1 00:00:00,630 --> 00:00:06,420 So as this is the first of a new batch of lectures, it's worth me going over again how these lectures work. 2 00:00:06,420 --> 00:00:08,100 They're each on a single play. 3 00:00:08,100 --> 00:00:15,900 What I try and do is to collect some of the critical and kind of methodological issues about the play by focussing on a single question, 4 00:00:15,900 --> 00:00:23,370 sometimes quite silly or a naive question about the play. And what I'm trying to do really is not to give you a reading of these individual plays, 5 00:00:23,370 --> 00:00:28,800 but to give you a range of ways of thinking about them that you might be able to follow up in your own work. 6 00:00:28,800 --> 00:00:34,350 What I'm really trying to do is to stimulate you going off in one of the directions that I might just touch on 7 00:00:34,350 --> 00:00:40,260 rather than to work to grind through a whole thing that you would write down and then and then try and reproduce. 8 00:00:40,260 --> 00:00:47,340 So there's not a huge amount of factual content, I don't think, in the lectures, although I'll start always with a kind of summary of the plot, 9 00:00:47,340 --> 00:00:52,980 some so that if you don't know the play already, you can at least try and follow what it is I'm talking about. 10 00:00:52,980 --> 00:01:00,510 So the first play I talk about is as you like it, as you like, it's probably written and performed in only sixteen hundred. 11 00:01:00,510 --> 00:01:05,460 Am I going to come back to the historical context of the play in a minute. 12 00:01:05,460 --> 00:01:14,520 And as you know, it's first published in the posthumous collected edition of Shakespeare's plays in sixteen twenty three. 13 00:01:14,520 --> 00:01:19,440 And the question I want to ask about this play is what happens in as you like it? 14 00:01:19,440 --> 00:01:22,560 What happens in as you like it? 15 00:01:22,560 --> 00:01:28,560 So I'll stop by summarising as you like it, which may look as if it's going to give us the answer to that question immediately. 16 00:01:28,560 --> 00:01:35,850 Tony, as you like, the Duke. Frederick has exiled his older brother, Duke Senior, but kept his daughter Rosalind, 17 00:01:35,850 --> 00:01:41,820 his that's Duke senior's daughter, Rosalind, at court to be a companion to his own daughter, Celia. 18 00:01:41,820 --> 00:01:47,820 Meanwhile, Orlando, who is being persecuted by his older brother Oliver after the death of their father, 19 00:01:47,820 --> 00:01:53,640 comes to court set up by Oliver in a wrestling match, which surprisingly he wins. 20 00:01:53,640 --> 00:01:57,380 And he also earns Rosalind's love in the process. 21 00:01:57,380 --> 00:02:04,860 Rosalind is banished from court by her uncle, and she escapes to the forest dressed as a boy Ganymede along with Celia, 22 00:02:04,860 --> 00:02:10,350 her cousin, and therefore touchstone in the forest is also Duke Senior's exiled court. 23 00:02:10,350 --> 00:02:14,400 But he must be quite a large forest. They don't encounter each other for a while. 24 00:02:14,400 --> 00:02:22,350 Rosalind and Celia set themselves up with a cottage and some sheep. Orlando goes round, pinning terrible poetry to trees. 25 00:02:22,350 --> 00:02:29,550 Duke Seniors Lords philosophise about the natural life. There are a lot of speeches and a lot of songs. 26 00:02:29,550 --> 00:02:34,290 In the end, for couples are united and the duke is restored. 27 00:02:34,290 --> 00:02:39,780 That's it. So I've tried to summarise the plot of the play in a way which I hope suggests that 28 00:02:39,780 --> 00:02:44,790 an easy answer to the question what happens in as you like it is not very much. 29 00:02:44,790 --> 00:02:50,940 James Shapiro talking about the play as part of his brilliant survey of the 50 99, a kind of a. 30 00:02:50,940 --> 00:02:56,710 Mirabilis in Shakespeare's career, calls it a relatively plotless play, 31 00:02:56,710 --> 00:03:01,740 which is quite a polite way of putting it relatively plotless, i.e., nothing happens in part. 32 00:03:01,740 --> 00:03:08,820 Shapiro blamed the thinness of the plot in the play's source, Thomas Lodge's novella, Rosalind. 33 00:03:08,820 --> 00:03:13,200 So Shapiro says there's not much happens in Rosalind Diver, so there's not much for Shakespeare to work with. 34 00:03:13,200 --> 00:03:17,610 I'm not completely sure that would let Shakespeare off the hook. 35 00:03:17,610 --> 00:03:23,750 Shapiro's book reminds us that as you like, it belongs to a period of huge creative energy for Shakespeare. 36 00:03:23,750 --> 00:03:28,650 And that's part of the reason why my sense that not much happens in view like it seems to me, 37 00:03:28,650 --> 00:03:32,630 something interesting rather than something that nothing interesting. 38 00:03:32,630 --> 00:03:37,980 So as you like, it belongs to the moment of the new Globe Theatre, and it's adjacent, 39 00:03:37,980 --> 00:03:44,520 very closely adjacent in Shakespeare's writing to Henry the Fifth, to Julius Caesar and to Hamlet. 40 00:03:44,520 --> 00:03:51,750 Put a lot of sideways comparisons with Hamlet. I'd like to make as we go through the lecture, 41 00:03:51,750 --> 00:03:56,040 we might think more helpfully consider it alongside this group of chronological 42 00:03:56,040 --> 00:04:02,550 plays rather than is more usual with other romantic or cross-dressing comedies. 43 00:04:02,550 --> 00:04:07,950 And here, the addition of Shakespeare that you're using is actually can can shape the kinds of things you are able to see. 44 00:04:07,950 --> 00:04:10,290 If you're using a collected edition of Shakespeare, 45 00:04:10,290 --> 00:04:17,730 which uses the First Folio designations that will divide the plays by histories, communism, tragedies. 46 00:04:17,730 --> 00:04:23,520 They will look like the groups that it's most obvious to think of the plays in generic groups. 47 00:04:23,520 --> 00:04:28,710 But if you look at a collective division like, say, the Oxford Edition, 48 00:04:28,710 --> 00:04:34,630 that's an addition which prints the plays, prints the works in the their putative order of composition. 49 00:04:34,630 --> 00:04:40,470 So that gives us a kind of chronological approach which enables you to look at things which are 50 00:04:40,470 --> 00:04:44,340 which might have been written around the same time and to think about the time of writing, 51 00:04:44,340 --> 00:04:49,440 the time of performance as the category of analysis rather than the zone. 52 00:04:49,440 --> 00:04:53,550 So positioned around the middle of Shakespeare's two decade career as a dramatist as you like, 53 00:04:53,550 --> 00:04:59,650 it is inclined to telling rather than showing and to set piece declamation. 54 00:04:59,650 --> 00:05:09,240 Rather than action. I think it's appropriate that the play's most famous lines are just such a set piece. 55 00:05:09,240 --> 00:05:17,190 The famous Seven Ages of Man speech delivered by the melancholy Jaquiss Lord of Juk Senior's court. 56 00:05:17,190 --> 00:05:23,100 More or less sing along with this with me. All the world's a stage and all the men and women, merely players. 57 00:05:23,100 --> 00:05:30,360 They have their exits and their entrances. And one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages. 58 00:05:30,360 --> 00:05:37,210 Jaquiss goes on, as you remember, to enumerate the infant Newling and puking the schoolboy creeping to school like a snail, 59 00:05:37,210 --> 00:05:43,370 the lover, the soldier, the justice, the leveland slippered pantaloon. And finally, the second childishness of old age. 60 00:05:43,370 --> 00:05:47,630 It's a wonderful, much quoted, massive theatrical speech. It's useful for us. 61 00:05:47,630 --> 00:05:53,280 And we're trying to think about a Shakespeare or a set of characters who know they are in plays. 