As You Like It
Books | Drama / Shakespeare
3.6
(260)
William Shakespeare
Readers and audiences have long greeted As You Like It with delight. Its characters are brilliant conversationalists, including the princesses Rosalind and Celia and their Fool, Touchstone. Soon after Rosalind and Orlando meet and fall in love, the princesses and Touchstone go into exile in the Forest of Arden, where they find new conversational partners. Duke Frederick, younger brother to Duke Senior, has overthrown his brother and forced him to live homeless in the forest with his courtiers, including the cynical Jaques. Orlando, whose older brother Oliver plotted his death, has fled there, too. Recent scholars have also grounded the play in the issues of its time. These include primogeniture, passing property from a father to his oldest son. As You Like It depicts intense conflict between brothers, exposing the human suffering that primogeniture entails. Another perspective concerns crossdressing. Most of Orlando’s courtship of Rosalind takes place while Rosalind is disguised as a man, “Ganymede.” At her urging, Orlando pretends that Ganymede is his beloved Rosalind. But as the epilogue reveals, the sixteenth-century actor playing Rosalind was male, following the practice of the time. In other words, a boy played a girl playing a boy pretending to be a girl. The authoritative edition of As You Like It from The Folger Shakespeare Library, the trusted and widely used Shakespeare series for students and general readers, is now available as an eBook. Features include: · The exact text of the printed book for easy cross-reference · Hundreds of hypertext links for instant navigation · Freshly edited text based on the best early printed version of the play · Full explanatory notes conveniently placed on pages facing the text of the play · Scene-by-scene plot summaries · A key to famous lines and phrases · An introduction to reading Shakespeare’s language · Illustrations from the Folger Shakespeare Library’s vast holdings of rare books · An essay by a leading Shakespeare scholar providing a modern perspective on the play
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More Details:
Author
William Shakespeare
Pages
320
Publisher
Simon and Schuster
Published Date
2011-08-23
ISBN
1439116989 9781439116982
Ratings
Google: 5
Community ReviewsSee all
"The gender reversals in the play were highly amusing, especially when you consider that in the original performances of the play all of the actors were male. Thus, a male actor plays the female Rosalind who disguises herself as the male Ganymede who pretends to be Rosalind (which in fact (s)he is) and then proceeds to pronounce mock-solemn judgment on the nature of gender relations. <br/><br/>Had Shakespeare stuck to the the relations above, the play might have merited five stars. But in the final scene, the play fell apart. The appearance of the god Hymen was superfluous and could easily have been eliminated, while the sudden religious enlightenment of Duke Frederick was wholly unprecedented: even more of a <i>deus ex machina</i> than the appearance of the <i>deus</i> himself.<br/>"
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