In many of Shakespeare’s comedies, we see people from all social ranks being portrayed – from the highest of nobles, to the lowest of servants. In cases of male friendship, there is a common pattern to see friendship develop through master-servant relationships, which aid and...
In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It, feminine homoeroticism emerges as an interplay of passive and aggressive opposition. Women take the sphere of romantic love — one sphere to which they have access in the midst of an oppressive patriarchal order...
Rosalind’s literal significance in Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” is grounded in her motivation in acting as Ganymede, for it is her sole perspective that elucidates the reader of the biases of society’s gender roles. The necessity for Rosalind to perform as Ganymede defines her...
In the epilogue of As You Like It, Rosalind discusses the nature of real and performed gender identity in a final bid to resolve the gender confusion extant throughout the play. The events leading up to the epilogue make such resolution necessary, fraught as they...
In Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Jaques is a static, melancholy character who continually prefers to remain removed from the imprudence of love, wishing he could speak his mind without reprehension. In contrast to most of the other characters, who seize opportunities for change, Jaques,...
Pastoralism as a literary device thrives on the juxtaposition of city life and country life. Pastoralists often stress that the burdens of the city can be alleviated and clarified by a trip into the country’s therapeutic environment. A sense of balance and rightness is often...
“Cleanse the foul body of th’infected world / If they will patiently receive my medicine” (Shakespeare 304). William Shakespeare addresses an ailment known as melancholy through the character Jaques in As You Like It. In this quote, Jaques blames the outside world for imposing their...
Northrop Frye and C. L. Barber’s “green world” and “misrule” theories are very much evident in William Shakespeare’s As You Like It (ASYI). Frye discusses his “green world” theory in his books Anatomy of Criticism, in 1957, and A Natural Perspective, in 1965. In it,...
Cross-dressing on the early modern stage was a highly exploited theatrical device. It subverted the traditional conceptions of gender, evoking a recurring sense of dramatic irony. Jean E. Howard explains that “behavioural differences” and “distinctions of dress” were considered very significant in the Renaissance period...
From the viewpoint of our world today, Shakespeare’s era seems about as conservatively-minded as a society could get. Shakespeare completely demolishes this notion, with his progressive suggestions of a normalcy in homosexuality and transgenderism in his comedy, As You Like It. He first introduces these...
In the pastoral setting of the Forest of Arden in William Shakespeare’s As You Like It, the characters are physically removed from society, and thus from the political, economic, and sexual rules that govern social life. If Arden is a paradise, however, it is an...
Present day conceptions of gender would appear to be different to what they were in Shakespeares day. Clear cut divisions of male, female and neuter are apparent. One would need to look back to the time of Shakespeare to try and see the different view...
William Shakespeare is an author who is known best for his tragedies, such as Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and Julius Caesar: plays in which the heroes lose. However, Shakespeare also wrote comedies, such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, and As You...
“In the latter part of the 19th century, Japan opened up for trade with the West. Merchant adventurers arrived from all over the world, many of them English. Some traded in silk and rice and lived in enclaves around the ‘treaty ports.’ They brought their...
Although some Shakespearean plays carve out a more passive, male-defined role for women, such as that which is exemplified through Ophelia’s obedience to Polonius in Hamlet, the comedies of As You Like It and Twelfth Night explore women’s potential for unexpected honesty, especially within the...
Compare the relations between older and younger men in the following extracts; pay close attention to the use of dramatic language and the opportunities offered by the text for different emphases in production: 1 Henry IV, 2.4.109-62 (Bevington ed., pp. 182-6) and As You Like...