62 00:05:53,280 --> 00:05:57,300 But it's one that I think is written with an eye to the commonplace book. 63 00:05:57,300 --> 00:06:03,090 Those collections of quotable sayings which an educated Elizabethans kept ransacking their reading, 64 00:06:03,090 --> 00:06:08,940 the things that could be taken out of any kind of narrative context and used as a 65 00:06:08,940 --> 00:06:15,780 kind of rhetorical exemplar or a piece of moral wisdom about some particular topic. 66 00:06:15,780 --> 00:06:22,410 These gems that needed no wider context to make any kind of sense making actually encouraged a particular kind of writing, 67 00:06:22,410 --> 00:06:30,480 which had sort of already embedded quotations. And Jaquiss is giving us a quotation and we've picked it up and quoted it. 68 00:06:30,480 --> 00:06:33,660 We've been cued to do that. Perhaps in this sense, 69 00:06:33,660 --> 00:06:39,690 our modern preoccupation with the structure and unity of early modern works of literature is very anachronistic for contemporaries. 70 00:06:39,690 --> 00:06:46,710 The point of them was that they were full of quotations that could be ported easily out in the play itself. 71 00:06:46,710 --> 00:06:57,660 Jaquie speech is distinctly under motivated. There's kind of no point for it and it serves to halt rather than to advance any plot. 72 00:06:57,660 --> 00:07:05,040 So like the many songs with which the play is punctuated, that's to say Jaquie speech is a hiatus or a pause. 73 00:07:05,040 --> 00:07:09,450 It's not furthering songs songs in them. 74 00:07:09,450 --> 00:07:13,650 This is this is a play which probably the largest number of songs of any Shakespeare play. 75 00:07:13,650 --> 00:07:18,750 And you'll know if you if you've seen a play in the theatre, how long songs take. 76 00:07:18,750 --> 00:07:24,000 There really are very of a very slowing decelerating kind of force in the theatre. 77 00:07:24,000 --> 00:07:27,120 And that's mostly their point is to give us is to give us a pause. 78 00:07:27,120 --> 00:07:34,680 If you think about the music that Porsche has play in The Merchant of Venice before the someo chooses between the Cascades, 79 00:07:34,680 --> 00:07:40,930 that's a deliberate putting off the moment of choice. The point of the song is it kind of freezes things. 80 00:07:40,930 --> 00:07:46,170 It's a kind of freeze frame. So in all that case, 81 00:07:46,170 --> 00:07:51,750 then Jaquie speech on the seven ages of Man seems to me an appropriate epitome of the play's own tendency 82 00:07:51,750 --> 00:08:01,830 towards Stacie's rather than momentum to moments of contemplation rather than moments of action. 83 00:08:01,830 --> 00:08:06,150 In an extended conversation about the implications of time. 84 00:08:06,150 --> 00:08:13,800 Orlando tells Rosalind that there's no clock in the forest, there's no clock in the forest, 85 00:08:13,800 --> 00:08:21,270 suggesting that the forest of Arbon exists in a kind of suspended animation. 86 00:08:21,270 --> 00:08:25,020 Now he to outline some of the ways in which this tendency to Stacie's is part of the 87 00:08:25,020 --> 00:08:32,010 plays that the genre of pastoral and to make some connexions with other pastoral texts. 88 00:08:32,010 --> 00:08:37,890 And then I want to try and think about the play itself again to revisit some of the ways in which its dramatic structure, 89 00:08:37,890 --> 00:08:44,490 even its umpty dramatic structure, plays out. So I should reiterate, I think the is up to Stacie's in this play. 90 00:08:44,490 --> 00:08:52,140 It's deliberate, or at least I think it's purposeful. It highlights some structural issues about comedy as a genre. 91 00:08:52,140 --> 00:08:59,070 And as I said, it's something we can interestingly compare with those other contemporaneous plays I listed a moment ago. 92 00:08:59,070 --> 00:09:06,720 It has some affinities with the tendency to speechify in Julius Caesar or with the curious anticlimax of Henry the Fifth, 93 00:09:06,720 --> 00:09:12,630 which ought to be building up to a big battle scene. The battle of action call, but somehow never does or both. 94 00:09:12,630 --> 00:09:20,340 Clearly, I suppose, with the kind of frustrated movement forward which is so characteristic of Hamlet. 95 00:09:20,340 --> 00:09:23,620 And I have come back to the ways this preference for verbal over physical action 96 00:09:23,620 --> 00:09:30,200 might be connected with the particular moments of the play's composition. But first, let's think generically for a minute as you like it. 97 00:09:30,200 --> 00:09:41,260 In Shakespeare's most sustained take on the genre of pastoral, NASA's genre, which is associated primarily not with the active genre of drama, 98 00:09:41,260 --> 00:09:49,440 but with more contemplative or static genres, especially poetry and prose fiction. 99 00:09:49,440 --> 00:09:51,460 Pastoral, as one definition puts it. 100 00:09:51,460 --> 00:09:58,290 You can find a similar definition in any dictionary of literary terms, tends to be an idealisation of shepherd life. 101 00:09:58,290 --> 00:10:03,840 And by doing so, creates an image of peaceful and uncorrupted existence. 102 00:10:03,840 --> 00:10:09,780 A kind of prelapsarian world. That's what's important about pastoral, but it's a kind of Edenic world. 103 00:10:09,780 --> 00:10:15,780 This is a world before the fall. It displays a nostalgia for the past. 104 00:10:15,780 --> 00:10:20,700 And for some state of harmony which has been lost. 105 00:10:20,700 --> 00:10:35,630 A dominating theme of much pastoral is the search for a simple life away from the court or the town away from corruption, more strife or politics. 106 00:10:35,630 --> 00:10:40,140 Now, we can see from this description of pastoral that inertia is actually intrinsic to it. 107 00:10:40,140 --> 00:10:47,100 This is a genre which is retreating from the active life, which is a descriptive rather than active, 108 00:10:47,100 --> 00:10:51,390 nostalgic and looking backwards rather than narrative or progressive. 109 00:10:51,390 --> 00:11:01,830 And you know this already, if you've had to read the Arcadia Shepperd's calendar, not not kind of page turners, really, I think you could agree. 110 00:11:01,830 --> 00:11:08,160 Pastoral had its origins in Virgil's act clogs and flourished in the humanist culture of Tudor, England. 111 00:11:08,160 --> 00:11:15,570 And by the 50 90s, when Shakespeare's writing, as you like it, a series of tropes, possible tropes had been quite clearly established. 112 00:11:15,570 --> 00:11:18,870 Noble shepherds debating in speeches and in song. 113 00:11:18,870 --> 00:11:31,280 The difference between court and countryside, uncaring mistresses, disdainful women, generally poetic competitions, etc., but bad weather often. 114 00:11:31,280 --> 00:11:35,570 So we might think again of Spenser's Shepard's calendar published in fifty seventy nine. 115 00:11:35,570 --> 00:11:42,510 The absent love object in the Shepherds calendar is called Rosalind. We know that Shakespeare's major sources Lodge's novel novella. 116 00:11:42,510 --> 00:11:47,730 But Rosalind comes in as well via the Shepherds calendar. 