SOURCE

As You Like It was probably written in 1599-1600, and it follows in the tradition of the folk or fairy tale (in this sense it has certain interesting affinities with King Lear). As his primary source Shakespeare relied on Thomas Lodge's Rosalynde, a pastoral romance first published in 1590. Shakespeare added virtually nothing to Lodge's plot. According to some critics, there is no comedy in which, in one sense, he invents so little. Yet he does leave a good deal out of Lodge's story since As You Like It is not a straight dramatization of the pastoral romance. In fact, Shakespeare uses it in such a way as to produce a parody on pastoralism, and hence it is a comedy on love. For a detailed analysis of Rosalynde see Kenneth Muir's Shakespeare's Sources.

GENERAL COMMENTS

Though it sounds trite, this is a play that attempts, as the title suggests, to please all. For the simple, it provides the stock ingredients of romance: a handsome, well-mannered young hero, the youngest of three brothers, two disguised princesses to be wooed and wed, and a banished virtuous Duke to be restored to his rightful throne. For the more sophisticated, it propounds, in the manner of the old courtly literary form of the debate, a question which is still left us to answer: "Is it better to live in the court (city) or the country?" The play also has the age-old appeal of the pastoral love-eclogue (eclogue comes from a Greek word meaning selection; as a literary term it refers to a pastoral or idyllic poem that praises country life) in the wooing of Phebe, with the burlesque of this in the wooing of Audrey, and with the tradition of the moral eclogue, in which the shepherd is the wise man, in Corin, For the learned and literary this is one of Shakespeare's most allusive plays, uniting old traditions and playing with them lightly. Then there are the songs--the forest is filled with music--and there is spectacle: a wrestling match to delight lovers of sport, the procession with the deer, which goes back to old country ritual and folk plays, and finally the masque of Hymen, to end the whole with courtly grace and dignity. As You Like It is the most refined and exquisite of the comedies, the one which is most commonly staged for delighted audiences.

One of the most interesting things about the play besides its characters and plot is its setting: the Forest of Arden. Arden ranks with the woods near Athens that we saw in A Midsummer Night's Dream and the island of Prospero that we will see in The Tempest as a place set apart, though unlike the other two Arden is not ruled by magic. (By the way, like A Midsummer Night's Dream this play begins in sorrow and ends in joy and marriage). It is set over against the envious court ruled by a tyrant, and a home which is no home because it harbors hatred, not love. Seen from the court, Arden appears to be an idyllic place untouched by the discontents of life, a place where "they fleet the time carelessly, as they did in the golden age," the happy greenwood of Robin Hood. Of course it is not a paradise. It contains some rough and uncouth characters; its weather is not always sunny; it has a bitter winter. Orlando, famished with hunger and carrying the fainting Adam, sees it as "an uncouth forest" and a desert where the air is bleak. Indeed, Arden does not seem very attractive at first sight to the weary escapees from the tyranny of the world. Arden is not a place where the laws of nature are denied and roses are without thorns.

Although life in Arden is not wholly idyllic, and this place set apart from the world is yet touched by the world's sorrows and can be mocked at by the worldly wise (as do Jaques and Touchstone), the image of life which the forest presents is irradiated by the conviction that the gay and the gentle can endure the rubs of fortune and that this earth is a place where men can find happiness in themselves and in others. Like other comic places, Arden is a place of discovery where the truth becomes clear and where each man finds himself and his true way. This discovery of truth in comedy is made through errors and mistakings. The trial and error by which we come to knowledge of ourselves and of our world is symbolized by the disguisings which are a recurrent element in all comedy, but as we have already seen particularly common in Shakespeare's. Things have, as it were, to become worse before they become better, more confused and farther from the proper pattern. By misunderstandings men come to understand, and by lies and feignings they discover truth.

One further element in the play is worth noting because it is pervasive though subtle: the constant, natural and easy reference to the Christian ideal of loving-kindness, gentleness, pity, and humility and to the sanctions which that ideal finds in the commands and promises of religion. In this fantasy world, in which the world of our experience is imaged, this element in experience finds a place with others, and the world is shown not only as a place where we may find happiness, but as a place where both happiness and sorrow may be hallowed. Critics have long noted the number of religious references in As You Like It and it is striking when we consider the play's main theme.

In conclusion, in no other play of Shakespeare do we feel so plainly a sense of happy and carefree ease. Once he sat down to write this play, Shakespeare left the noisy crowded town with all the demands it made on him, to forget the world for a while in the shade of Arden. As You Like It is of all his plays most visibly a comedy of escape.

CHARACTERIZATION

One of the most striking elements of the play is the way in which one character puts forth one point of view only to have it contradicted or corrected by another. In effect, the whole play is a balance of sweet against sour, of the cynical against the idealistic, and life is thus shown to be a mingling of hard fortune and good hap.

1) Rosalind: Once the action of the play moves to Arden, Rosalind is the central character; indeed, all the action revolves around her in her disguise as Ganymede. She is a creature of natural and almost divine simplicity. She first appears to us saddened for her banished father and when her dawning passion for Orlando occurs, it is at least partly motivated by the fact that he is the son of her father's old friend. Her love for Orlando and her game of pretending to be Rosalind while disguised as Ganymede is both playful and delightful. Of all the heroines in Shakespearean comedy, she is the gayest because she is the happiest, and the happiest because she knows her lover loves her, while yet she need not confess her own passion.

2) Touchstone and Jaques: The two commentators of the play are nicely contrasted. Touchstone is the parodist, Jaques the cynic. The parodist must loves what he parodies. To poke playful fun one must love the thing he mocks. In everything Touchstone says and does gusto, high spirits, and a zest for life ring out. Essentially comic, he can adapt himself to any situation in which he may find himself. Never at a loss, he is life's master. The essence of clowning is adaptability and improvisation. The clown is never baffled and is marked by his ability to place himself at once in rapport with his audience, to be all things to all men, to perform the part which is required at the moment. His role is as court-jester, the "all-licensed" fool. At the court he is somewhat subdued, having to side-step whippings, the customary penalty for the fool who oversteps his bounds. Once he is in Arden, he is free to practice unchecked his vocation--the exposure of folly. That, presumably is the significance of his name; he is the touchstone that distinguishes the pure from the base metal.

Jaques is his opposite. He is the cynic, the person who prefers the pleasures of superiority, cold-eyed and cold-hearted. He is not one to change. He likes himself as he is. In a sense he is a "humour" character; in the phrase of the day he was a malcontent. A professed satirist, he demands the liberty of caustic criticism of society, of all human life. His famous "All the world's a stage" speech is the cynic's picture of man's life in all its periods. There is no fear that we shall take the pastoral seriously while Jaques is there to comment upon it. Unlike the other characters, he is a loner; yet as a solitary figure, the outsider, he does nothing to harm others and is perfectly satisfied with himself and happy in his melancholy. Even more, his melancholy is a source of pleasure and amusement for others. Anyone in the play can put him down and feel the better for it. Perhaps a certain sour distaste for life is voided through Jaques, something most of us feel at one time or another. If he were not there to give expression to it, we might be tempted to find the picture of life in the forest too sweet. His effect, therefore, is to deflate, not destroy since whatever he says only postpones happiness; cheerfulness soon breaks in again.

(Notes taken from Helen Gardner's "As You Like It," in Muir's Shakespeare: The Comedies, Parrot, and Muir's Shakespeare's Sources.)