Shakespeare: A Complete Introduction

In Love’s Labour’s Lost, the Princess of France is prevented from entering Navarre’s Court because of his vow. The vow places Navarre in a dilemma, as the Princess points out:

’Tis deadly sin to keep that oath, my lord,

And sin to break it.

(2.1.105–6)

The end of that play and the romantic comedies that were to follow can be regarded, particularly by festive and archetypal forms of criticism, as embodying the seasonal energies of spring combating the ‘death’ of winter. It is the energy of life, which is to lead ultimately to the festivity of a midsummer night, for example. These critics hold that a seasonal rhythm underpins the way in which civilization and art order their affairs. The King of Navarre and his courtiers are acting unnaturally in taking their vows of celibacy for three years. Sexuality and procreation are fundamental to new life and life itself follows a seasonal pattern.

Pleading for her brother Claudio’s life in Measure for Measure (1604), Isabella reminds Angelo that even the killing of animals for food is determined by the requirements of the various seasons:

…Even for our kitchens

We kill the fowl of season: shall we serve heaven

With less respect than we do minister

To our gross selves?

(2.2.85–8)

And as we will see in As You Like It, Jaques observes a seasonal pattern of life going through seven ages, the last being ‘mere oblivion,/Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything’ (2.7.165–6).

Troubled times

Recent criticism has been alert to the fact that at the time he was writing As You Like It and Twelfth Night – along with the tragedy Hamlet (1601) – Shakespeare was himself facing deaths in his family. His young son, Hamnet, twin brother of Judith, had died in August 1596. James Burbage, the father of the company and the man who had helped frame his career, had died in 1598 and Shakespeare’s own father died in 1601 (and was buried in Stratford on 8 September). It was thus a period of loss. We, of course, have to be wary of reading autobiographical detail into fictional works, and death, as noted earlier, was a more common everyday event in Elizabethan society than in our contemporary, sanitized existence. But, whatever the age, there are few deeper sorrows than the death of a child, a parent, a close friend and/or mentor, and it appears that Shakespeare experienced the loss of all three in a short space of time.

Further, although Shakespeare appears to have been personally financially secure, his company had also been experiencing difficulties. The lease on their playhouse in the north of the city, The Theatre, expired in 1598, and a quarrel broke out between the company and the owner of the lease of the land on which it had been built. The company dismantled the timbers of The Theatre in late December 1598, as their lease allowed, and having acquired land near the sewers on the South Bank of the Thames, had transported the wood and fabric to build a new theatre, the Globe, which opened in 1599.

Almost simultaneously with the opening came adverse publicity. This was in the form of an argument with one of their star actors, the clown Will Kempe, who acrimoniously left the company and made his departure known by dancing a jig from London to Norwich. Further, a young poet, John Marston, who had had his profane and satiric verses publicly burned in 1599, following Bishops Whitgift and Bancroft’s ban on the writing of satiric poems and epigrams, had turned to writing plays. He and some other satiric playwrights wrote for the more expensive, small private theatres at St Paul’s and Blackfriars. They satirized one another and those writing in the public theatres and also the ‘feathered’ gentry who would pay for the sixpenny seats to watch, and be seen at, the plays performed in the Globe theatre. Such gallants would be better off, possibly, paying their sixpence to go to the private theatres – although that didn’t mean they would not be satirized there – thus reducing the revenues of the Globe. But perhaps the biggest commercial threat of all was the plague. This regularly closed the theatres, leaving theatre companies without a steady income for long periods.

Key idea

Although Shakespeare was personally reasonably wealthy by the time he wrote As You Like It, the period between 1599 and 1604 was a critical one for the company, which faced many commercial challenges including the frequent closing of the theatres because of the plague. His plays therefore had to be as audiences ‘liked’ them. Shakespeare duly produced a series of highly successful plays including Henry V (1599), Julius Caesar (1599) (two plays that may have been the ones with which the new theatre opened), As You Like It (1599–1600), Twelfth Night (1601) and Hamlet (1600–1601).

