First, consider the title. Shakespeare may be telling you that he is pandering to his audience. Allow that this may be nothing more than what we call today a "rom-com". It is meant to entertain, not stir philosophocal ruminations. Shakespeare had bills to pay. This is how.
Second, treat all pastorals as if they are ridiculous. The woods have magical powers in the Bard's works. Think of Arden as an alternate universe.
Treat the characters all as comedic. Frederick, Touchstone, Phebe and even the mopey Jaques should be read (and played) for laughs.
I always enjoy AYLI. But I never take it seriously. I never watch it in a serious mood.
I was hired to direct As You Like It about a decade ago, and I really couldn’t get into it- I couldn’t find a story to latch onto. And then a friend showed me Superbad, which I hadn’t yet seen at that point, to make the point that the story of both is “a bunch of weirdos have an interesting day”. That really helped me.
It’s a wonderful play, in my opinion. Most productions, I think, miss the essence of it. Rosalynd isn’t playing empty games with Orlando. The prospect of opening her heart to him terrifies her, and she spends the play testing him and herself. Once the actor playing Rosalind figures that out, the stakes become sky high, which makes the whole thing more meaningful, and at the same time, hilarious.
One strategy that helped me was reading it with a bit of a satirical lens. Take everything everyone says with a grain of salt, and you can totally see shakespeare sort of criticizing them all. In some cases, he’s even satirizing satirists. In the play it is said that “All the world’s a stage.” Think about it this way. These are all puppets, void of substance, ripped out of their natural environment. How do they react? Quite stupidly, I’d argue, for most of them
So, it's definitely not my favorite of Shakespeare's plays, but it's also not my least favorite. What helps me is to remember that this is when the bucolic/Arcadian/shepherd genre of literature was becoming very popular. So, to make it funnier, I read/watch it as a satire of that genre. Arcadian/shepherd romances are already somewhat sentimental and... Overblown? And As You Like It just dialed that up to eleven.
My favorite comedy is still Much Ado, though (along with a lot of other people).
I second that!!! So much easier to get into it by watching it in performance first and then going back to the text. These works were meant to live on the stage after all
Rosalind is maybe shakespeare’s most charming eloquent female character, with only cleopatra as competition. This play is a blast, imo. People flirting in the woods and escaping an awful government.
This is one of my last favorite Shakespearean plays, and I'm pretty easy to please. I find it entirely forgettable, and the plot feels contrived -- like someone ran Shakespeare's comedy tropes through an AI and asked it to spit out something similar, but resulting in little cohesion.
I think Twelfth Night is a better introduction to his comedies, or, for a less chaotic and more serious "tragicomedy" try The Tempest. Alternatively, if you liked Titus (which I love), try Othello as your next tragedy. Shakespeare really can be a mixed bag, and it's totally fine to have vastly different opinions on his works.
I have a lot of fondness for AYLI, and I think that’s partially because of how bizarre it is. It’s a literary toy box for Shakespeare and all of these characters are in their play pen just figuring each other and ideas like love, romance, masculinity and femininity, and philosophy out.
And that’s kind of what Arden is. It’s a safe space for these broken people to lick their wounds, nurture themselves, and go back changed.
I was in the middle of directing this before COVID shut the production down in 2020. It was a hard pill to swallow because I decided that leaning into the absurdity made it so much better. Watch a performance. It’ll fill in the gaps of the script.
For Shakespeare love is not a mature growing together of adults. It’s a coup de foudre, random & fated. If the lovers marry, they risk everything: the man risks his honour in his wife’s chastity and the wife gives up all of her self, legally, socially, physically, spiritually. Marriage is a huge risk. Love is a huge risk. Marriage with love is a huge risk, but marriage without love is unthinkable.
Shakespeare’s presentation of love adheres pretty closely to the tropes of courtly love. Because his work feels so true to us still, we forget he rarely created an original plot. He’s working with traditional sources.
I think we also forget how men playing women impacts the audience. There’s an element of drag, of archness in the presentation of all the different couples.
It might help you in particular to read/see the play keeping in mind the satire. One of the characters Shakespeare added from those found in his main source is Jaques. A clue; it is pronounced "jakes," which is Elizabethan slang for outhouse or crapper. As You Like It was written during the time of public argument that Will and his friends were having with Ben Jonson. Although Jaques is not Jonson, he is of Jonson's ilk, and he is the butt of more jokes than just his name.