117 00:11:47,730 --> 00:11:59,040 We might think about Sydney's Arcadia with the theme of pastoral cross-dressing. So pastoral is like the early modern theatre itself, an urban genre, 118 00:11:59,040 --> 00:12:05,880 a genre which which works out of towns and cities, which is generated by those kind of connotations. 119 00:12:05,880 --> 00:12:11,600 And one in which rural life is idealised and allegory ised. 120 00:12:11,600 --> 00:12:15,240 Virgil, who's backlogs are foundational to the genre of pastoral use. 121 00:12:15,240 --> 00:12:22,290 These bucolic stories to imagine a golden age at once fictional but also highly political. 122 00:12:22,290 --> 00:12:28,950 And this curious combination of engagement with politics and escapism from politics structures, 123 00:12:28,950 --> 00:12:33,600 pastoral right from the start, right from Virgil and goes through. And I think we'll see it in as you like it. 124 00:12:33,600 --> 00:12:40,170 Also in the Shepherds calendar. Spencer is preoccupied with the politics of the Elizabethan court, 125 00:12:40,170 --> 00:12:45,660 shadowing both his own poetic autobiography and his engagement with radical Protestantism. 126 00:12:45,660 --> 00:12:52,170 In these stories of Shepherd singing their unrequited love's against inclement weather, 127 00:12:52,170 --> 00:13:01,100 so crucial to the discussion of pastoral is the idea that it embodies a notion known as Otim OTM. 128 00:13:01,100 --> 00:13:10,600 Otim is a Greek word which signals something like leasure. It's opposed in Greek and Roman philosophy to negotiation. 129 00:13:10,600 --> 00:13:21,210 That's active public life. So the distinction between Otim Leisure and Nikodim active life is perhaps liberalised 130 00:13:21,210 --> 00:13:28,760 here for as in as you like it in the distinction between the forest and the court. 131 00:13:28,760 --> 00:13:38,410 If pastoral favours the contemplative virtues associated with Otim, then it also it also tends to enact them form and content are aligned. 132 00:13:38,410 --> 00:13:42,190 Pastoral is about leisure and is leisure is about leisure. 133 00:13:42,190 --> 00:13:47,830 It is leisurely. If something happens in a pastoral, it tends to happen verbally. 134 00:13:47,830 --> 00:13:55,630 Pastoral shepherds entertain themselves with singing contests. Action is contained within reportage or prophecy. 135 00:13:55,630 --> 00:13:59,290 And for the Elizabethans Pastoral is a really high status genre. 136 00:13:59,290 --> 00:14:07,450 Pastoral shepherds are noble beings, but one in which socially marginalised peoples might also get a voice. 137 00:14:07,450 --> 00:14:17,860 As Phillip Sydney puts it in his apology for poetry, Pastoral can show the misery of people under hard Lord's or ravening soldiers and 138 00:14:17,860 --> 00:14:22,990 what blessedness is deprived to them that lie lowest from the goodness of them. 139 00:14:22,990 --> 00:14:31,960 That's it. Highest sometimes under the pretty tales of wolves and sheep can include the whole considerations of wrongdoing and patients. 140 00:14:31,960 --> 00:14:37,870 So he suggests that pastoral gives a voice to people who are not in a kind of privileged position. 141 00:14:37,870 --> 00:14:44,110 The alternative view we get in Shakespeare quite often is that people who are burdened with carers, 142 00:14:44,110 --> 00:14:47,790 burdened with the cares of office, would like to become shepherds. 143 00:14:47,790 --> 00:14:56,650 Richard the second says that Henry the sixth also says that there are lots of people who who idealise this idea of the shepherd life without care. 144 00:14:56,650 --> 00:15:05,110 Christine Edzard, 1992 film of As You Like It in Modern Dress brought out, I think the political implications of this view from Sydney. 145 00:15:05,110 --> 00:15:11,080 Rosalind, wearing jeans and a beanie hat, joined an alternative community of outsiders. 146 00:15:11,080 --> 00:15:20,710 Arden was a kind of urban cardboard city in which all spray painted graffiti poems onto concrete barriers. 147 00:15:20,710 --> 00:15:26,980 Not as bad as I made it sound. So the idea of an allegorical reading of pastoral, 148 00:15:26,980 --> 00:15:35,080 either politically or ethically in Sydney suggests here or in Spencer where he's thinking about the religious connotations of shepherds and the flock. 149 00:15:35,080 --> 00:15:42,850 This is a common one. So the idea that pastoralism is an allegory. So it looks as if it's an escape from real life, as it were. 150 00:15:42,850 --> 00:15:45,040 But in fact, it's just an allegory of it. 151 00:15:45,040 --> 00:15:51,100 And that brings us back to the idea that even as pastoral landscape figures itself as an escape from the everyday world, 152 00:15:51,100 --> 00:15:56,950 it's actually the shadow or double of that world. Okay, so that's quite a long excursions into pastoral as a genre. 153 00:15:56,950 --> 00:16:01,300 How does that actually help us with as you like it? Well, 154 00:16:01,300 --> 00:16:06,520 I think like the accounts of pastoral I've just been proposing as we like it plays 155 00:16:06,520 --> 00:16:14,710 with ideas of distinctness and convergence between its two worlds or two settings, 156 00:16:14,710 --> 00:16:21,700 because the forest of has been so compelling and so sort of fruitful a setting imaginatively, 157 00:16:21,700 --> 00:16:25,270 we tend to think that the whole of us would like it takes place in the forest of Arbon, 158 00:16:25,270 --> 00:16:30,460 but in fact the whole long first act of the play takes place in court. 159 00:16:30,460 --> 00:16:40,330 And it's not until Act two scene for more than a third of the way through that Rosalind announces, Well this is the forest of Ardern. 160 00:16:40,330 --> 00:16:41,860 That's an interesting contrast. 161 00:16:41,860 --> 00:16:48,940 Maybe we might think with Twelfth Night, Shakespeare's other major cross-dressing comedy where Vilo appears only really for a few moments. 162 00:16:48,940 --> 00:16:52,060 As a woman and then it's into her disguises. 163 00:16:52,060 --> 00:16:59,170 Azara, for the whole of the rest of the play, Rosalind has a long time being before she comes in as Ganymede. 164 00:16:59,170 --> 00:17:04,690 So it's easy to construct a vision of the play in which the court and the forest are absolute opposites. 165 00:17:04,690 --> 00:17:15,880 Nago tiem to Otim to use those terms that I introduced before, urban to rural, romance to pastoral met male to female. 166 00:17:15,880 --> 00:17:23,350 Juk Senior in his first entrance in Act two draws just this comparison between the forest world and the court world. 167 00:17:23,350 --> 00:17:33,620 Now my co mate, some brothers in exile, have not old custom made this life more sweet than that of painted pomp painted pompous. 168 00:17:33,620 --> 00:17:40,000 The idea of what the court is like are not these woods more free from peril than the envious court. 169 00:17:40,000 --> 00:17:45,820 Here we feel not the penalty of Adam. 170 00:17:45,820 --> 00:17:51,380 So the pastoral attempts to to recreate a fallen Eden here we feel not the penalty of Adam. 171 00:17:51,380 --> 00:17:57,040 And this is prelapsarian. This is before everything went so wrong. 172 00:17:57,040 --> 00:18:04,150 And it must be significant in this regard that the play's own figure, Adam, is an old man. 173 00:18:04,150 --> 00:18:12,730 The attempt to recreate the fall in Eden is both ambitious and already doomed to failure. 