As You Like It Research Folder

Background Context

As You Like It was most likely written around 1598–1600, during the last years of Elizabeth’s reign. The play belongs to the literary tradition known as pastoral: which has its roots in the literature of ancient Greece, came into its own in Roman antiquity with Virgil’s Eclogues, and continued as a vital literary mode through Shakespeare’s time and long after. Typically, a pastoral story involves exiles from urban or court life who flee to the refuge of the countryside, where they often disguise themselves as shepherds in order to converse with other shepherds on a range of established topics, from the relative merits of life at court versus life in the country to the relationship between nature and art. The most fundamental concern of the pastoral mode is comparing the worth of the natural world, represented by relatively untouched countryside, to the world built by humans, which contains the joys of art and the city as well as the injustices of rigid social hierarchies. Pastoral literature, then, has great potential to serve as a forum for social criticism and can even inspire social reform.

In general, Shakespeare’s As You Like It develops many of the traditional features and concerns of the pastoral genre. This comedy examines the cruelties and corruption of court life and gleefully pokes holes in one of humankind’s greatest artifices: the conventions of romantic love. The play’s investment in pastoral traditions leads to an indulgence in rather simple rivalries: court versus country, realism versus romance, reason versus mindlessness, nature versus fortune, young versus old, and those who are born into nobility versus those who acquire their social standing. But rather than settle these scores by coming down on one side or the other, As You Like It offers up a world of myriad choices and endless possibilities. In the world of this play, no one thing need cancel out another. In this way, the play manages to offer both social critique and social affirmation. It is a play that at all times stresses the complexity of things, the simultaneous pleasures and pains of being human.

Narrative and Plot

Rosalind, daughter of a duke (Duke Senior), falls in love with a character named Orlando, the son of one of the duke’s friend; She is then banished by her uncle named Duke Fredrick. Rosalind then takes up the appearance of a boy, calling herself Ganymede. She travels with her cousin named Celia and the jester and they go and find the Forest of Arden, where her father lives in exile. When she is reunited with her father, there are new friends made and of course families are reunited. Near to the end of the play, Ganymede reveals herself to be Rosalind and marries Orlando along with three other marriages. They then go back to Duke Fredrick, who has changed his ways and turns to religion and allows the exile Duke Senior, father to Rosalind, can rule again.

Themes

Love – the play focuses on the relationships between four couples, including Rosalind and Orlando. This play is also focused on the nature of love and desire, and how love can make people do stupid and risky things

Foolishness – the play makes it clear that humans can be ridiculous and most of the play is spent of ridiculousness, like Orlando’s silly image that love should look like a 14^th Italian Hallmark card to Jacques’ monologue ‘All the world’s a stage’.

Gender – this theme is really focused in the play when Rosalind flees to the Forest of Ardene as a boy and comes up with the name of Ganymede. This challenges traditional ideas about what it means to be either a man or a woman.

Family – family treachery and betrayal is more conveyed in this play than togetherness because it shows Duke Frederick banishing his own brother who was the Duke and then her own niece, Rosalind. This shows that family relatives cannot always be counted on to be loyal or loving. 

Original Staging Conditions

The play would probably have opened the Globe theatre in London in 1599, a purpose-built playhouse on the south bank of the Thames at Southwark. Before then plays played in the courtyards and back rooms of pubs. This was one of the many reasons why actors had a reputation as being hard-drinking fellows who consorted with drunks and prostitutes. It was thought that their plays promoted ungodly ideas and it was for these reasons the City Fathers of London didn't allow a theatre to be built within the walls of the City of London - theatres in those days were the equivalent of the red-light district.

Performance History of the Texts

There is no certain record of any performance before the Restoration. Evidence suggests that the premiere may have taken place at Richmond Palace on 20 Feb 1599, enacted by the Lord Chamberlain's Men. Another possible performance may have taken place at Wilton House in Wiltshire, the country seat of the Earls of Pembroke. William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke hosted James I and his Court at Wilton House from October to December 1603, while Jacobean London was suffering an epidemic of bubonic plague. The King's Men were paid £30 to come to Wilton House and perform for the King and Court on 2 December 1603. A Herbert family tradition holds that the play acted that night was As You Like It.

During the English Restoration, the King's Company was assigned the play by royal warrant in 1669. It is known to have been acted at Drury Lane in 1723, in an adapted form called Love in a Forest; Colley Cibber played Jaques. Another Drury Lane production seventeen years later returned to the Shakespearean text (1740).

Notable recent productions of As You Like It include the 1936 Old Vic Theatre production starring Edith Evans and the 1961 Shakespeare Memorial Theatre production starring Vanessa Redgrave. The longest running Broadway production starred Katharine Hepburn as Rosalind, Cloris Leachman as Celia, William Prince as Orlando, and Ernest Thesiger as Jacques, and was directed by Michael Benthall. It ran for 145 performances in 1950. Another notable production was at the 2005 Stratford Festival in Stratford, Ontario, which was set in the 1960s and featured Shakespeare's lyrics set to music written by Barenaked Ladies. In 2014, theatre critic Michael Billington said his favourite production of the play was Cheek by Jowl's 1991 production, directed by Declan Donnellan.