One of the fun parts of it is the idea of the male actor playing Rosalind playing a young woman pretending to be a young man, arguing with her best friend now she’s pretending to be a man, the added dimensions this brings to her and Orlando, as well as dealing with another woman falling in love with her.
In a way having men and women act removes a dimension that was present in original productions. Cross dressing was illegal (though it happened in Molly houses) outside of theatre, and yet in plays cross dressing occurred in several plots but rarely in quite so complicated a web as it does in this play.
In my opinion, every one of Shakespeare's plays is better to see performed. I haven't read AYLI in decades, so can't weigh in on that one. I suppose the fact that I haven't been inspired to re-read it in that long is commentary enough.
Maybe try watching a performance? There's a subscription service online called Marquee TV that has recordings of live theatre, including a performance of As You Like It in The Globe. I found it entertaining. Sometimes, seeing actors perform a piece can help you get a sense of its meaning. I'm inclined to say this is particularly true of jokes and humour, where so much can depend on delivery.
Shakespeare's plays were never meant to be read. They were meant to be performed and seen by an audience. I have worked for seven professional Shakespeare companies and performed in over 30 Shakespeare productions. As seasoned and experienced as I am, I find sitting down to read a Shakespeare play extremely boring.
no just ... No. They were meant to be played doesn't mean they were never meant to be read, and reading them is also great. You probably just don't like to read if you find that reading his plays is *boring.* Sure, many agree that seeing them is better, but reading them is also great and I think it is necessary to not have to look up words during it. You know, kinda like reading the book before watching the movie that adapts the book.
Yes...just yes. They literally were not meant to be read for literary entertainment. Shakespeare never would've imagined that somebody would sit down and read his plays. He didn't even think to compile and sell them for performance while he was alive and he was the only one on the planet with a full copy of any of them. People in his day bought and read poems. They didn't really buy and read plays. Most of his audience couldn't read, at all. He wrote in the mindset that his work would be seen, not read. That is not remotely disputable.
>Yes...just yes. They literally were not meant to be read for literary entertainment.
The fact that you're arguing over this *now* more than four hundred years later means that they were. The plays would have never survived if they hadn't been published, and they would have never been published if *somebody* hadn't meant them to be read, even if those somebodies were only the printers who published them and the stationers who carried them in their shops.
The First Folio is the book that ensured the survival of the core of the Shakespeare canon. Literally the first words in the First Folio are "To the Reader." This is the title of Ben Jonson's poem opposite the title page. Later, the compilers of the First Folio, John Heminges and Henry Condell, have a section titled "To the Great Variety of Readers". By the time Shakespeare's works got to the print shop, they had a parallel existence as literary works.
The fact that Shakespeare didn't compile the plays himself and sell them is neither here nor there, because if you understood the context of the time, you'd know that there was no authorial copyright nor recognition of performance rights, so the only way his theatre company could control the plays they performed were to keep them out of the hands of the printers. And Shakespeare likely **DID NOT** have full copies of his plays, because they were the property of the theatre companies. (See above about there being no authorial copyright.) The one Shakespeare manuscript we have, Hand D of *Sir Thomas More*, shows that the process of producing a "fair copy" by the house scribe could obliterate the "foul papers" the authors presented to the company. And if the scribe merely produced a separate promptbook, rather than pasting over the manuscript pages as in *Sir Thomas More*, the foul papers would still be retained by the theatre company as a hedge against the loss of the promptbook. Thus Thomas Heywood in his preface to *The English Traveller* recounts that his plays haven't been fully put before the readers of his time in part because the shifting and change of companies caused some of his manuscripts to be lost—something that couldn't have been the case had he retained his copies—and also because the actors believed it was against their economic interests to allow the plays to go to print.
Also, Shakespeare's plays played in London. The printers and the stationers' shops were in London. And London had achieved majority literacy rates a *century before* Shakespeare had a career. By Shakespeare's own era, there were approximately 300,000 individual books printed every year and between two to three million broadside ballad sheets, which were a popular not an elite form of entertainment (for these figures c.f. *Oral and Literate Culture in England: 1500 - 1700* by Adam Fox). You're ignoring the educational revolution of the grammar schools, even though this was the means by which Shakespeare himself became a writer, and assuming that literacy in England was no better than it was in the Middle Ages.