174 00:18:12,730 --> 00:18:22,920 Now, seeing pastoral as one pole in a binary system of ideological opposites fits with a common way of conceptualising dual locations in Shakespeare, 175 00:18:22,920 --> 00:18:29,830 we might compare Rome and Egypt in Antony and Cleopatra or Belmont and Venice in the Merchant of Venice, for example. 176 00:18:29,830 --> 00:18:35,530 So there's lots of criticism about those two plays and others which say the two locations stand for quite 177 00:18:35,530 --> 00:18:42,820 distinct of worldviews that compare their separate alternative views of of the world and of what's possible. 178 00:18:42,820 --> 00:18:49,220 And of course, that is not entirely wrong. There are ways in which these dual settings are opposites. 179 00:18:49,220 --> 00:18:51,670 But in as you like it, as I think in these other plays, 180 00:18:51,670 --> 00:18:58,090 there are ways in which the edges between the two worlds are definitely blurred in a practical way. 181 00:18:58,090 --> 00:19:05,800 We don't simply move from court to forest. There are a number of scenes which to impro between them. 182 00:19:05,800 --> 00:19:14,350 And although the modern states, the 20th century stage has made a kind of visual recreation of the forest of art and one a great sort of stage trick. 183 00:19:14,350 --> 00:19:22,780 So we've seen very, very realist or very elaborate stagings with trees and animals. 184 00:19:22,780 --> 00:19:28,810 A real deer brought on stage in the Edwardian period, a stuffed deer, 185 00:19:28,810 --> 00:19:36,100 which you can still see in the props museum in Stratford through in most of the productions at Stratford-Upon-Avon in the 20th century. 186 00:19:36,100 --> 00:19:43,690 So all this work to create a kind of realistic forest is, of course, completely anachronistic on the early modern stage on the globe there to stage, 187 00:19:43,690 --> 00:19:49,030 there would have been no visual difference between the court and the forest. 188 00:19:49,030 --> 00:19:58,180 So that work the work of staging to establish the locations as completely distinct is a modern one rather than an early modern one. 189 00:19:58,180 --> 00:20:04,160 The difference between Arden and the court in the Globe Theatre would have been entirely verbal. 190 00:20:04,160 --> 00:20:10,720 Rob Rosalind's declaration. Well, this is the forest of Ardern is not descriptive in that context then, 191 00:20:10,720 --> 00:20:21,030 but performative only saying this is the forest of art makes it so not state trees or grass or other props. 192 00:20:21,030 --> 00:20:26,400 So this idea that the two locations didn't look different and may not signal 193 00:20:26,400 --> 00:20:33,840 entirely oppositely has been a more has been picked up in more recent production. 194 00:20:33,840 --> 00:20:41,820 The idea of the ambiguity deep in the pastoral genre that the pastoral space closed both is and is not an escape from the real world. 195 00:20:41,820 --> 00:20:45,290 I think it's quite it's been quite an interesting thing for modern directors. 196 00:20:45,290 --> 00:20:55,530 And I'm just gonna give one review of Adrian Noble's 1985 production for the RISC to give an idea of how this might work. 197 00:20:55,530 --> 00:20:58,900 This is Roger Warren writing about Noble's production. 198 00:20:58,900 --> 00:21:07,110 The usurping court doubled as the forest court simply wrapping white dust sheets around their evening dress. 199 00:21:07,110 --> 00:21:14,340 When Rosalind, Celia and Touchstone arrived in Arden, they drew behind the more white sheeting that covered the court furniture. 200 00:21:14,340 --> 00:21:18,600 Later, this furniture was replaced by identical green versions. 201 00:21:18,600 --> 00:21:28,020 At times, Arben seemed merely a country of the mind, a spiritual voyage of discovery by Duke, Frederick, Rosalind and Orlanda, but not the others. 202 00:21:28,020 --> 00:21:34,110 As when touched home was twice stuck in a very real pool. 203 00:21:34,110 --> 00:21:38,160 So this idea that the forest is merely the sleeping or subconscious or dust wrapped 204 00:21:38,160 --> 00:21:42,840 court draws on a familiar adjacent interpretation of Midsummer Night's Dream, 205 00:21:42,840 --> 00:21:49,830 which you're probably familiar with in that play. So the story goes the fairy queen and keep her fairy king and queen. 206 00:21:49,830 --> 00:21:57,660 Oberon and Titania are echoes dream versions, subconscious versions of their Athenian counterparts, Theseus and Hippolyta. 207 00:21:57,660 --> 00:22:04,720 They're often played by the same actors to emphasise the link. These are the same people in a just in a different context. 208 00:22:04,720 --> 00:22:07,030 Dublin was also used by Noble in this. 209 00:22:07,030 --> 00:22:15,660 You like your production to link the two Dukes, Duke, Frederick and Duke Senior, making them dark and light sides of the same personality. 210 00:22:15,660 --> 00:22:20,700 And it may in fact be that this was originally the case in the early modern theatre. 211 00:22:20,700 --> 00:22:28,850 This practicality that one actor plays the two dukes would explain a strange anticlimax in as you like, its final act. 212 00:22:28,850 --> 00:22:35,820 We are promised that Duke Frederick is going to come into the into the forest with with armed men. 213 00:22:35,820 --> 00:22:46,110 But that arrival is postponed. A new character, a brother to a landowner, Oliver enters with the surprising news that the skirts of this Wildwood. 214 00:22:46,110 --> 00:22:55,500 He came where meeting with an old religious man after some question with him was converted both from its enterprise and from the world. 215 00:22:55,500 --> 00:23:02,340 His crown bequeathing to his banished brother and all their lands restored to them again that were with him exiled. 216 00:23:02,340 --> 00:23:13,110 So do Frederick has this unlikely conversion in the in the as he enters the forest and so never has to appear on stage, sometimes on stage. 217 00:23:13,110 --> 00:23:20,700 This is presented as a self consciously and comically unlikely plot twist, which is almost Alltop on the spur of the moment to think. 218 00:23:20,700 --> 00:23:25,170 What are we going to do? The plot needs this guy to split into two figures. 219 00:23:25,170 --> 00:23:27,990 How are we going to explain the fact that the other one doesn't come? 220 00:23:27,990 --> 00:23:32,910 And I've seen it done very funnily where Jack Senior is on stage thinking how how is this going to work? 221 00:23:32,910 --> 00:23:37,140 Get me out of this. Why am I coming in? According to people at the same time. 222 00:23:37,140 --> 00:23:44,100 So the idea that the play is written to play off an idea of doubling, I think is quite a compelling one. 223 00:23:44,100 --> 00:23:48,900 A playful acknowledgement of the overlapping rather than distinct jurisdictions. 224 00:23:48,900 --> 00:23:56,040 The two groups are really just the same person after all. Just ask the two courts are really just the same. 225 00:23:56,040 --> 00:24:02,820 It's also then a way of collapsing that pastoral project if the same Duke leads both the court and the forest communities. 226 00:24:02,820 --> 00:24:08,280 We can see that there are in some sense the same place. 227 00:24:08,280 --> 00:24:14,750 On the other hand, if we maintain the idea that the two groups are distinct persons, the idea that the forest is morally regenerated, 228 00:24:14,750 --> 00:24:23,310 that it has this miraculous power to convert people from price influence idea of the GreenWorld, that's more sustainable. 