As You Like It 2 nd Lecture

1. As You Like It2nd Lecture Experimental Theater? Play among the first to be performed on the stage of the Globe (1599)

2. Seeing play vs. reading it • AYLI very much depends on our seeing it. • In theater the play can seem quite satisfying, even moving if Rosalind is well played. • In reading we encounter lots of curious stuff, not all of which still works. • E.g., Touchstone’s riff on the seven types of quarreling in V.4. 68ff. (“retort courteous” through “lie direct”). • And other topical jokes, mainly in Touchstone’s part, some in Jaques’. • The play demands a lively, witty Rosalind and an appealing Orlando.

3. Play as experimental theater • We notice how little plot there really is. • Classic beginning sense of a world awry, the Cain and Abel pattern of brothers murderously at each other’s throats. • Moving to a magic green world where everything seems suspended. • And pastoral virtues can prevail: (in Duke Senior’s formulation) “tongues in trees, sermons in stones,/ Books in the running brooks, and good in everything.” • Toward the end of the play, Oliver is converted in what looks like a parody of pastoral action: the snake, the lion, Orlando’s rescue of him. • And Duke Frederick, as Jaques de Boys tells us, simply comes in contact with the pastoral forest and an old religious man and is converted. • Pastoral is magically effective.

4. Experimental theater (continued) • Once we enter pastoral world, in Act II, the plot seems to stop. • Instead, lots of talk. • Songs (more than in any other of Shakespeare’s plays). • Bad poetry recited: III.2.85-92, 121ff. • And parodied: 98ff. And mocked, 161ff. • Wooing: Orlando of “Ganymede,” Silvius of Phebe (and Phebe of Ganymede), Touchstone of Audrey (rhymes with bawdry). • And mockery of wooing: IV.1.63ff, 135ff. • And of literary traditions; IV.1.88ff. • And more talk. • And finally, the marriage Masque of Hymen.

5. Jaques’ “seven ages of man” in the Globe • A set piece, a sort of theatrical “aria.” • “All the world’s a stage” – perhaps a cliché. • But it translates, “Totus mundus agit histrionem,” the motto of The Globe. • In theater the audience sees itself, understands its theatrical role. • So we’re aware that the speech reflects the audience; we’re included in the theatricality. • New Globe production of the play a few years ago: the schoolboys, then everybody else. • The pat entrance of Orlando and Adam at end. • But the inadequacy of the speech to define them.

6. Jaques as character • Completely extraneous to the plot. • His name. • Related to contemporary fashion for satire: II.7.58ff. • But his satire is general (ll. 70ff) – and therefore toothless? • Satire of the fashion for satire? • Jaques also represents parody of the fashion for melancholy: he “can suck melancholy from a song, as a weasel sucks eggs” (II.5). • Orlando and he are like oil and water: III.2.248. • The mocker mocked. • Comes he comes in for mockery from Rosalind in IV.1. • And when Orlando enters, Jaques leaves: “God be with you an you speak in blank verse” • And at end, “I am for other than for dancing measures.”

7. Touchstone • Will Kemp (played Falstaff, Dogberry, other “clown” roles) had left the Lord Chamberlain’s company. (Danced a jig all the way to Norwich.) • And was replaced by Robert Armin, who was physically Kemp’s opposite. • Armin known for his singing voice, sharp wit. • Would go on to play Feste in Twelfth Night, the gravedigger in Hamlet, the Fool in King Lear.