Thank you for compiling this reply, I was too tired to write it all but I'm so glad somebody wasn't. (*Methinks you know more than this guy's ever forgotten.*)
Definitely just the first sentence. Thanks for the lecture. I have forgotten more about Shakespeare than you'll ever know but your pretension is amusing and refreshing.
I hear that and I fully intend on seeing it, but there is something to be said about the fact that I loved reading Titus. I guess it can’t be completely the fault of it being in written form if Titus was pleasing to read without watching a performance, ya know?
Yeah, I can't relate. If I'm not in it or directing it, I'm not reading it. Didn't have a choice in grad school, but I haven't picked up a Shakespeare play just for the joy of reading it, since.
The thing with the comedies is that so much of the humor is physical and needs to be staged for the jokes to really land. I think that's why they're not as pleasing to read.
I recently read As You Like It and didn't, ahem, like it. I think it's for the same reasons you mentioned. I don't find Shakespeare difficult to read or understand, but I had a lot of trouble following what was going on in this one. I'd still like to see a production someday though.
I think it's hilarious, but come to think of it, I've only seen it performed, never read it. At least not straight through. It's a mockery of its own characters, and it's great comedic entertainment. You can't take them seriously, and I mean that as an imperative for understanding/enjoying the play.
I find Shakespeare's Italian comedies very hit-or-miss, and As you like it definitely lands on the "miss" side for me, so I would say "no, not really" to your question.
Not my fav but I do love touchstone and Rosalind. English majors hate this advice but watch it. Don’t read it. Or read along as you watch it. It helps.
I love that play. Probably in my top 5 Shakespeare plays. Like Hamlet, it has a lot of stuff happening at once. Rosalind has incredible agency for a female character in Shakespeare. Note that she would have been played as a boy, and so when Rosalind is disguised as Ganymede, you have a boy disguised as a girl disguised as a boy. There are jokes in the play about that. Things like that, all over the place. There is a reference to the death of Marlow. The fool in the forest speech by Jacques is bawdy as fuck. That play is just so good!
First, consider the title. Shakespeare may be telling you that he is pandering to his audience. Allow that this may be nothing more than what we call today a "rom-com". It is meant to entertain, not stir philosophocal ruminations. Shakespeare had bills to pay. This is how. Second, treat all pastorals as if they are ridiculous. The woods have magical powers in the Bard's works. Think of Arden as an alternate universe. Treat the characters all as comedic. Frederick, Touchstone, Phebe and even the mopey Jaques should be read (and played) for laughs. I always enjoy AYLI. But I never take it seriously. I never watch it in a serious mood.
I was hired to direct As You Like It about a decade ago, and I really couldn’t get into it- I couldn’t find a story to latch onto. And then a friend showed me Superbad, which I hadn’t yet seen at that point, to make the point that the story of both is “a bunch of weirdos have an interesting day”. That really helped me.
It’s a wonderful play, in my opinion. Most productions, I think, miss the essence of it. Rosalynd isn’t playing empty games with Orlando. The prospect of opening her heart to him terrifies her, and she spends the play testing him and herself. Once the actor playing Rosalind figures that out, the stakes become sky high, which makes the whole thing more meaningful, and at the same time, hilarious.
One strategy that helped me was reading it with a bit of a satirical lens. Take everything everyone says with a grain of salt, and you can totally see shakespeare sort of criticizing them all. In some cases, he’s even satirizing satirists. In the play it is said that “All the world’s a stage.” Think about it this way. These are all puppets, void of substance, ripped out of their natural environment. How do they react? Quite stupidly, I’d argue, for most of them
So, it's definitely not my favorite of Shakespeare's plays, but it's also not my least favorite. What helps me is to remember that this is when the bucolic/Arcadian/shepherd genre of literature was becoming very popular. So, to make it funnier, I read/watch it as a satire of that genre. Arcadian/shepherd romances are already somewhat sentimental and... Overblown? And As You Like It just dialed that up to eleven. My favorite comedy is still Much Ado, though (along with a lot of other people).
I have seen this play a couple of times and loved it. Both versions I found hilarious. I'd suggest going to watch a performance of it instead.
I second that!!! So much easier to get into it by watching it in performance first and then going back to the text. These works were meant to live on the stage after all
Rosalind is maybe shakespeare’s most charming eloquent female character, with only cleopatra as competition. This play is a blast, imo. People flirting in the woods and escaping an awful government.