229 00:24:23,310 --> 00:24:32,160 More interestingly, perhaps nobles are done in that production that we're discussing with both a metaphore or a state of mind to the noble characters. 230 00:24:32,160 --> 00:24:40,510 And a real place to the more lowly ones. Touchstone is dumped in a real pond. 231 00:24:40,510 --> 00:24:45,420 Let's just take a minute to explore the distinction between pastoral as a real place and as as a 232 00:24:45,420 --> 00:24:52,500 metaphor for the unreal haze of pastoral is part of Shakespeare's depiction of the forest of Ardern. 233 00:24:52,500 --> 00:25:00,420 We've already seen that pastoral is an urban projection or idealisation. It's less a description of the real countryside than a literary fiction. 234 00:25:00,420 --> 00:25:03,040 And certainly left wing critics from Raymond Williams onwards, 235 00:25:03,040 --> 00:25:11,260 truly historicism have been suspicious of pastoral as a genre which evades the kind of realities of landownership and all those kinds of things. 236 00:25:11,260 --> 00:25:15,000 I think back to those new historicist views of romantic poetry jam. 237 00:25:15,000 --> 00:25:22,080 But that very compelling article on them, Tim, was with Tim Tanabe, which says, Why this works with wipe-out. 238 00:25:22,080 --> 00:25:28,880 From this view, this pastoral sort of idea, view all the people who work there and who are kind of involved in it, 239 00:25:28,880 --> 00:25:31,880 of industrial production at Ground Tintern Abbey. 240 00:25:31,880 --> 00:25:39,330 That's all part of a suspicion of pastoral as a kind of Upper-Class conspiracy, which which writes out. 241 00:25:39,330 --> 00:25:48,270 What if we like to be a country person? A bit like a kind of modern idea of Norfolk or something that would go that. 242 00:25:48,270 --> 00:25:58,820 You know, there's a kind of gentrified idea of the countryside and a much, much grittier one underneath. 243 00:25:58,820 --> 00:26:05,210 So that would suggest that Shakespeare First Varden is less a description of the real countryside than a literary fiction. 244 00:26:05,210 --> 00:26:10,220 It draws on literary models rather than as critics and sometimes romantically implied. 245 00:26:10,220 --> 00:26:20,000 Drawing on Shakespeare's own country childhood, the literary generation of the forest is clear from names like Coryn, Phoebe and Silvius. 246 00:26:20,000 --> 00:26:26,300 These are not everyday names. These are pastoral names is a fictional names. 247 00:26:26,300 --> 00:26:32,930 Charles the Wrestler reports that the exiled Duke lives, quote, in the forest of Ardern and Mary, sorry. 248 00:26:32,930 --> 00:26:38,510 And many married men with him. And there they live, like the old Robin Hood of England. 249 00:26:38,510 --> 00:26:45,170 And fleet the time carelessly as they did in the golden world. They live like the old Robin Hood of England. 250 00:26:45,170 --> 00:26:51,830 And the idea combines a native folklore idea of Robin Hood with that powerful myth of the golden age of peace and harmony, 251 00:26:51,830 --> 00:26:58,750 which comes from book one of of it. It's a very typical Shakespearean conflation of the native and the classical. 252 00:26:58,750 --> 00:27:02,060 Now, I think the forest of Ardern is just such a curious hybrid, 253 00:27:02,060 --> 00:27:09,340 a hybrid between the native and the classical or between the semi realistic and the fictive. 254 00:27:09,340 --> 00:27:13,850 It's at once the never never land of pastoral fantasy and the real place, 255 00:27:13,850 --> 00:27:23,270 just as sheep in the play are at once the traditional decoration of the pastoral backdrop and real dirty physical animals. 256 00:27:23,270 --> 00:27:32,030 Corrinne refuses touchstones, courtly gesture of kissing hands, saying it would be on cleanly if courtiers were shepherds. 257 00:27:32,030 --> 00:27:40,490 Because we are still handling our ewes and their cells, their skins, you know, our greasy. 258 00:27:40,490 --> 00:27:46,130 So for carrying the sheep are real things that have to be dealt with. They're not they're not just decorative. 259 00:27:46,130 --> 00:27:49,520 They're not just pretty, but confusion over the status. 260 00:27:49,520 --> 00:27:58,070 The kind of ontology, if you like, of the forest of Ardern extends to its naming in the play in that folio text of sixteen twenty three. 261 00:27:58,070 --> 00:28:08,320 The first text, as I indicated, the name of the forest is spelt out in a r d e n a name obviously familiar to Shakespeare. 262 00:28:08,320 --> 00:28:14,180 It's his mother's maiden name and the name of a Warwickshire woodland close to his birthplace. 263 00:28:14,180 --> 00:28:18,440 It does has a claim to be a real place with real associations. 264 00:28:18,440 --> 00:28:26,090 And under this heading we might think about corroborating rustic features like oak trees, willows, sheep and deer. 265 00:28:26,090 --> 00:28:34,550 So so far, so England. But some editors drawing on the play's source lodges romance. 266 00:28:34,550 --> 00:28:39,560 Rosalind, amend the spelling to our den a r d e double n e. 267 00:28:39,560 --> 00:28:47,940 S suggesting either a location in Flanders of that name or in France that has more distant and more romance qualities, 268 00:28:47,940 --> 00:28:56,630 and especially the tiny a tiny difference. But whether you call the forest a kind of English name or a European kind of romance name does shape, 269 00:28:56,630 --> 00:29:04,850 I think what we expect it is possible to happen that it's a difference which betrays something of the of the paradox of the forest in as you like it, 270 00:29:04,850 --> 00:29:11,150 as both local and literary, familiar and strange, within the forest. 271 00:29:11,150 --> 00:29:17,570 That ambiguity continues. We've already seen that Juk Senior and his men are associated with the story of Robin Hood. 272 00:29:17,570 --> 00:29:26,430 But if you notice that phrase Robin Hood of England, which suggests we're not in England, otherwise you would just say Robin Hood. 273 00:29:26,430 --> 00:29:35,660 So Robin Hood is both kind of recognised and distance in that in that phrase, Orlando's Frenchified romance name DeBois suggests. 274 00:29:35,660 --> 00:29:43,850 Du Bois of the Woods. The trope of the civilised outlaws in in living in the forest is a stock story of romance, 275 00:29:43,850 --> 00:29:47,240 and it belongs to a pleasurably artificial and fictive world. 276 00:29:47,240 --> 00:29:55,700 And see again, in two gentlemen of Verona, for instance, you people who are outlaws in Shakespeare are of very decent, 277 00:29:55,700 --> 00:30:00,720 law abiding people who've just got on the wrong side of tyrants or something. 278 00:30:00,720 --> 00:30:08,360 So that artificial fictive forest of our Dan perhaps includes snakes, olive trees and lionesses. 279 00:30:08,360 --> 00:30:16,160 It's full of storybook exotica. So I suppose what I can say is that there's a kind of there's a native all or 280 00:30:16,160 --> 00:30:23,090 realistic or English sense of Ardern and then this kind of fictional romance, 281 00:30:23,090 --> 00:30:30,530 alien sense of it. We might think that what the forest allows its highborn characters is the fiction of being in a pastoral. 282 00:30:30,530 --> 00:30:36,550 It's rather like Marie Antoinette dressing as a shepherdess in the grounds of their sight. 