A collection of essays about Shakespeare's comedic play As you like it, addressing its structure, themes, and subject matter.

This book is a study of As You Like It , which shows how the play represents issues of interest to literate playgoers of its time, as well as speculatively to Shakespeare himself.

A pastoral comedy written by William Shakespeare, As You Like It is regarded as one of his greatest comedies for more than four centuries now. The play is set up mostly in the Forest of Arden, and it narrates the story of Rosalind and Celia's experiences with disguises and desires. While the readers also remain engaged with the issues of primogeniture and exile informing the tensions between the two sets of brothers Oliver-Orlando and Duke Senior (Ferdinand)-Duke Frederick, respectively, the play’s true captivating nature is lent by characters like Audrey, Silvius, Phoebe and Adam, who come from the lower social strata. The play ends on a note of forgiveness, reunion and understanding. The analysis of ‘The idea of the pastoral’ and ‘The operations of gender’, both the primary subjects of criticism, have been given a special focus in the two extremely informative critical essays included at the end of the book. Key Features • Fully-annotated text explained in an easy-to-understand language. • Detailed introduction to the play encourages readers to critically examine the background and the various aspects of the play. • Act-wise Summary given at the end of each Act.

This essential guide provides a comprehensive survey of the most important criticism surrounding As You Like It, one of Shakespeare's most popular and engaging comedies, from the earliest appraisals through to 21st century scholarship. Dana Aspinall outlines, assesses and explores the key critical issues, including As You Like It and the genre of comedy; Shakespeare's adaptation of sources; gender, love and marriage; and interrogations of power. Highlighting how critical and scholarly studies of As You Like It continue to enrich our understanding of this complex and popular play, this guide is an invaluable resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students of English literature, teachers, researchers, scholars, and lovers of Shakespeare everywhere.

This study removes some of the critical puzzles that Shakespeare's comedies of love have posed in the past. The author shows that what distinguishes the comedies is not their similarity but their variety.

This edition of As You Like It is an annotated text with detailed notes on the play from different angles. It has a general introduction by the series editor and an introduction to the play by the editor of the book, marking the place of the play in Shakespeare s dramatic career. There is also a detailed summary of each scene at the beginning of each scene so that the student will get a clear idea of the development of the plot structure. There is also an elaborate discussion of the different strands of thought and ideas in the play in the introduction. There are line references, explanations and commentary which will enable the student to master the play. Cross-references which have been added on at all relevant points give the student a holistic view of the play. There is a list of further reading and a list of topics for discussion at the end of the edition.

As You Like It: Language and Writing explores one of Shakespeare's best-known comedies. It considers the literary and theatrical contexts in which Shakespeare was writing; examines, in detail, the different forms of language used in the play and considers ways in which language and meaning have changed over time, and are affected by performance. Each chapter contains a 'Writing matters' section which provides suggestions for activities that can further enhance a student's understanding of the play. This informative guide to Shakespeare's popular comedy equips students with the critical skills to analyze its language, structure and themes and to expand and enrich their own responses to the play.

First published in 1985. In this revisionist history of comic characterization, Karen Newman argues that, contrary to received opinion, Shakespeare was not the first comic dramatist to create self-conscious characters who seem 'lifelike' or 'realistic'. His comic practice is firmly set within a comic tradition which stretches from Plautus and Menander to playwrights of the Italian Renaissance.

Shakespeare's As You Like It is a play without a theme. Instead, it repeatedly poses one question in a variety of forms: What if the world were other than it is? As You Like It is a set of experiments in which its characters conditionally change an aspect of their world and see what comes of it: what if I were not a girl but a man? What if I were not a duke, but someone like Robin Hood? What if I were a deer? "What would you say to me now an [that is, "if"] I were your very, very Rosalind?" (4.1.64-65). "Much virtue in 'if'," as one of its characters declares near the play's end; 'if' is virtual. It releases force even if the force is not that of what is the case. Change one thing in the world, the play asks, and how else does everything change? In As You Like It, unlike Shakespeare's other plays, the characters themselves are both experiment and experimenters. They assert something about the world that they know is not the case, and their fictions let them explore what would happen if it were-and not only if it were, but something, not otherwise apparent, about how it is now. What is as you like it? What is it that you, or anyone, really likes or wants? The characters of As You Like It stand in 'if' as at a hinge of thought and action, conscious that they desire something, not wholly capable of getting it, not even able to say what it is. Their awareness that the world could be different than it is, is a step towards making it something that they wish it to be, and towards learning what that would be. Their audiences are not exempt. As You Like It doesn't tell us that it knows what we like and will give it to us. It pushes us to find out. Over the course of the play, characters and audiences experiment with other ways the world could be and come closer to learning what they do like, and how their world can be more as they like it. By exploring ways the world can be different than it is, the characters of As You Like It strive to make the world a place in which they can be at home, not as a utopia-Arden may promise that, but certainly doesn't fulfill it-but as an ongoing work of living. We get a sense at the play's end not that things have been settled once and for all, but that the characters have taken time to breathe-to live in their new situations until they discover better ones, or until they discover newer desires. As You Like It, in other words, is a kind of essay: a set of tests or attempts to be differently in the world, and to see what happens. These essays in As If: As You Like It, originally commissioned as an introductory guide for students, actors, and admirers of the play, trace the force and virtue of someof the claims of the play that run counter to what is the case-its 'ifs.' William N. West is Associate Professor of English, Classics, and Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University, where he is also chair of the Department of Classics and co-editor of the journal Renaissance Drama. He is co-editor (with Helen Higbee) of Robert Weimann's Author's Pen and Actor's Voice: Writing and Playing in Shakespeare's Theatre (Cambridge, 2000) and (with Bryan Reynolds) of Rematerializing Shakespeare: Authority and Representation on the Early Modern Stage (Palgrave, 2005). In addition to his book Theatres and Encyclopedias in Early Modern Europe (2002), he has recently published articles on Romeo and Juliet's understudies, irony and encyclopedic writing before and after the Enlightenment, Ophelia's intertheatricality (with Gina Bloom and Anston Bosman), humanism and the resistance to theology, Shakespeare's matter, and conversation as a theory of knowledge in Browne's Pseudodoxia. His work has been supported by grants from the NEH and the Beinecke, Folger, Huntington, and Newberry libraries.