The Duet of Ethical Identity and Pastoral Ideal in Shakespeare’s As You Like It

While ecocritical approaches to literary texts receive more and more attention, climate-related issues remain fairly neglected, particularly in the field of Shakespeare studies. This monograph explores the importance of weather and changing skies in early modern England while acknowledging the fact that traditional representations and religious beliefs still fashioned people’s relations to meteorological phenomena. At the same time, a growing number of literati stood against determinism and defended free will, thereby insisting on man’s ability to act upon celestial forces. Yet, in doing so, they began to give precedence to a counter-intuitive approach to Nature. Sophie Chiari argues that Shakespeare reconciles the scholarly views of his time with more popular ideas rooted in superstition and that he promotes a sensitive, pragmatic understanding of climatic events. She pays particular attention to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It, Othello, King Lear, Anthony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest. Taking into account the influence of classical thought, each of the book’s seven chapters emphasises specific issues (e.g. cataclysmic disorders, the dog days’ influence, freezing temperatures, threatening storms) and considers the way climatic events were presented on stage and how they came to shape the production and reception of Shakespeare’s drama.

Download Full-text

Shakespeare Afoot

10.1093/oso/9780198793755.003.0003 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

John Kerrigan

Keyword(s):

Early Modern ◽

Richard Iii ◽

Midsummer Night's Dream ◽

As You Like It ◽

A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽

History Of ◽

The Way

That Shakespeare adds a limp to the received characterization of Richard III is only the most conspicuous instance of his interest in how actors walked, ran, danced, and wandered. His attention to actors’ footwork, as an originating condition of performance, can be traced from Richard III through A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It into Macbeth, which is preoccupied with the topic and activity all the way to the protagonist’s melancholy conclusion that ‘Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player | That struts and frets his hour upon the stage’. Drawing on classical and early modern accounts of how people walk and should walk, on ideas about time and prosody, and the experience of disability, this chapter cites episodes in the history of performance to show how actors, including Alleyn, Garrick, and Olivier, have worked with the opportunities to dramatize footwork that are provided by Shakespeare’s plays.

Download Full-text

Introduction

10.1093/oso/9780198823384.003.0001 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Bernard Capp

Keyword(s):

Sibling Relationship ◽

King Lear ◽

As You Like It ◽

Parents And Children ◽

The Family

This chapter introduces the issues, surveys briefly the existing literature, and sets out the scope of the book. It summarizes contemporary views on the appropriate relationship between siblings, especially the rights and responsibilities of an elder brother towards his sisters and younger brothers. Contemporaries saw these as grounded in both nature and scripture, but recognized too the strength of sibling rivalries and resentments over favouritism and inheritance. These were often explored in contemporary drama, such as Shakespeare’s As You Like It and King Lear, and in social commentaries and polemic. The imagery of brotherhood and sisterhood pervaded the language as well as literature of the period, both as tokens of friendship and (in the case of elder/younger brothers) of oppression within the family. In language as in life, the sibling relationship was a heated and divisive issue for both parents and children.

Download Full-text

Women, Power & the Decline of the West: Richard Sherwin’s Ethical Wisdom, Krzysztof Koslowski’s Tricolor-Red, & Machiavelli’s Mandragola

Pólemos ◽

10.1515/pol-2018-0011 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 12 (1) ◽

pp. 185-201

Author(s):

Andrew Majeske

Keyword(s):

The West ◽

Benito Mussolini ◽

Western Literature ◽

As You Like It ◽

Moral Crisis

Abstract This essay initially identifies and explores issues relating to relativity and relativism in cultural and political matters. It highlights the problematic character of the prime virtue that liberals claim to be the product of this relativistic outlook, tolerance, and points out that relativism equally supports illiberal agendas, as emphasized by Benito Mussolini. The essay then examines Shakespeare’s profound treatment of relativity in his As You Like It, focusing especially upon Rosalind and Orlando’s riddle exchange in Act 3, Scene 2, and the related sequencing of Orlando’s poems. In closing, the essay attempts to show how the West could benefit from revisiting great works of Western literature such as As You Like It, as it grapples with its moral crisis, works which plumbed the depths of the very problems we face today. But we will only garner from these texts the lessons we truly need to learn if we set aside, if only provisionally, the historicist assumptions which have blinded us to the contemporary pertinence and value of an older wisdom which by all appearances is more profound than our own.

Download Full-text