Sex and sexual titillation

There is something pertinent about the title of a play such as As You Like It, but the same could be said of the subtitle of Twelfth Night, which was or, What You Will, or even the title Much Ado About Nothing; they all have a certain bawdy edge to them. What You Will has the pun on ‘will’, or ‘penis’, but Twelfth Night itself was also regarded as ‘the feast of fools’. Much Ado About Nothing has a pun on ‘no thing’ or ‘vagina’, while at the same time advertising that the play concerns itself with trivia. As You Like It, of course, refers to what audiences like, and at the end of the play Rosalind in the epilogue makes that very point:

I charge you, O women, for the love you bear to men, to like as much of this play as please you. And I charge you, O men, for the love you bear to women – as I perceive by your simpering none of you hates them – that between you and the women the play may please.

(Epilogue, 207–12)

Spotlight

Two of the issues that these plays deal with are certainly sex and sexual titillation, although the list of concerns by those opposed to theatres was much longer. In these plays and other comedies, Shakespeare capitalizes on the fact that, as women were not allowed to perform in plays, he had prepubescent boys playing the roles of young women. One of them, Rosalind, then dresses up as a young man and calls herself Ganymede, Jove’s errand-boy – a name with homoerotic associations – and under that disguise woos another young man named Orlando, who in the poem Orlando Furioso by Ariosto (1532) engages in a number of emotionally charged activities, one of which involves his running through the countryside naked.

But even the names of some of the other characters draw attention to the body or bodily functions. Touchstone, for example, may be a ‘touchstone’ of reality, but there is a sexual pun on stones, meaning testicles, and the name Jaques may well refer to the ‘jakes’ or privy, a flushing lavatory that had recently been invented by Sir John Harrington.

Although As You Like It is a romantic comedy, within it there is a great deal of banter and punning on sexual matters and on physical desire, as, for example, in 4.1.138f., when Orlando wishes his wife will be faithful ‘For ever, and a day’, to which Rosalind, disguised as Ganymede, replies ‘Say a day, without ever’, later explaining ‘Make the doors upon a woman’s wit, and it will out at the casement; shut that, and ’twill out at the keyhole; stop that, ’twill fly with the smoke out at the chimney’. To get outside is to go ‘out of doors’, which suggests that given freedom from restraint women will become ‘whores’, and woman’s ‘wit’ refers both to female anarchic ingenuity (particularly in sexual matters but also in her capacity for subversion generally) and to her apparently insatiable desire. She’ll find an opening ‘out of doors’ and shortly will be found in an adulterous bed with a ‘neighbour’. Indeed, there is a possible sexual pun even on each of the ways out of the house. (See Rubinstein, F. [1989, 2^nd edn: 181], A Dictionary of Shakespeare’s Sexual Puns and Their Significance. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan.)

Much of this punning is now lost on a modern audience or reader without the help of footnotes or specific reference books, but it gives an indication of the earthy humour of the play itself and helps performers in their interpretation, as, indeed, it can the reader. But it is not necessary to get sidetracked in trying to recognize all the puns, since in a number of cases the double entendres depend heavily on context.

Today, of course, women usually play the female roles and so another historical dimension is lost to the plays such as As You Like It, in which the gender disguises would have played such an important part in the performance. Indeed, Rosalind’s final appearance in the Epilogue, now in her woman’s attire but with the boy actor, draws attention to the fact that he is still in a woman’s role: ‘It is not the fashion to see the lady the epilogue;’ later saying ‘If I were a woman, I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me, complexions that liked me, and breaths that I defied not’ (Epilogue 1–2, 212–15). Catherine Belsey calls this the ‘comedy of uncertainty’, where ‘a male actor and a female character is speaking’ (Belsey, C., in Drakakis, J. [ed.] [1985: 181], Alternative Shakespeares. London and New York: Methuen New Accents).

