As You Like It Read online

  THE RSC SHAKESPEARE

  Edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen

  Chief Associate Editors: Héloïse Sénéchal and Jan Sewell

  Associate Editors: Trey Jansen, Eleanor Lowe, Lucy Munro,

  Dee Anna Phares

  As You Like It

  Textual editing: Eric Rasmussen

  Introduction and Shakespeare’s Career in the Theater: Jonathan Bate

  Commentary: Takashi Kozuka and Héloïse Sénéchal

  Scene-by-Scene Analysis: Esme Miskimmin

  In Performance: Karin Brown (RSC stagings) and Jan Sewell (overview)

  The Director’s Cut (interviews by Jonathan Bate and Kevin Wright):

  Dominic Cooke and Michael Boyd

  Playing Rosalind: Naomi Frederick

  Editorial Advisory Board

  Gregory Doran, Chief Associate Director,

  Royal Shakespeare Company

  Jim Davis, Professor of Theatre Studies, University of Warwick, UK

  Charles Edelman, Senior Lecturer, Edith Cowan University,

  Western Australia

  Lukas Erne, Professor of Modern English Literature,

  Université de Genève, Switzerland

  Akiko Kusunoki, Tokyo Woman’s Christian University, Japan

  Jacqui O’Hanlon, Director of Education, Royal Shakespeare Company

  Ron Rosenbaum, author and journalist, New York, USA

  James Shapiro, Professor of English and Comparative Literature,

  Columbia University, USA

  Tiffany Stern, Professor and Tutor in English, University of Oxford, UK

  2010 Modern Library Paperback Edition

  Copyright © 2007, 2010 by The Royal Shakespeare Company

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of

  The Random House Publishing Group, a division of

  Random House, Inc., New York.

  MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks

  of Random House, Inc.

  “Royal Shakespeare Company,” “RSC,” and the RSC logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of The Royal Shakespeare Company.

  The version of As You Like It and the corresponding footnotes that appear in this volume were originally published in William Shakespeare: Complete Works, edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, published in 2007 by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

  eISBN: 978-1-58836-842-3

  www.modernlibrary.com

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Rosalynd

  In the Forest of Arden

  The Festive Resolution

  Aliena and Ganymede

  About the Text

  Key Facts

  As You Like It

  Act 1

  Scene 1

  Scene 2

  Scene 3

  Act 2

  Scene 1

  Scene 2

  Scene 3

  Scene 4

  Scene 5

  Scene 6

  Scene 7

  Act 3

  Scene 1

  Scene 2

  Scene 3

  Scene 4

  Scene 5

  Act 4

  Scene 1

  Scene 2

  Scene 3

  Act 5

  Scene 1

  Scene 2

  Scene 3

  Scene 4

  Textual Notes

  Scene-by-Scene Analysis

  As You Like It in Performance: The RSC and Beyond

  Four Centuries of As You Like It: An Overview

  At the RSC

  The Director’s Cut: Interviews with Dominic Cooke and Michael Boyd

  Playing Rosalind: An Interview with Naomi Frederick

  Shakespeare’s Career in the Theater

  Beginnings

  Playhouses

  The Ensemble at Work

  The King’s Man

  Shakespeare’s Works: A Chronology

  Further Reading and Viewing

  References

  Acknowledgments and Picture Credits

  INTRODUCTION

  ROSALYND

  For centuries, trade and marriage have been the engines of social mobility in Britain. The story of the Lodge family in the age of the first Queen Elizabeth is typical. A boy called Thomas Lodge was born in Shropshire, deep in the countryside. His family sent him to the big city and he was apprenticed to a grocer. He made a good marriage and rose to become Lord Mayor of London. He was bankrupted when there was a business downturn, but he still managed to get his son Thomas educated as a “poor scholar” at the Merchant Taylors’ School. From there Thomas Lodge junior went to Oxford. Education was the route from trade to the professions: after graduating, Lodge enrolled at the Inns of Court to train as a lawyer.

