Full Description
Since its return to the London stage in 1740, As You Like It has delighted theatergoers, readers, and critics. Its heroine, Rosalind, is one of Shakespeare's greatest characters. The play's Forest of Arden setting and its focus on the relationship between natural occurrences and things created by humans (Shakespeare collectively termed these "art") provide us with access to debates in Renaissance England that relate to the ecological issues of our own time. This Norton Critical Edition is based on the 1623 First Folio text. It is accompanied by a note on the text, eight illustrations, six photographs, and explanatory annotations.
"Sources and Contexts" includes, in its entirety, Shakespeare's primary source for the play—Thomas Lodge's popular prose romance Rosalynde (1590). Reading Shakespeare's play with (and against) Lodge's romance reveals striking similarities and fascinating differences, both large and small. An array of other readings focuses on the central areas of gender and ecology and includes works by Michel de Montaigne, Sir Thomas More, Thomas Bastard, George Gascoygne, and William Prynne.
A rich "Criticism" section includes twenty-one commentaries on As You Like It spanning four centuries. Contributors include, among others, Mrs. Anna Jameson, Clara Claiborne Park, Jean E. Howard, Marjorie Garber, James Shapiro, Valerie Traub, Jeffrey Masten, and Robert Smallwood.
A Selected Bibliography is also included.
Contents
List of Illustration
Preface
The Text of As You Like It
A Note on the Text
Sources and Contexts
Thomas Lodge
Rosalynde
Richard Pace
[The Benefit of a Liberal Education]
Keith Thomas
[Boundaries between Animal and Human]
Michel de Montaigne
[Humans versus Animals]
Sir Thomas More
[How Sheep Devour the English]
William C. Carroll
Enclosure, Vagrancy, and Sedition in the Tudor-Stuart
Period
Thomas Bastard
[Proto-ecological Epigrams]
George Gascoygne
The Woeful Words of the Hart to the Hunter
William Prynne
[The Dangers of Theatrical Cross-Dressing]
Erica Fudge
Dressing Up as a Human
Joseph W. Meeker
The Comic Mode
Walter Benjamin ? Gloves
Criticism
William Hazlitt
As You Like It
Mrs. Anna Jameson
Rosalind
Edward Dowden
[As You Like It as Escape]
Anne Barton
As You Like It: Shakespeare's "Sense of an Ending"
Rosalie Colie
Perspectives on Pastoral
Linda Woodbridge
As You Like It and the Pastoral-Bashing Impulse
Clara Claiborne Park
As We Like It: How a Girl Can Be Smart and Still Popular
Louis Adrian Montrose
"The Place of a Brother" in As You Like It
Richard Wilson
"Like the Old Robin Hood": As You Like It and the
Enclosure Riots
Jean E. Howard
Crossdressing, the Theatre, and Gender Struggle in Early Modern
England
Marjorie Garber
Rosalind the Yeshiva Boy
James Shapiro
[The Play in 1599]
Juliet Dusinberre
Pancakes and a Date for As You Like It
Laurie Shannon
[Friendship in As You Like It]
Valerie Traub
[The Homoerotics of As You Like It]
Cynthia Marshall
Constructions of Negation in As You Like It
Jeffrey Masten
Ganymede's Hand in As You Like It
Robert N. Watson
[Likenesses: Jaques and the Deer]
Gabriel Egan
Food and Biological Nature [in] As You Like It
Michael Jamieson
As You Like It: Performance and Reception
Robert Smallwood ? [Royal Shakespeare Company Stagings of the
Final Scene]
Selected Bibliography