283 00:30:36,550 --> 00:30:39,730 But the fiction of pastoral is always undercut in the play. 284 00:30:39,730 --> 00:30:51,130 I think Shakespeare's use of the genre is Terrick and self-conscious moments of artificiality tend to be undercut by bathos or by realism. 285 00:30:51,130 --> 00:30:57,250 If we take the overblown syntax of Orlando, run, run Orlando KAB on every tree, the fair, 286 00:30:57,250 --> 00:31:03,400 the chaste and unexpressed, she we can see it's immediately undercut by the next scene, 287 00:31:03,400 --> 00:31:12,190 which is the scene between Coryn and Touched and talking about how dirty she pa Rosalind is a realist when she scolds Orlando. 288 00:31:12,190 --> 00:31:18,580 Men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love. 289 00:31:18,580 --> 00:31:23,620 Men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for not for love. 290 00:31:23,620 --> 00:31:28,460 She presents herself as a realist about the species you go back to look at. 291 00:31:28,460 --> 00:31:35,620 It explicitly distances her from romantic of heroic prototypes like Troilus and Cressida, 292 00:31:35,620 --> 00:31:41,950 or Hero in the end that she's trying to bring these storybook figures down to earth and say that's not what it's like in real life. 293 00:31:41,950 --> 00:31:49,000 Men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love. But at the same time, in the forest, she is a prime pastoral fantasist, 294 00:31:49,000 --> 00:31:58,930 playing the landowner in a distant echo of contemporary concerns about the enclosure of common land for sheep farming by wealthy landlords. 295 00:31:58,930 --> 00:32:04,600 Shakespeare, I think, toggles here between pastoral and satire, or perhaps more accurately, 296 00:32:04,600 --> 00:32:09,070 he articulates the satiric potential which is always there in pastoral. 297 00:32:09,070 --> 00:32:13,690 At some level, these shepherds must know they look stupid. 298 00:32:13,690 --> 00:32:22,600 So Ardern Den is a pastoral paradox, a real place with a recognisable proximity to everyday life and the distant fictional place. 299 00:32:22,600 --> 00:32:33,370 Or to put it another way, it's a location in which urban wannabes go up at real country people and vice versa for the Upper-Class characters. 300 00:32:33,370 --> 00:32:38,650 The forest is a pastoral, not for the for the regular inhabitants. 301 00:32:38,650 --> 00:32:50,280 And so if we can see Ardern as the play's weekend cottage, then its main purpose for the play's caught exiles is to waste time. 302 00:32:50,280 --> 00:32:59,530 It's quite an important point I'd like to make about the Time-Wasting places to fill up the time created by the comedy. 303 00:32:59,530 --> 00:33:04,810 And again, I think we can see a structural parallel with Hamlet at one level. 304 00:33:04,810 --> 00:33:13,570 Hamlet has to delay his revenge because without delay there would be no play without the structural device of delay. 305 00:33:13,570 --> 00:33:19,150 Revenge is justified. A fight is not five acts. 306 00:33:19,150 --> 00:33:23,820 Psychological explanations of why Hamlet delays taking revenge start from the wrong end, so to speak. 307 00:33:23,820 --> 00:33:33,100 We have to find a reason for him to take revenge rather than we have to justify the fact that he will take revenge rather than find his reasons first. 308 00:33:33,100 --> 00:33:35,050 He isn't so much delaying, that's to say, 309 00:33:35,050 --> 00:33:41,680 as filling up the time until the end of the play when he can take revenge because he's something similar in comedy. 310 00:33:41,680 --> 00:33:48,340 We all know that Shakespeare's comedies and in marriage comic partners usually meet early in the play. 311 00:33:48,340 --> 00:33:53,320 So the play sets up right, usually right at the beginning. What's going to happen at the end? 312 00:33:53,320 --> 00:33:59,980 And then has to spin out the fact that it can't happen straight away otherwise with us just all go home. 313 00:33:59,980 --> 00:34:04,240 So the structure of comedy is thus a structure of delay or time filling. 314 00:34:04,240 --> 00:34:10,390 Dramatic pleasure is in having the desired unknown outcome deferred in as you like it. 315 00:34:10,390 --> 00:34:14,650 We know right from the wrestling scene at court that Orlando and Rosalind will get together. 316 00:34:14,650 --> 00:34:22,570 There's no reason for them not to do so. So the play has to invent a series of diversionary or procrastinator scenes to put off the inevitable. 317 00:34:22,570 --> 00:34:30,790 We know, too, that the good will be restored. That's what happens in comedy. And similarly, it can't happen immediately. 318 00:34:30,790 --> 00:34:36,670 So comedies does epitomise the literary pleasure of withheld or deferred gratification. 319 00:34:36,670 --> 00:34:38,620 The play's title, 320 00:34:38,620 --> 00:34:46,150 which George Bernard Shaw thought was Shakespeare's own acknowledgement that the comedy was piffling and trifling and nothing much to bother with. 321 00:34:46,150 --> 00:34:50,890 In fact, I think encapsulates the way it is meshed with audience expectation and desire. 322 00:34:50,890 --> 00:34:54,760 We all know this is as you like it. You want to know what's going to happen. 323 00:34:54,760 --> 00:34:59,980 We don't want it to happen yet. That's comedy. So back to our opening question then. 324 00:34:59,980 --> 00:35:06,360 What happens in as you like it? Answer three hours a diversion until it's time to have the ending. 325 00:35:06,360 --> 00:35:13,980 And when the ending comes, as if to point out the foolishness of this theatrical contract, the ending still manages to look rushed. 326 00:35:13,980 --> 00:35:19,710 We've had plenty of time to prepare for it, but it's still we're still in a hurry. Oliver and Celia are jammed together. 327 00:35:19,710 --> 00:35:22,990 Due prejudice, offstage conversion that we've already talked about looks frankly, 328 00:35:22,990 --> 00:35:28,630 as if no one has given it a moments prior thought and the atmosphere of Arden begins to unravel. 329 00:35:28,630 --> 00:35:34,800 An editor needs to say to Shakespeare, where did this lioness come from? Why have you introduced a character who has the same name as a. 330 00:35:34,800 --> 00:35:41,330 We've already got this is the plane falling out of control. It's time to finish its time. 331 00:35:41,330 --> 00:35:43,010 It is time to it is time to finish. 332 00:35:43,010 --> 00:35:52,140 And Heimann, the goddess of marriage, has also brought in at the end of, as you like it, to solemnise these four marriages. 333 00:35:52,140 --> 00:35:59,940 And there's a question mark just in brackets about whether Rosalind appears in her female costume for this for this marriage in its final moments, 334 00:35:59,940 --> 00:36:04,410 that by bringing in Highman a goddess, the play throws away its vestiges of realism. 335 00:36:04,410 --> 00:36:10,560 In the last camp, paroxysm design must make conclusions as Heimann of these most strange events. 336 00:36:10,560 --> 00:36:16,470 Here's eight that must take hands to join in Hyman's bands. 337 00:36:16,470 --> 00:36:25,170 So I'm arguing, I think, that the forest of Ardern is a kind of holding pattern Restasis a kind of kettling and that its purpose is to waste 338 00:36:25,170 --> 00:36:33,540 time and that this is pointed out to us all through the play by its own frequent disquisitions on the nature of time. 339 00:36:33,540 --> 00:36:39,390 If you search an online text, the Internet, Shakespeare editions or the Internet Shakespeare archive, 340 00:36:39,390 --> 00:36:45,540 a good, reliable text for their search in online text for the word time or various words, our search. 