  But then he hit a barrier. Young Lodge had converted to Roman Catholicism. This immediately made him an outsider, a member of an oppressed minority. His father angrily excluded him from his will and it proved impossible to pursue a career in the law. So Lodge turned to writing and became a prolific author of plays, poems, pamphlets, and short novels. The most successful of these—one of the bestselling literary works of the Elizabethan age—was Rosalynd, a story of exile from the court to the forest. Like a modern screenwriter turning a successful novel into a movie, Shakespeare dramatized the story for the London stage.

  By rights, the play should have been named after its heroine. It is the Elizabethan equivalent of an “adapted” as opposed to an “original” screenplay. Shakespeare selects and compresses his material, but retains its essential spirit as a series of debates on the nature of love played out against a romantic woodland backdrop. The flavor of Lodge’s story, its language studded with allusions to classical mythology, may be tasted from the climactic moment when Rosalynd reverts to her female identity: “In went Ganimede and dressed herself in woman’s attire, having on a gown of green, with kirtle of rich sandal, so quaint that she seemed Diana triumphing in the forest; upon her head she wore a chaplet of roses, which gave her such a grace that she looked like Flora perked in the pride of all her flowers.”

  There are striking parallels between Shakespeare’s background and Lodge’s. Shakespeare’s father, too, was upwardly mobile thanks to his success in trade. John Shakespeare’s glove-making business secured him a position on the Stratford-upon-Avon town council. He eventually became town bailiff, the equivalent of mayor. But he, too, ran into financial trouble. It is also possible that the Shakespeares faced difficulties because of family associations with Catholicism. Like Thomas Lodge junior, Will Shakespeare sought his fortune in London. Not having a university degree, he could not enter a profession such as the law, so he drifted into the theater.

  The plot of As You Like It reflects aspects of the experience of both Lodge and Shakespeare. How can a young man improve himself if he is not given educational opportunities? In the first scene, we learn that whereas an older brother has gone off to college, young Orlando is forced to hang around at home. He sets off for the court and proves his mettle in the entertainment arena—not as a dramatist, but as a sportsman, the amateur upstart who bravely goes into the ring and unexpectedly defeats the professional court wrestler, Charles.

  But he is then exiled from the center of power. In a neat reversal of Shakespeare’s own journey from the Forest of Arden in Warwickshire to the bustling world of London, with its commerce, its court, and its theaters, Orlando goes into the forest and discovers his destiny there. Because the wicked Duke Frederick has taken power from his elder brother, the other ma
jor characters—the good duke and his courtiers, the disguised Rosalind and Celia, the wandering philosopher-gentleman Jaques—are also exiles in the forest.

  Lodge’s setting for his story was France, but he anglicized the name of the Ardennes forest to Arden. Perhaps this is what made the story so attractive to Shakespeare, who was born and raised close to the forest from which his mother, Mary Arden, took her family name. The play accordingly removes the action farther from France: though some French names, such as “Le Beau,” are retained, the location of the court is not specified. The deceased gentleman with three sons—the oldest who treats the youngest like a mere servant, the middle away at university and invisible until the closing twist—is Sir John of Bordeaux in Lodge but the more symbolically named Sir Rowland de Bois in Shakespeare. De Bois means “of the woods,” and Sir Rowland is a name suggestive of a lost world of chivalry and romance, as in The Song of Roland. Orlando, the Italianized form of Rowland, is chosen by Shakespeare for his hero as a way of indicating that the youngest son has a special bond with his dead father, a duty to preserve his good name. To more educated members of the Elizabethan theater audience, it would also have conjured up the eponymous hero of Orlando Furioso, an epic poem by Ariosto that was the sixteenth century’s great exemplar of chivalric romance. It is typical of Shakespeare’s skeptical, ironic temperament that the Orlando who wanders around the forest defacing trees with second-rate love poems, and who needs to take lessons in courtship from a supposed teenage boy, does not quite live up to his heroic name—not, at least, until the play moves into the true mode of romance when he rescues his brother from a lion and a snake.

