Shakespeare is better known for his great tragedies: Macbeth, Hamlet, King Lear, but we seldom put a thought as modern readers into a lot of his comedies. And to be fair, personally I have not touched much of his comedies until recently. I loved The Midsummer Night’s Dream, which I found fantastical and hilarious. But there are some stinkers in his arsenal. The Two Gentlemen of Verona was half-baked, and now As You Like It is messy.
If one wedding wasn’t enough at the end, there were four at the end of the book with star-crossed lovers and lovers falling into convenient circumstances. If one jester wasn’t enough, try three. I don’t know what the fuck to make out from this play. Shakespeare wrote the play as one of the more mature plays in his repertoire. It was one of the most complete plays in the original folio. But it seems that he had written better comedies and As You Like It is one of the most inconsistent ones he had ever written.
Is it a bad play? No, not really. The Two Gentlemen of Verona reeked worse and we couldn’t say that it was horrible either. It is a play full of weaknesses, but like any work by Bill it glimmers brightly in a few places. There are not really any memorable characters that stick out to you. Shakespeare would have written better lead characters, jesters and comedies. It is most memorable for the setting in the Forest of Arden, the soliloquy of a man’s life constituting seven seasons and Rosalind supposively being one of the rare four Shakespearean female leads in his body of work. But for mine, the rest felt hollow.
Trudging through the muds of a pastoral mess
Where should we start? Rosalind, being the daughter of the exiled duke, ousted by his own brother, stayed in court thanks to the intimacy with her cousin, Celia, the daughter of the perpetrator. Orlando, the youngest son of Sir Rowland de Boys was also outed by his brother Oliver, left to trod on the road after a bit of an argument. However, Orlando managed to impress in the courts as he took on the Duke’s wrestler and beat him comprehensively. In this short but impactful event, Orlando and Rosalind fell in love but only from a distance.
It’s not too long before Rosalind rubbed the reigning Duke the wrong way and was kicked out of the courts herself. But her bond with Celia, the Duke’s own daughter, is strong and they both decided to take off to the Forest of Arden along with Touchstone the clown. In classic Shakespearean fashion, Rosalind decides to play a man. In Arden the rightful Duke (let’s call him Duke Senior) found his new refuge. Orlando, who received some advice from his servant Adam decided to find this same refuge.
Then I don’t really what the fuck happened. The players, like atoms colliding, run into each other in a tangle of amusing interactions, as you’d like. Save to say, the adventures in the forests of Arden resulted in four marriages, Duke Senior restored his fiefdom and Orlando being the poster boy of pastoral manlihood as he took on wrestlers, snakes, lionesses, court politics and made them all his bitch.
Sometimes Shakespeare just needs to pay the bills
Just like David Fincher had to take on projects like Alien 3, or the Coen Brothers made the mediocre Ladykillers, Shakespeare with his gargantuan body of work is allowed a few stinkers. As You Like It is perhaps best seen as a play in more relevance to Shakespeare’s own times, as pastoral arcadian fiction was steaming ahead full speed in Victorian England. Perhaps it was really a miserable time that everybody needs this sort of escapism: back to when times were simple, nature temperate and the slightest bit of romance will result in an inevitable marriage.
Hell we probably need some of these ourselves in this day and age. I can’t even read the news anymore without shaking my head and questioning humanity. Comedies are supposed to make you feel giddy, perhaps you might end up loving your fellow man a bit more than entrapping yourself in the doom and gloom that often result after watching a Shakespearean tragedy.
But As You Like It is not really a play to be over-examined. It is Shakespeare paying his bills and creating jobs for himself and his actors. Yet it does feel a bit different than his other plays as his characters use of prose is more prevalent than his other plays. Characters would switch out from prose to verse to prose at the blink of an eye. Lowly characters would also in a grand irony, speak in verse and vice versa.
For this, the play is deemed to be one of the most mixed out of Shakespeare’s plays, but that is not to say the play is outright dogshit. Productions of the play is frequent, directors and actors would still take it on, though to what level of success I don’t know. Directors such as Kenneth Brannagh took it on as a passion project, but to a mediocre rating. Yet, I wouldn’t rule out watching it if the local community theatre is going to perform it. But this is true for most of Shakespeare’s plays.