341 00:36:45,540 --> 00:36:51,000 You see it. It comes with great frequency. There are 50 uses of the word time in this play. 342 00:36:51,000 --> 00:36:54,540 Charles tells us that men fleet the time carelessly. 343 00:36:54,540 --> 00:37:01,650 Jaquiss reports he's meeting with Touchstone, with the clam saying From hour to hour, we ripe and ripe. 344 00:37:01,650 --> 00:37:13,650 And then from hour to hour, we've rocked and rocked. Rosalind tells Orlando how time ambles, Trott's gallops and stand still with different people. 345 00:37:13,650 --> 00:37:20,340 We could say that comedy is opposed to linear notions of time and to the overinvested teleology of tragedy. 346 00:37:20,340 --> 00:37:25,080 I've thought about this in other lectures, most notably in Richard the Third. 347 00:37:25,080 --> 00:37:28,230 But what? As you like, as you like, it seems to know more clearly, 348 00:37:28,230 --> 00:37:35,520 and to show more explicitly than the other comedies has to say is that in the best sense, it is a waste of time. 349 00:37:35,520 --> 00:37:43,670 I like this place, says Celia Avadon, and willingly could waste my time in it. 350 00:37:43,670 --> 00:37:54,770 As you like, it identifies comedy itself as a kind of time out from the real world, a pleasurable spaces, a moment away from movement and activity. 351 00:37:54,770 --> 00:37:57,320 You might think of the playwright Thomas Haywood, who, 352 00:37:57,320 --> 00:38:04,940 in a defence of the theatre against its Puritan detractors, gives us a similar view of what theatre is for. 353 00:38:04,940 --> 00:38:08,450 Theatre is to recreate or recreate that word. 354 00:38:08,450 --> 00:38:14,060 I mean, I think both means form again and give leisure to recreation in our sense. 355 00:38:14,060 --> 00:38:20,750 And recreation to recreate, such as of themselves are wholly devoted to melancholy, which corrupts the blood, 356 00:38:20,750 --> 00:38:27,620 or to refresh such weary spirits as a tired with labour or study to moderate the cares and heaviness 357 00:38:27,620 --> 00:38:33,560 of the mind that they may return to their trades and faculties with more zeal and earnestness. 358 00:38:33,560 --> 00:38:42,740 After some soft and pleasant retirement, the idea that the theatre itself is a kind of forest of Ardern that we go to to waste a bit of time, 359 00:38:42,740 --> 00:38:48,230 renew ourselves and then go back to real life. 360 00:38:48,230 --> 00:38:54,290 I want to finish with two different approaches to the play, which might give us a slightly different take on these static qualities. 361 00:38:54,290 --> 00:38:59,720 And one is to think about it historically and the other is to think about it anachronistically. 362 00:38:59,720 --> 00:39:04,490 Let's think about it historically. First, who could argue that as you like, 363 00:39:04,490 --> 00:39:11,990 it is one of Shakespeare's earliest satires of frontal promote talks about it as the most topical of Shakespeare's plays. 364 00:39:11,990 --> 00:39:17,840 It's really interesting. We tend to think of the history plays as topical immediately to do with Elizabethan 365 00:39:17,840 --> 00:39:23,360 politics and so on commode in in in Shakespeare's language says is as you like it, 366 00:39:23,360 --> 00:39:34,150 which is the most topical in reference. What it's topical about is really literature, literary fashions past, including pastoral and satire. 367 00:39:34,150 --> 00:39:41,140 And I think this is this has to be, of course, topicality has to be associated with the moment of its composition. 368 00:39:41,140 --> 00:39:48,190 Elizabethan press censorship experienced one of its most dramatic moments in the months before us. 369 00:39:48,190 --> 00:39:52,870 You like it was first performed. And I'm just gonna describe this. 370 00:39:52,870 --> 00:39:54,340 This is censorship. 371 00:39:54,340 --> 00:40:02,770 In June, fifteen ninety nine, the so-called bishop's ban, which was named after its sponsors, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the bishop of London, 372 00:40:02,770 --> 00:40:10,330 responded to concerns about the contemporary literary scene by banning the publication of satires, 373 00:40:10,330 --> 00:40:19,240 particularly formal verse satire that had become a popular form of complaint and commentary by the end of the century. 374 00:40:19,240 --> 00:40:26,260 So June fifteen ninety nine, the bishops ban bans formal verse satires while they're at it. 375 00:40:26,260 --> 00:40:39,460 The bishops also banned works of English history without the approval of the Privy Council and also banned the printing of any play without authority. 376 00:40:39,460 --> 00:40:49,240 So Sievert Satie's English history and plays all censored or newly or more insistently censored. 377 00:40:49,240 --> 00:40:59,110 The order to destroy extant copies of these works politically satires resulted in public book burning in the summer of fifteen ninety nine. 378 00:40:59,110 --> 00:41:04,830 The Bishop's man serves to associate three types of work satire, history and drama, 379 00:41:04,830 --> 00:41:11,890 and it identifies them as not morally but politically dangerous or potentially seditious. 380 00:41:11,890 --> 00:41:13,150 Now we might see as you like it, 381 00:41:13,150 --> 00:41:24,250 as a play that responds to the ban on first unversed satire by trying to incorporate some of its commercially and politically successful features. 382 00:41:24,250 --> 00:41:33,850 Indeed, it seems that when Celia is talking to Touchstone, who you might think of as a kind of satirist, she seems to allude to the barn itself. 383 00:41:33,850 --> 00:41:37,930 Since the little wit that fools have was silenced. 384 00:41:37,930 --> 00:41:45,220 The little foolery that wisemen have makes a great show since the little wit that fools have was silenced. 385 00:41:45,220 --> 00:41:48,850 The little foolery that wise men have makes a great, great show. 386 00:41:48,850 --> 00:41:57,250 Most editors think that that is an allusion to the bishop's ban, the silencing of the literal with fools and therefore Celia allies, 387 00:41:57,250 --> 00:42:06,880 the usurping court of Duke Frederick with the censorship of the Elizabethan Elizabethan bishop's if touchstone is a satirist. 388 00:42:06,880 --> 00:42:15,310 It's really his companion in the play or his opposite in the play. Jaquiss, who carries most of the play's burden towards satire. 389 00:42:15,310 --> 00:42:21,100 I think Jaquiss we could see as a court satirist with a voice very recognisable to Elizabethans, 390 00:42:21,100 --> 00:42:27,790 who had bought work by verse satirists like Marston or Paul or Nash. 391 00:42:27,790 --> 00:42:38,590 And as we've already seen, it's Jaquiss whose lengthy speeches serve most to slow down the play, most to stymie its attempts to really get going. 392 00:42:38,590 --> 00:42:42,850 And most to reinstate telling for doing description. 393 00:42:42,850 --> 00:42:52,660 For plot. Perhaps then part of the difficulty of the play's pacing derives from the import importing of another non-dramatic genre. 394 00:42:52,660 --> 00:43:01,930 The satire into the structure of as you like it in trying to occupy some of the cultural ground recently vacated by the ban on satire. 