  IN THE FOREST OF ARDEN

  The first we hear of the exiled duke is that, “like the old Robin Hood of England,” he is in the forest with a group of “merry men.” Ostensibly the qualifier “of England” is an indication that the action is supposed to take place in France, but the deeper effect is to identify Arden with Sherwood. About a year before the play was written, rival acting company the Admiral’s Men had played a two-part drama on the subject of Robin Hood called Robert Earl of Huntingdon—the first work in the long history of the legend to turn Robin into a disguised aristocrat as opposed to a genuinely subversive outlaw. The Arden scenes of As You Like It begin with the exiled duke contrasting the natural order of the forest to the flattery and envy of the court. As in the Robin Hood story, the wished-for conclusion is the restoration of the right ruler.

  Yet the play ironizes as well as idealizes. The most prominent figure in the duke’s forest circle is not a merry man but a melancholy man, the satirical Jaques. Often wrongly described as one of the duke’s courtiers, he is a gentleman who has sold his lands in order to become a “traveler,” a wry, detached observer of manners and morals. The forest order is dependent on hunting, leading Jaques to sympathize with the wounded stag and suggest that the good duke usurps the place of the deer every bit as much as the bad duke has usurped power back at court. Jaques and Touchstone—the two key characters invented by Shakespeare without precedent in Lodge—spar with each other because the satire of the former and the witty foolery of the latter are rival modes of mocking courtly pretensions such as Orlando’s highly romanticized language of love-service.

  Arden is also compared to the mythological “golden age,” and the play duly has its complement of classically named shepherds, signaling the influence of the ancient tradition of pastoral verse. The golden age was the imagined infancy of humankind, another Eden, a playground in which Nature offered up her fruits and the winter wind never blew. But Shakespeare complicates the picture. The duke’s very first speech sees Arden as a place less to “fleet the time carelessly as they did in the golden world” than to draw moral lessons from the natural world. This is no Arcadia of perpetual summer: the seasons do change; it is just that “the penalty of Adam”—being forced to labor for subsistence—seems less harsh than the vicissitudes of the court. The myth of the golden age made Utopia into the state that society had fallen from rather than that which it aspired to: a place where everybody was happy and there was no such thing as property. The old shepherd Corin is a voice of happiness, but he has no illusions about the need for labor and his dependence on property that he does not own. He is shepherd to another man’s flock and keeps his job only because Celia buys the farm.

  “Under the greenwood tree / Who loves to lie with me,” sings Amiens as the exiled lords come on dressed as foresters, and we are reminded of the rustic communities of Thomas Hardy, who used the opening line of that song as the title for one of his novels. The play has become central to the myth of “deep England,” the idea that English national identity is bound up with milkmaids dancing around the Maypole, tankards of nut-brown ale sipped in thatched taverns, and lengthening shadows on the village green.

  In 1987 the British West Indian artist Ingrid Pollard created a series of photographs called “Pastoral Interlude” in which she explored the place of black people in the English countryside. “It’s as if the Black experience is only lived within an urban environment,” Pollard wrote. “I thought I liked the Lake District where I wandered lonely as a Black face in a sea of white.” For her, “a visit to the countryside is always accompanied by a feeling of unease, dread.” A feeling, that is to say, that she does not belong in the world that, in shorthand, could be described as Arden. Yet the whole point of Shakespeare’s Arden is that it is an adventure playground for exiles and outsiders. The world we encounter there does not have the homogeneity of an English village. Rather, it is a gloriously multicultural community. Shakespeare loves to mix and match the past and the present, the indigenous and the immigrant, down-to-earth observation from experience and wild fantasia from myth and folktale.