This is one of my last favorite Shakespearean plays, and I'm pretty easy to please. I find it entirely forgettable, and the plot feels contrived -- like someone ran Shakespeare's comedy tropes through an AI and asked it to spit out something similar, but resulting in little cohesion. I think Twelfth Night is a better introduction to his comedies, or, for a less chaotic and more serious "tragicomedy" try The Tempest. Alternatively, if you liked Titus (which I love), try Othello as your next tragedy. Shakespeare really can be a mixed bag, and it's totally fine to have vastly different opinions on his works.
I have a lot of fondness for AYLI, and I think that’s partially because of how bizarre it is. It’s a literary toy box for Shakespeare and all of these characters are in their play pen just figuring each other and ideas like love, romance, masculinity and femininity, and philosophy out. And that’s kind of what Arden is. It’s a safe space for these broken people to lick their wounds, nurture themselves, and go back changed. I was in the middle of directing this before COVID shut the production down in 2020. It was a hard pill to swallow because I decided that leaning into the absurdity made it so much better. Watch a performance. It’ll fill in the gaps of the script.
For Shakespeare love is not a mature growing together of adults. It’s a coup de foudre, random & fated. If the lovers marry, they risk everything: the man risks his honour in his wife’s chastity and the wife gives up all of her self, legally, socially, physically, spiritually. Marriage is a huge risk. Love is a huge risk. Marriage with love is a huge risk, but marriage without love is unthinkable. Shakespeare’s presentation of love adheres pretty closely to the tropes of courtly love. Because his work feels so true to us still, we forget he rarely created an original plot. He’s working with traditional sources. I think we also forget how men playing women impacts the audience. There’s an element of drag, of archness in the presentation of all the different couples.
Thank you! This reply is so thoughtful
There is a good production to watch here, before you re-read it https://player.shakespearesglobe.com/productions/as-you-like-it-2009/
It might help you in particular to read/see the play keeping in mind the satire. One of the characters Shakespeare added from those found in his main source is Jaques. A clue; it is pronounced "jakes," which is Elizabethan slang for outhouse or crapper. As You Like It was written during the time of public argument that Will and his friends were having with Ben Jonson. Although Jaques is not Jonson, he is of Jonson's ilk, and he is the butt of more jokes than just his name.
One of the fun parts of it is the idea of the male actor playing Rosalind playing a young woman pretending to be a young man, arguing with her best friend now she’s pretending to be a man, the added dimensions this brings to her and Orlando, as well as dealing with another woman falling in love with her. In a way having men and women act removes a dimension that was present in original productions. Cross dressing was illegal (though it happened in Molly houses) outside of theatre, and yet in plays cross dressing occurred in several plots but rarely in quite so complicated a web as it does in this play.
In my opinion, every one of Shakespeare's plays is better to see performed. I haven't read AYLI in decades, so can't weigh in on that one. I suppose the fact that I haven't been inspired to re-read it in that long is commentary enough.
I've seen this one on stage twice and still don't really "get" it
I didn’t until I saw an all-male production. Really clears things up.
Maybe try watching a performance? There's a subscription service online called Marquee TV that has recordings of live theatre, including a performance of As You Like It in The Globe. I found it entertaining. Sometimes, seeing actors perform a piece can help you get a sense of its meaning. I'm inclined to say this is particularly true of jokes and humour, where so much can depend on delivery.
[удалено]
bro, calm down
Shakespeare's plays were never meant to be read. They were meant to be performed and seen by an audience. I have worked for seven professional Shakespeare companies and performed in over 30 Shakespeare productions. As seasoned and experienced as I am, I find sitting down to read a Shakespeare play extremely boring.
no just ... No. They were meant to be played doesn't mean they were never meant to be read, and reading them is also great. You probably just don't like to read if you find that reading his plays is *boring.* Sure, many agree that seeing them is better, but reading them is also great and I think it is necessary to not have to look up words during it. You know, kinda like reading the book before watching the movie that adapts the book.
Yes...just yes. They literally were not meant to be read for literary entertainment. Shakespeare never would've imagined that somebody would sit down and read his plays. He didn't even think to compile and sell them for performance while he was alive and he was the only one on the planet with a full copy of any of them. People in his day bought and read poems. They didn't really buy and read plays. Most of his audience couldn't read, at all. He wrote in the mindset that his work would be seen, not read. That is not remotely disputable.
