary fashions past, including pastoral and satire. And I think this is this has to be, of course, topicality has to be associated with the moment of its composition.

Elizabethan press censorship experienced one of its most dramatic moments in the months before us. You like it was first performed. And I'm just gonna describe this. This is censorship.

In June, fifteen ninety nine, the so-called bishop's ban, which was named after its sponsors, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the bishop of London, responded to concerns about the contemporary literary scene by banning the publication of satires, particularly formal verse satire that had become a popular form of complaint and commentary by the end of the century. So June fifteen ninety nine, the bishops ban bans formal verse satires while they're at it.

The bishops also banned works of English history without the approval of the Privy Council and also banned the printing of any play without authority. So Sievert Satie's English history and plays all censored or newly or more insistently censored. The order to destroy extant copies of these works politically satires resulted in public book burning in the summer of fifteen ninety nine.

The Bishop's man serves to associate three types of work satire, history and drama, and it identifies them as not morally but politically dangerous or potentially seditious. Now we might see as you like it, as a play that responds to the ban on first unversed satire by trying to incorporate some of its commercially and politically successful features. Indeed, it seems that when Celia is talking to Touchstone, who you might think of as a kind of satirist, she seems to allude to the barn itself.

Since the little wit that fools have was silenced. The little foolery that wisemen have makes a great show since the little wit that fools have was silenced. The little foolery that wise men have makes a great, great show. Most editors think that that is an allusion to the bishop's ban, the silencing of the literal with fools and therefore Celia allies, the usurping court of Duke Frederick with the censorship of the Elizabethan Elizabethan bishop's if touchstone is a satirist.

It's really his companion in the play or his opposite in the play. Jaquiss, who carries most of the play's burden towards satire. I think Jaquiss we could see as a court satirist with a voice very recognisable to Elizabethans, who had bought work by verse satirists like Marston or Paul or Nash. And as we've already seen, it's Jaquiss whose lengthy speeches serve most to slow down the play, most to stymie its attempts to really get going. And most to reinstate telling for doing description.

For plot. Perhaps then part of the difficulty of the play's pacing derives from the import importing of another non-dramatic genre. The satire into the structure of as you like it in trying to occupy some of the cultural ground recently vacated by the ban on satire. That's to say, as you like, it becomes more like a satiric poem than a dramatic plot. Again, we could see Hamlet as a kind of satiric voice and perhaps trace an oblique relation to the bishop's stand in that place, too.

So that's a way of thinking about pastoral and satire and status in the play, which might try to relate it specifically to the circumstances of its composition. The last idea I'd like to float back is quite different, is a is a is a much more a much more modern view, a kind of a historical view. One of the ways contemporary criticism has revisited the idea of the pastoral.

I've discussed pastoral as an escapist and impossible urban genre, which presents an idealised or unreal landscape derived from literary precedent rather than from nature. But there's a different way of seeing the play's depiction of the forest of Ardern and one that's more convinced by the moral force of its recuperative energies. It's no surprise, I think, that the romantic period love does. You like it as a proto romantic text.

The epitome of Wordsworth's lines in the table turned at Wordsworth, encourages the scholar to put down his books and get out into the countryside. One impulse from a vernal wood will teach you more of man, of moral evil and of good than all the sages can is a complete epitome of romantic kind of nature worship.

Wordsworth alludes quite explicitly. So as you like it to times uncounted hours in the prelude, so the romantics rediscovered as you like it, as a kind of proto romantic text or something which understood the force of nature in a way that they were trying to understand it. And this new appreciation of, as you like it spoke to a kind of late 18th, early 19th century idealism about the restorative place of nature.

And it recast what had been a long, critical excuse about Shakespeare, that he had no classical learning, but he was the poet of nature and turned that into an absolute high achievement. I think the heir to that romantic enthusiasm in our own day is the relatively new discipline of eco criticism. Eco criticism is a politically engaged study of the interconnectedness of human culture and the environment.

Eco critics of the eco system has been quite active in Shakespeare studies, eco eco criticism and kind of relatedly, animal studies, the role of animals in in Shakespeare's world and in his world view have been quite, quite prevalent in the last six or five or so, five or so years. So if you're interested in what people are really working on now, rather than on that whole history of criticism that sometimes we can feel burdened with by Shakespeare,

I think this is probably quite an interesting place to look at. So eco critics of As You Like It, such as Gabriel Egan in his book Green Shakespeare, have explored the play's depiction of the natural world with more attention to its kind of ecological acuity. Instead of say this is a kind of literary space, is the literary space of possible. Same saying this is a natural space, which is which is accurately depicted. It reinstates the forest as a natural rather than a literary space.

It's as if the forest is the source of social regeneration in the play, the place where the court can be newly made. To me, that's an if, but if it is that, it is also the site. Egan argues of a negotiation of the roles of the human and non-human worlds. And once you begin to be made aware of this fact, you can see that as you like, it is completely preoccupied with animals and must have more animals in it than any other Shakespeare play, but also more reference to animals right from the start.

When Orlando complains that his brother is treating him like an animal, his treatment differs not from the stalling of an ox. There's a long description of how Jay Kreis is addressing a wounded stag, which is quite important in this. In this, which I'm not going to I'm not gonna read out because of time. But Jaquiss description suggests that the wounded stag ought to have the same rights as the human. The description is that he calls the U. The court in exile user purs tyrant.

And what's worse, to fright the animals and kill them up in their assigned and native dwelling place. So he makes the connexion between Juk Frederick pushing out Juk Senior from the human world and then Duke Senior and the court and the court is pushing out the animals from the forest. It's one that tries to see an ethical equivalence between the human and animal worlds and suggests that we should deal with nature in the way that we deal with culture.

It is anachronistic, I think, to see Jaquiss as a hump saboteur or as an eco warrior. But it is significant that he alone of the exiled courtiers does not seem to be planning to return. What you would have. I'll stay to know your abandoned cave. So rather than a temporary GreenWorld, Jaquiss is making an alternative court life in this forest structure. This eco criticism might be a good way to think about debates about art vs. nature.

Old debates which need a bit of packing up, I think, in The Winter's Tale or in The Tempest as well as in as you like it. What I've tried to ask in this lecture is what happens in as you like it? And I've tried to deal with the answer, but not much happens by thinking about the place generic relations postulant to satire both in its own day and in recent productions, when I've tried to suggest eco criticism as a way of thinking again about ideas of nature.

In Shakespeare's plays next week, I'm going to talk about Hamlet. And the question about Hamlet is why is Hamlet called Hamlet?