395 00:43:01,930 --> 00:43:08,770 That's to say, as you like, it becomes more like a satiric poem than a dramatic plot. 396 00:43:08,770 --> 00:43:17,020 Again, we could see Hamlet as a kind of satiric voice and perhaps trace an oblique relation to the bishop's stand in that place, too. 397 00:43:17,020 --> 00:43:21,130 So that's a way of thinking about pastoral and satire and status in the play, 398 00:43:21,130 --> 00:43:26,650 which might try to relate it specifically to the circumstances of its composition. 399 00:43:26,650 --> 00:43:34,900 The last idea I'd like to float back is quite different, is a is a is a much more a much more modern view, a kind of a historical view. 400 00:43:34,900 --> 00:43:41,170 One of the ways contemporary criticism has revisited the idea of the pastoral. 401 00:43:41,170 --> 00:43:46,060 I've discussed pastoral as an escapist and impossible urban genre, 402 00:43:46,060 --> 00:43:53,540 which presents an idealised or unreal landscape derived from literary precedent rather than from nature. 403 00:43:53,540 --> 00:43:56,520 But there's a different way of seeing the play's depiction of the forest of Ardern 404 00:43:56,520 --> 00:44:02,230 and one that's more convinced by the moral force of its recuperative energies. 405 00:44:02,230 --> 00:44:09,520 It's no surprise, I think, that the romantic period love does. You like it as a proto romantic text. 406 00:44:09,520 --> 00:44:18,250 The epitome of Wordsworth's lines in the table turned at Wordsworth, encourages the scholar to put down his books and get out into the countryside. 407 00:44:18,250 --> 00:44:21,610 One impulse from a vernal wood will teach you more of man, 408 00:44:21,610 --> 00:44:30,150 of moral evil and of good than all the sages can is a complete epitome of romantic kind of nature worship. 409 00:44:30,150 --> 00:44:40,860 Wordsworth alludes quite explicitly. So as you like it to times uncounted hours in the prelude, so the romantics rediscovered as you like it, 410 00:44:40,860 --> 00:44:49,020 as a kind of proto romantic text or something which understood the force of nature in a way that they were trying to understand it. 411 00:44:49,020 --> 00:44:59,320 And this new appreciation of, as you like it spoke to a kind of late 18th, early 19th century idealism about the restorative place of nature. 412 00:44:59,320 --> 00:45:05,260 And it recast what had been a long, critical excuse about Shakespeare, that he had no classical learning, 413 00:45:05,260 --> 00:45:11,650 but he was the poet of nature and turned that into an absolute high achievement. 414 00:45:11,650 --> 00:45:20,280 I think the heir to that romantic enthusiasm in our own day is the relatively new discipline of eco criticism. 415 00:45:20,280 --> 00:45:31,240 Eco criticism is a politically engaged study of the interconnectedness of human culture and the environment. 416 00:45:31,240 --> 00:45:37,390 Eco critics of the eco system has been quite active in Shakespeare studies, eco eco criticism and kind of relatedly, animal studies, 417 00:45:37,390 --> 00:45:47,230 the role of animals in in Shakespeare's world and in his world view have been quite, quite prevalent in the last six or five or so, five or so years. 418 00:45:47,230 --> 00:45:51,070 So if you're interested in what people are really working on now, 419 00:45:51,070 --> 00:45:55,730 rather than on that whole history of criticism that sometimes we can feel burdened with by Shakespeare, 420 00:45:55,730 --> 00:46:04,420 I think this is probably quite an interesting place to look at. So eco critics of As You Like It, such as Gabriel Egan in his book Green Shakespeare, 421 00:46:04,420 --> 00:46:11,440 have explored the play's depiction of the natural world with more attention to its kind of ecological acuity. 422 00:46:11,440 --> 00:46:14,770 Instead of say this is a kind of literary space, is the literary space of possible. 423 00:46:14,770 --> 00:46:20,130 Same saying this is a natural space, which is which is accurately depicted. 424 00:46:20,130 --> 00:46:26,230 It reinstates the forest as a natural rather than a literary space. 425 00:46:26,230 --> 00:46:34,180 It's as if the forest is the source of social regeneration in the play, the place where the court can be newly made. 426 00:46:34,180 --> 00:46:38,200 To me, that's an if, but if it is that, it is also the site. 427 00:46:38,200 --> 00:46:43,520 Egan argues of a negotiation of the roles of the human and non-human worlds. 428 00:46:43,520 --> 00:46:47,260 And once you begin to be made aware of this fact, you can see that as you like, 429 00:46:47,260 --> 00:46:51,670 it is completely preoccupied with animals and must have more animals in it than any other Shakespeare play, 430 00:46:51,670 --> 00:46:53,890 but also more reference to animals right from the start. 431 00:46:53,890 --> 00:47:03,160 When Orlando complains that his brother is treating him like an animal, his treatment differs not from the stalling of an ox. 432 00:47:03,160 --> 00:47:12,510 There's a long description of how Jay Kreis is addressing a wounded stag, which is quite important in this. 433 00:47:12,510 --> 00:47:15,460 In this, which I'm not going to I'm not gonna read out because of time. 434 00:47:15,460 --> 00:47:23,950 But Jaquiss description suggests that the wounded stag ought to have the same rights as the human. 435 00:47:23,950 --> 00:47:31,090 The description is that he calls the U. The court in exile user purs tyrant. 436 00:47:31,090 --> 00:47:37,750 And what's worse, to fright the animals and kill them up in their assigned and native dwelling place. 437 00:47:37,750 --> 00:47:42,160 So he makes the connexion between Juk Frederick pushing out Juk Senior from the human world 438 00:47:42,160 --> 00:47:48,580 and then Duke Senior and the court and the court is pushing out the animals from the forest. 439 00:47:48,580 --> 00:47:52,330 It's one that tries to see an ethical equivalence between the human and animal worlds 440 00:47:52,330 --> 00:47:57,910 and suggests that we should deal with nature in the way that we deal with culture. 441 00:47:57,910 --> 00:48:03,280 It is anachronistic, I think, to see Jaquiss as a hump saboteur or as an eco warrior. 442 00:48:03,280 --> 00:48:08,800 But it is significant that he alone of the exiled courtiers does not seem to be planning to return. 443 00:48:08,800 --> 00:48:13,360 What you would have. I'll stay to know your abandoned cave. 444 00:48:13,360 --> 00:48:21,760 So rather than a temporary GreenWorld, Jaquiss is making an alternative court life in this forest structure. 445 00:48:21,760 --> 00:48:28,720 This eco criticism might be a good way to think about debates about art vs. nature. 446 00:48:28,720 --> 00:48:36,040 Old debates which need a bit of packing up, I think, in The Winter's Tale or in The Tempest as well as in as you like it. 447 00:48:36,040 --> 00:48:40,670 What I've tried to ask in this lecture is what happens in as you like it? And I've tried to deal with the answer, 448 00:48:40,670 --> 00:48:48,220 but not much happens by thinking about the place generic relations postulant to satire both in its own day and in recent productions, 449 00:48:48,220 --> 00:48:52,930 when I've tried to suggest eco criticism as a way of thinking again about ideas of nature. 450 00:48:52,930 --> 00:49:06,240 In Shakespeare's plays next week, I'm going to talk about Hamlet. And the question about Hamlet is why is Hamlet called Hamlet?