As You Like It and the Language of Finding Your Way Out of Trouble

Shakespeare’s plays keep turning up in films and in other stories that borrow an image or a line. Studying the plays themselves taught me how often that familiar detail came out of a stranger scene than I had imagined.

In South Korea, lists of Shakespeare’s four great tragedies usually name Hamlet, King Lear, Othello and Macbeth. I heard less about the comedies that often appear beside them in surveys.

Where the comedies fit

One familiar group comprises The Merchant of Venice, The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It and Twelfth Night. The Merchant of Venice was the one I knew best before university.

As You Like It has gone under more than one Korean title. They differ in how formal the invitation sounds, which feels right for a play so interested in the things a person can do by changing how they speak.

Reading the play at university

I studied English literature and met the play in a course on Renaissance writing. Here I have put some of the things I learned there together with what I found when I read it again.

What happens in the Forest of Arden

Duke Frederick has driven his elder brother from power. Rosalind, the exiled duke’s daughter, remains at court for a time because her cousin Celia, Frederick’s daughter, cannot bear to part with her.

Orlando lives under the authority of his elder brother Oliver, who has withheld the education and treatment he thinks he is owed. Orlando enters a wrestling match against Charles, the duke’s champion.

Orlando defeats Charles. Rosalind sees him wrestle and falls for him, and he can hardly speak to her when they meet.

Orlando flees to the Forest of Arden after learning that Oliver means him harm. Frederick also banishes Rosalind. She goes to the forest with Celia, taking the name Ganymede and dressing as a young man, while Celia calls herself Aliena.

Arden already has its own troubles in love. Silvius wants Phoebe. Phoebe looks straight past him and falls for Ganymede, without realizing whom she has met.

Orlando leaves poems for Rosalind in the forest. When he meets her in disguise, she offers to help him cure his lovesickness. He has to court Ganymede as if he were speaking to Rosalind, which is exactly what he is doing.

Frederick sends Oliver to find Orlando. In the forest, Orlando saves his brother from a lioness. Oliver’s account of the rescue leads him to Celia, and their courtship moves very quickly.

I spent much of the play wondering what could bring all these people into the same room at the right moment. The ending did it faster than I expected.

Rosalind gets several people to promise what they will do if she can bring the right people together. Then she leaves long enough to give the promises a chance to matter.

She returns as Rosalind with Hymen, the god of marriage. The people onstage finally see how the relationships they thought they were in will be resolved.

A messenger brings news of a separate reversal. Frederick has met a religious man, given up his campaign and restored the dukedom to his brother.

A god appears at the end

Deus ex machina means “god from the machine.” It originally referred to a stage device that could bring a god into view. It later became a name for an unexpected intervention that resolves a plot.

Hymen’s appearance brings that old device to mind. I also noticed how much Rosalind has arranged by the time he arrives. The forest has given her space to set the conditions for the ending herself.

Jaques and the seven ages

Hamlet gives Shakespeare one of his best-known opening phrases, “To be or not to be.” As You Like It has another of the lines readers often recognize before they know the scene it comes from.

The speaker is Jaques, a melancholy observer in Duke Senior’s company. He describes a life as a succession of parts an actor has to play.

• All the world’s a stage,
• And all the men and women merely players;
• They have their exits and their entrances,
• And one man in his time plays many parts,
• His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
• Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms;
• Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
• And shining morning face, creeping like snail
• Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
• Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
• Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,
• Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
• Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
• Seeking the bubble reputation
• Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,
• In fair round belly with good capon lined,
• With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
• Full of wise saws and modern instances;
• And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
• Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,
• With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
• His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
• For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,
• Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
• And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
• That ends this strange eventful history,
• Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
• Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

I once saw the BBC render the speech in a short filmed performance. An actor can give each turn of it a rhythm that is harder to hear at first on the page.

The infant becomes a schoolboy, lover, soldier, justice and aging man. Then the final age takes him back toward the helplessness of childhood. Some of those stations feel closer to my life than others.

The return from age to childhood gives the speech an arch. The seven ages are a sequence with echoes at either end. The reflection does not need an exact one-to-one symmetry for a reader to hear it.

Jaques also makes the theater itself the subject of a speech delivered in a theater. That is part of what makes the passage metatheatrical.

Then Orlando brings in his hungry old servant Adam. After hearing Jaques describe the last age as lacking taste and everything else, the audience has an old man before them who very much needs to eat.

A joke that builds the same way

A routine on the Korean television show Gag Concert once got a great deal of mileage out of a question that kept becoming a new question.

• What happens when you get a job? You earn money. What happens when you earn money? You treat yourself to beef. What happens after you buy beef?

Every answer leaves the audience ready for the next turn. Once the routine had caught on, people could repeat the pattern with almost any subject.

Rosalind uses a similar chain to describe how quickly her cousin and Orlando’s brother have fallen in love.

• They have no sooner met than they look at one another.
• They have no sooner looked than they love.
• They have no sooner loved than they sigh and look for the cause.
• As soon as they know the cause, they look for a remedy.

Carrying the end of one phrase into the next is a device called anadiplosis. Here the repetition also makes the story sound as if events are happening too quickly for anyone to interrupt.

Turning the words around

Antimetabole reverses key words or their forms across two parts of a sentence. Here are two turns of phrase to listen for.

• “Your gentleness shall force / More than your force move us to gentleness.”
• “The more pity that fools may not speak wisely what wise men do foolishly.”

There is plenty more to hear in the play. Early Modern English can also use a familiar word in a way that makes you stop and check who is doing what.

I would read the play for those differences. The constructions a character uses onstage have their own purposes, distinct from the modern standard a grammar exam expects.

Book details

As You Like It

Author

William Shakespeare

Edition reviewed

June 7, 2018

ISBN-13

9791127240431

View on YES24

We may earn a commission if you buy through the affiliate link in this article.