It is the uncertainty of gender identity that may well have attracted Shakespeare’s audience, but Belsey notes that it may also have exposed the way in which that identity was socially constructed, allowing the audience ‘to glimpse a possible meaning, an image of being, which is not a-sexual, but which disrupts the system of difference on which sexual stereotyping depends’ (Belsey, 1985: 190).

Herein lies the comedy of the play. This isn’t a bawdy play, despite the sexual puns and bawdy innuendos which no doubt delighted the original audience. It goes beneath that to produce a humour of the genders, to a point where in the epilogue the boy actor can refer openly to both genders in a single speech.

‘Conventional or no, the taking of female parts by boy players actually occasioned a good deal of contemporary comment, and created considerable moral uneasiness, even among those who patronized and supported the theatres. Among those who opposed them, transvestism on stage was a main plank in the anti-stage polemic.’

Jardine, L. (1983: 9), Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Press. (See also Dunsinberre, J. [1975: 231].)

The play in this respect was one that ‘took on’ the civil authorities with a challenge that could not be criticized. It is a humour on the edge of what was permitted but it simultaneously demonstrated what it is to be human.

‘Shakespeare is profoundly and continuously interested in sex as a fundamental human instinct and activity, as a source not only of comedy but also of joy, of anguish, of disillusionment and of jealousy, of nausea as well as of ecstasy, as a site of moral and ethical debate, and at its best, as a natural fulfilment of spiritual love.’

Wells, S. (2010: 9–10), Shakespeare, Sex and Love. Oxford: Oxford University Press

In the Forest of Arden

Duke Senior has been usurped by his brother and banished. He lives like Robin Hood in the forest but despite his protestations in 2.1.1–17, that ‘in exile,/Hath not old custom made this life more sweet’, he still conducts himself as an authority figure. Orlando, under the rule of his tyrannical brother, Oliver, escapes into the forest with his father’s old retainer Adam, who almost dies from starvation (2.6.1f.). The two are saved by human hospitality rather than by Orlando’s aggression in trying to steal the exiled duke’s food: entering with sword drawn, he cries ‘Forbear, and eat no more’, to which the melancholy Jaques sardonically replies ‘Why, I have eat none yet’ (2.7.88–9). It is a put-down in relation to Orlando’s expectations concerning the behaviour of ‘outlaw’.

Attention is being drawn to the difference between nature and civilization as well as the differences within humankind inscribed in circumstances and levels of birth. Orlando, Rosalind, Oliver and Celia come from the upper stratum of society and retain that status even in refuge in the forest. Phoebe, Silvius, Audrey and Touchstone are from the lower stratum, although it is their existence at the lower end of society that allows Touchstone the clown to use his urbane knowledge of court behaviour to displace William – a possible reference to the playwright – in love, reducing him to the status of a ‘clown’:

TOUCHSTONE	[I am] He sir that must marry this woman. Therefore, you clown, abandon – which is in the vulgar leave – the society – which in the boorish is company – of this female – which in the common is woman. Which together is, abandon the society of this female, or clown, thou perishest;
	(5.1.45–50)

Touchstone here assumes a ridiculous linguistic superiority to William, humorously placing himself in a dominant hierarchical position, allying himself in his imagination with a cultural and political superiority. He has found someone, William, whom he can force to relieve him of his position of ‘clown’, which would allow him to move up the social ladder. In reality, however, he does not progress very far in sophistication, since for him marriage is reduced simply to a means of legitimizing sexual gratification: ‘Come sweet Audrey, We must be married or we must live in bawdry’ (3.3.87–8).

For her part, Phoebe, who has aspirations above her social status, falls in love with Rosalind disguised as Ganymede, thereby adding a further, audacious dimension to the sexual interest: two boy actors playing two women, one of whom has fallen for the other in her male attire.

