As You Like It

THE RSC SHAKESPEARE
Edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen
Chief Associate Editors: Héloïse Sénéchal and Jan Sewell
Associate Editors: Trey Jansen, Eleanor Lowe, Lucy Munro,
Dee Anna Phares

As You Like It
Textual editing: Eric Rasmussen
Introduction and Shakespeare’s Career in the Theater: Jonathan Bate
Commentary: Takashi Kozuka and Héloïse Sénéchal
Scene-by-Scene Analysis: Esme Miskimmin
In Performance: Karin Brown (RSC stagings) and Jan Sewell (overview)
The Director’s Cut (interviews by Jonathan Bate and Kevin Wright):
Dominic Cooke and Michael Boyd
Playing Rosalind: Naomi Frederick

Editorial Advisory Board
Gregory Doran, Chief Associate Director,
Royal Shakespeare Company
Jim Davis, Professor of Theatre Studies, University of Warwick, UK
Charles Edelman, Senior Lecturer, Edith Cowan University,
Western Australia
Lukas Erne, Professor of Modern English Literature,
Université de Genève, Switzerland
Akiko Kusunoki, Tokyo Woman’s Christian University, Japan
Jacqui O’Hanlon, Director of Education, Royal Shakespeare Company
Ron Rosenbaum, author and journalist, New York, USA
James Shapiro, Professor of English and Comparative Literature,
Columbia University, USA
Tiffany Stern, Professor and Tutor in English, University of Oxford, UK

2010 Modern Library Paperback Edition

Copyright © 2007, 2010 by The Royal Shakespeare Company

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of
The Random House Publishing Group, a division of
Random House, Inc., New York.

MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks
of Random House, Inc.

“Royal Shakespeare Company,” “RSC,” and the RSC logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of The Royal Shakespeare Company.

The version of As You Like It and the corresponding footnotes that appear in this volume were originally published in William Shakespeare: Complete Works, edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, published in 2007 by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

eISBN: 978-1-58836-842-3

www.BookishMall.com

v3.1

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

Rosalynd

In the Forest of Arden

The Festive Resolution

Aliena and Ganymede

About the Text

Key Facts

As You Like It

Act 1

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

Act 2

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

Scene 4

Scene 5

Scene 6

Scene 7

Act 3

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

Scene 4

Scene 5

Act 4

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

Act 5

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

Scene 4

Textual Notes

Scene-by-Scene Analysis

As You Like It in Performance: The RSC and Beyond

Four Centuries of As You Like It: An Overview

At the RSC

The Director’s Cut: Interviews with Dominic Cooke and Michael Boyd

Playing Rosalind: An Interview with Naomi Frederick

Shakespeare’s Career in the Theater

Beginnings

Playhouses

The Ensemble at Work

The King’s Man

Shakespeare’s Works: A Chronology

Further Reading and Viewing

References

Acknowledgments and Picture Credits

INTRODUCTION

ROSALYND

For centuries, trade and marriage have been the engines of social mobility in Britain. The story of the Lodge family in the age of the first Queen Elizabeth is typical. A boy called Thomas Lodge was born in Shropshire, deep in the countryside. His family sent him to the big city and he was apprenticed to a grocer. He made a good marriage and rose to become Lord Mayor of London. He was bankrupted when there was a business downturn, but he still managed to get his son Thomas educated as a “poor scholar” at the Merchant Taylors’ School. From there Thomas Lodge junior went to Oxford. Education was the route from trade to the professions: after graduating, Lodge enrolled at the Inns of Court to train as a lawyer.

But then he hit a barrier. Young Lodge had converted to Roman Catholicism. This immediately made him an outsider, a member of an oppressed minority. His father angrily excluded him from his will and it proved impossible to pursue a career in the law. So Lodge turned to writing and became a prolific author of plays, poems, pamphlets, and short novels. The most successful of these—one of the bestselling literary works of the Elizabethan age—was Rosalynd, a story of exile from the court to the forest. Like a modern screenwriter turning a successful novel into a movie, Shakespeare dramatized the story for the London stage.

By rights, the play should have been named after its heroine. It is the Elizabethan equivalent of an “adapted” as opposed to an “original” screenplay. Shakespeare selects and compresses his material, but retains its essential spirit as a series of debates on the nature of love played out against a romantic woodland backdrop. The flavor of Lodge’s story, its language studded with allusions to classical mythology, may be tasted from the climactic moment when Rosalynd reverts to her female identity: “In went Ganimede and dressed herself in woman’s attire, having on a gown of green, with kirtle of rich sandal, so quaint that she seemed Diana triumphing in the forest; upon her head she wore a chaplet of roses, which gave her such a grace that she looked like Flora perked in the pride of all her flowers.”

There are striking parallels between Shakespeare’s background and Lodge’s. Shakespeare’s father, too, was upwardly mobile thanks to his success in trade. John Shakespeare’s glove-making business secured him a position on the Stratford-upon-Avon town council. He eventually became town bailiff, the equivalent of mayor. But he, too, ran into financial trouble. It is also possible that the Shakespeares faced difficulties because of family associations with Catholicism. Like Thomas Lodge junior, Will Shakespeare sought his fortune in London. Not having a university degree, he could not enter a profession such as the law, so he drifted into the theater.

The plot of As You Like It reflects aspects of the experience of both Lodge and Shakespeare. How can a young man improve himself if he is not given educational opportunities? In the first scene, we learn that whereas an older brother has gone off to college, young Orlando is forced to hang around at home. He sets off for the court and proves his mettle in the entertainment arena—not as a dramatist, but as a sportsman, the amateur upstart who bravely goes into the ring and unexpectedly defeats the professional court wrestler, Charles.

But he is then exiled from the center of power. In a neat reversal of Shakespeare’s own journey from the Forest of Arden in Warwickshire to the bustling world of London, with its commerce, its court, and its theaters, Orlando goes into the forest and discovers his destiny there. Because the wicked Duke Frederick has taken power from his elder brother, the other major characters—the good duke and his courtiers, the disguised Rosalind and Celia, the wandering philosopher-gentleman Jaques—are also exiles in the forest.

Lodge’s setting for his story was France, but he anglicized the name of the Ardennes forest to Arden. Perhaps this is what made the story so attractive to Shakespeare, who was born and raised close to the forest from which his mother, Mary Arden, took her family name. The play accordingly removes the action farther from France: though some French names, such as “Le Beau,” are retained, the location of the court is not specified.