  The denizens of the forest include not only Corin, the wise old agricultural laborer whose name is Greco-Roman yet whose nature is English, but also a country clergyman called Sir Oliver Martext, who may well have been imagined as a dangerous Catholic, and a very English peasant of small brainpower called William, who in the original production may well have been acted by a very English countryman of great brainpower called William Shakespeare. Among the exiles are the very French-sounding Amiens, with his musical gifts, and the quintessentially English stand-up comedian Touchstone. On the fringes of the forest, and of the play, is a mysterious “magician,” described but never seen, who converts the drama into a kind of fairy tale (complete with a rather gentle lion) even as it remains grittily true to English environment and climate.

  THE FESTIVE RESOLUTION

  Shortly after the Second World War, the Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye published a short essay that inaugurated the modern understanding that Shakespeare’s comedies, for all their lightness and play, are serious works of art, every bit as worthy of close attention as his tragedies. Entitled “The Argument of Comedy,” it proposed that the essential structure of Shakespearean comedy was ultimately derived from the “new comedy” of ancient Greece, which was mediated to the Renaissance via its Roman exponents Plautus and Terence. The “new comedy” pattern, described by Frye as “a comic Oedipus situation,” turned on “the successful effort of a young man to outwit an opponent and possess the girl of his choice.” The girl’s father, or some other authority figure of the older generation, resists the match but is outflanked, often thanks to an ingenious scheme devised by a clever servant, perhaps involving disguise or flight (or both). Frye, writing during Hollywood’s golden age, saw an unbroken line from the classics to Shakespeare to modern romantic comedy: “The average movie of today is a rigidly conventionalized New Comedy proceeding toward an act which, like death in Greek tragedy, takes place offstage, and is symbolized by the final embrace.”

  The union of the lovers brings “a renewed sense of social integration,” expressed by some kind of festival at the climax of the play—a marriage, a dance, or a feast. The union often also involves social mobility: it certainly does here, as Orlando, the youngest son of a gentleman, finds himself
bound to the daughter of a duke. All right-thinking people come over to the side of the lovers, but there are others “who are in some kind of mental bondage, who are helplessly driven by ruling passions, neurotic compulsions, social rituals, and selfishness.” Malvolio in Twelfth Night, Don John in Much Ado About Nothing, Shylock in The Merchant of Venice: Shakespearean comedy frequently includes a party pooper, a figure who refuses to be assimilated into the harmony. Jaques is of this company.

  Frye’s “The Argument of Comedy” pinpoints a pervasive structure: “the action of the comedy begins in a world represented as a normal world, moves into the green world, goes into a metamorphosis there in which the comic resolution is achieved, and returns to the normal world.” But for Shakespeare, the green world, the forest and its fairies, is no less real than the court. Frye, again, sums it up brilliantly:

  This world of fairies, dreams, disembodied souls, and pastoral lovers may not be a “real” world, but, if not, there is something equally illusory in the stumbling and blinded follies of the “normal” world, of Theseus’ Athens with its idiotic marriage law, of Duke Frederick and his melancholy tyranny [in As You Like It], of Leontes and his mad jealousy [in The Winter’s Tale], of the Court Party with their plots and intrigues. The famous speech of Prospero [in The Tempest] about the dream nature of reality applies equally to Milan and the enchanted island. We spend our lives partly in a waking world we call normal and partly in a dream world which we create out of our own desires. Shakespeare endows both worlds with equal imaginative power, brings them opposite one another, and makes each world seem unreal when seen by the light of the other.*

  Many of Shakespeare’s plays keep up a constant shuttle between symbolically opposed locations—Venice and Belmont, Rome and Egypt, Sicilian court and Bohemian country—but As You Like It moves all the major players to Arden as swiftly as possible. Once there, the scenes run together fluently. There is no clock ticking in the forest, no sense of time being marked by the scene breaks. Initially, however, there are two discernible imaginary locations: the farm and the cave, Corin’s world of agricultural labor and the deep forest where the duke and his men play at being Robin Hood. Orlando and Jaques drift between the two, whereas Rosalind/Ganymede and Celia/Aliena are not allowed to penetrate too far into the deep forest. Their reunion with the duke must be withheld for the climax.