Defying the dream

In the midst of this sexual and social melee within the forest is the malcontent, Jaques. Throughout the drama, Jaques demonstrates that he cannot be assimilated into the illusion that the characters are creating for themselves, since he feels compelled to defy their dream by reminding everyone of the frailty of flesh. His vision of a fallen, postlapsarian world is in conflict with the Duke’s illusory prelapsarian Edenic vision. Jaques offers his own vision of human progress in the famous Seven Ages of Man speech, in which he goes beyond drawing a parallel between life and the stage to suggest that life is itself a theatrical performance:

All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players.

They have their exits and their entrances,

And one man in his time plays many parts,

His acts being seven ages.

(2.7.139f.)

He continues by drawing out the different phases of human life as it declines towards imbecility and death. Society is constant only in its repetition of the mutability of its members, with the result that the process of living is also an inescapable part of a process of dying.

Key idea

In this context the comic plot builds on the foundation of a Shakespearean formulaic structure, and may be seen as a mating game in a world of birth, copulation and death, where rebirth and an investment in youth are Nature’s way of compensating for the rise and decline of existence.

The structure of the play

Within the structure, the obstacle with which this play begins is twofold: firstly, the usurpation of Duke Senior by his brother Ferdinand leads to the rejection of Rosalind; and secondly, Oliver’s dislike of his younger brother leads to him trying to have him killed in a wrestling match. Within that first stage of the play, not only are the issues set out but Shakespeare includes a wrestling bout which in itself has entertainment value – as have, of course, the songs performed in the forest setting.

In keeping with the formula of escape from a threat, subsequent lovers escape to the forest. There, the various re-articulations of the problem and the finding of a resolution take place under a pretence, a fantasy of the sort that constitutes ‘theatre’, to where the point of teasing and pretending are no longer enough. In 5.2.50–51 Rosalind’s lover Orlando declares, ‘I can live no longer by thinking’ and she replies, ‘I will weary you then no longer with idle talking.’ Their playing must come to an end, as must the play itself. Of course, that will be the point when the lovers’ true identities are discovered.

Rosalind subsequently uses Hymen’s masque, another ‘entertainment’, as a recognition scene, revealing who she is and thereby bringing each of the couples together. In this, Phoebe’s dream is shattered as she realizes that the man she loves (Ganymede) is a woman (Rosalind), and that she should be satisfied with the lover she has rejected (Silvius). But structurally there remain many unanswered questions. What about the original problem of the usurpation of the Duke? While a means has been found to bring Oliver into the wood and for him to fall in love, almost magically, with Celia, a device outside the harmony of the structural formula has to be created by the dramatist in order to allow for a reconciliation between the two dukes.

With only a brief prior reference (1.1.5–6), ‘My brother Jaques he keeps at school, and report speaks goldenly of his profit…’, Sir Rowland de Boys’s second son, confusingly named Jaques (or Jacques in the Arden stage direction), appears on the stage for the first time to convey the news of Duke Frederick’s conversion (5.4.149f.). The audience can scarcely be expected to recall the brief reference to him so early in the play, and so his introduction into the action comes as a surprise. It is a creaky dramatic solution that usually causes the audience to laugh and to forgive the dramatist for its implausibility. Yet, in its artifice, the second son’s appearance draws attention to the construct of the play as much as Hymen’s masque.

Its artificiality proclaims the self-referential nature of the artefact, in an attempt to alleviate the implausibility of the usurping Duke Frederick’s meeting ‘with an old religious man’ (5.4.158) and subsequent departure into a religious life. This also cleverly allows an exit for the malcontent Jaques, who has been left isolated by the plot and who elects to go to the converted Duke Frederick, commenting, ‘Out of these convertites,/There is much to be heard and learned’ (5.4.182–3). The resolution for him neatly suits his character as Shakespeare has him follow Duke Frederick’s fortunes now, as before he had followed Duke Senior in his banishment.

All that is left to do is for Rosalind, as we’ve seen, to close the play with that expression of the comic ambiguity of gender, allowing the audience a completeness and understanding of their place as a necessary component of the total performance. In all of this, however, there is still something highly satisfactory about As You Like It: it is a play that lives up to its name.