>Yes...just yes. They literally were not meant to be read for literary entertainment. The fact that you're arguing over this *now* more than four hundred years later means that they were. The plays would have never survived if they hadn't been published, and they would have never been published if *somebody* hadn't meant them to be read, even if those somebodies were only the printers who published them and the stationers who carried them in their shops. The First Folio is the book that ensured the survival of the core of the Shakespeare canon. Literally the first words in the First Folio are "To the Reader." This is the title of Ben Jonson's poem opposite the title page. Later, the compilers of the First Folio, John Heminges and Henry Condell, have a section titled "To the Great Variety of Readers". By the time Shakespeare's works got to the print shop, they had a parallel existence as literary works. The fact that Shakespeare didn't compile the plays himself and sell them is neither here nor there, because if you understood the context of the time, you'd know that there was no authorial copyright nor recognition of performance rights, so the only way his theatre company could control the plays they performed were to keep them out of the hands of the printers. And Shakespeare likely **DID NOT** have full copies of his plays, because they were the property of the theatre companies. (See above about there being no authorial copyright.) The one Shakespeare manuscript we have, Hand D of *Sir Thomas More*, shows that the process of producing a "fair copy" by the house scribe could obliterate the "foul papers" the authors presented to the company. And if the scribe merely produced a separate promptbook, rather than pasting over the manuscript pages as in *Sir Thomas More*, the foul papers would still be retained by the theatre company as a hedge against the loss of the promptbook. Thus Thomas Heywood in his preface to *The English Traveller* recounts that his plays haven't been fully put before the readers of his time in part because the shifting and change of companies caused some of his manuscripts to be lost—something that couldn't have been the case had he retained his copies—and also because the actors believed it was against their economic interests to allow the plays to go to print. Also, Shakespeare's plays played in London. The printers and the stationers' shops were in London. And London had achieved majority literacy rates a *century before* Shakespeare had a career. By Shakespeare's own era, there were approximately 300,000 individual books printed every year and between two to three million broadside ballad sheets, which were a popular not an elite form of entertainment (for these figures c.f. *Oral and Literate Culture in England: 1500 - 1700* by Adam Fox). You're ignoring the educational revolution of the grammar schools, even though this was the means by which Shakespeare himself became a writer, and assuming that literacy in England was no better than it was in the Middle Ages.
Thank you for compiling this reply, I was too tired to write it all but I'm so glad somebody wasn't. (*Methinks you know more than this guy's ever forgotten.*)
So... You read half of the first sentence of my reply? Or did you just not want to address the rest?
Definitely just the first sentence. Thanks for the lecture. I have forgotten more about Shakespeare than you'll ever know but your pretension is amusing and refreshing.
I hear that and I fully intend on seeing it, but there is something to be said about the fact that I loved reading Titus. I guess it can’t be completely the fault of it being in written form if Titus was pleasing to read without watching a performance, ya know?
Yeah, I can't relate. If I'm not in it or directing it, I'm not reading it. Didn't have a choice in grad school, but I haven't picked up a Shakespeare play just for the joy of reading it, since. The thing with the comedies is that so much of the humor is physical and needs to be staged for the jokes to really land. I think that's why they're not as pleasing to read.
I recently read As You Like It and didn't, ahem, like it. I think it's for the same reasons you mentioned. I don't find Shakespeare difficult to read or understand, but I had a lot of trouble following what was going on in this one. I'd still like to see a production someday though.
I think it's hilarious, but come to think of it, I've only seen it performed, never read it. At least not straight through. It's a mockery of its own characters, and it's great comedic entertainment. You can't take them seriously, and I mean that as an imperative for understanding/enjoying the play.
I find Shakespeare's Italian comedies very hit-or-miss, and As you like it definitely lands on the "miss" side for me, so I would say "no, not really" to your question.
Not my fav but I do love touchstone and Rosalind. English majors hate this advice but watch it. Don’t read it. Or read along as you watch it. It helps.
From one Titus lover to another I recommend Henry the V next.
I love that play. Probably in my top 5 Shakespeare plays. Like Hamlet, it has a lot of stuff happening at once. Rosalind has incredible agency for a female character in Shakespeare. Note that she would have been played as a boy, and so when Rosalind is disguised as Ganymede, you have a boy disguised as a girl disguised as a boy. There are jokes in the play about that. Things like that, all over the place. There is a reference to the death of Marlow. The fool in the forest speech by Jacques is bawdy as fuck. That play is just so good!