As You Like It

1
As You Like It

• Day Two
• ENGL 305
• Dr. Fike

2
Looking Ahead

• The midterm examination will cover MSND, MV, and
  AYLI, plus the histories, the Bedford Companion
  material, and concepts. You will need a large
  bluebook, plus 2 blue or black ballpoint pens.
• Your annotated bibliography is due on October
  3rd.
• Detailed assignment sheet http//faculty.winthro
  p.edu/fikem/Courses/ENGL20305/30520Annotated20B
  ibliography20Assignment.htm.
• The Analysis Paper is due on September 24th, one
  week from today.

3
Review

• Key concepts
• Primogeniture a system of inheritance that
  caused problems for younger sons but kept a
  fathers estate intact.
• Pronunciation from The American Heritage
  Dictionary pri mo jen i choor.
• Pronunciation from the OED  U.S.
  /?pra?mo?'d??n??t??(?)r/
• Pastoral literature idealized nature, and
  social commentary.
• Charactersthe forestaudiencethe theater ITO
  of renewal and rejuvenation.
• Forest of Arden Romanticized view of a place
  that had been decimated by Shakespeares time vs.
  the realistic portrayal of enclosure and poverty.
• AYLI participates in the pastoral tradition
  using rural persons to comment on matters in
  civilized society. Shakespeare seems to have been
  sensitive to the effects of enclosures (Bedford
  230, 236, and 245-46), but he himself exploited
  the poor by hoarding food http//www.telegraph.co
  .uk/culture/theatre/william-shakespeare/9963602/Sh
  akespeare-was-a-tax-evading-food-hoarder-study-cla
  ims.html
• The other settingsmanor and courtare sites of
  Machiavellian intrigue where the law of kind is
  violated. AYLI Chart

4
Question

• Write in class for 3 minutes about this question
• What does the title of the play mean?
• You will have an opportunity to share your
  answer with the class.

5
Others Answers to theQuestion about the Title

• As its title declares, this is a play to please
  all tastes. For the simple, it provides the
  stock ingredients of romance....For the more
  sophisticatedit propounds...a question which is
  left to us to answer Is it better to live in the
  court or the country?....For the learned and
  literary this is one of Shakespeare's most
  allusive plays, uniting old traditions and
  playing with them lightly... (Gardner 161).
  The title of the play came from a note to his
  gentlemen readers in Thomas Lodge's book,
  Rosalynde, in which he said, If you like it, so
  (Lodge 108). People interpret different lines and
  actions of the characters as they wish, and we
  know Shakespeare would not object it says so
  right in the title of the play! Actors and
  Directors have taken this literally, and have
  made various changes to the script, such as
  having Phoebe gnaw on a turnip or an apple
  between her lines and having Rosalind kiss the
  chain before giving it to Orlando.
• Source http//www.123helpme.com/view.asp?id614
  0

6
On Marriage, etc.

• http//www.youtube.com/watch?v9FPv2toi5og

7
Mini-Lecture on Rosalind

• As we prepare to discuss 4.1, it makes sense to
  think a bit about Rosalind.
• Source Harold Bloom, Shakespeare The
  Invention of the Human.
• Comments on this book.

8
Harold Bloom

• http//www.yale.edu/english/profiles/bloom_h.html

9
Blooms Comments on Rosalind

• Bloom groups Rosalind with Falstaff and Hamlet
  but says that she is like Falstaff without the
  history and like Hamlet without the tragedy.
• Falstaff is to humor as Hamlet is to intellect.
• In other words, she is both funny and
  intellectual at the same time.
• He also believes that these three characters are
  as close as Shakespeare ever comes to speaking in
  his own voice.

10
Bloom speaks of Rosalind in incredible
superlatives.

• Rosalind is vital and beautiful, in spirit, in
  body, in mind (205).
• Rosalind is the most admirable personage in all
  of Shakespeare (207).
• Rosalind is as integrated a personality as
  Shakespeare created (209).
• Rosalind is Shakespeares unshadowed ideal
  (209).

11
More Superlatives

• Rosalind must be the most remarkable and
  persuasive representation of a woman in all of
  Western literature (221).
• And did Shakespeare or nature invent the
  emotional inferiority of men to women (210).

12
Discussion of Passages Related to Rosalind, love,
etc.

• Consider these passages before we view 4.1
• 1.2.244-45, 1.3.26-28 love at first sight.
• 3.2.364-75 and 390-410 love sickness, love as
  madness.
• 3.4.36-37 and 3.5.82 attitude toward fathers
  and love at first sight.
• 3.5.35-63 Rosalinds advice to Phoebe.

13
Possible Paper

• 3.5.82 Who ever loved that loved not at first
  sight?
• 3.3.13 a great reckoning in a little room
• 4.1.95-100 Hero and Leander, the Hellespont
• How does Rosalinds lecture in 4.1 critique the
  portrayal of romantic love in Marlowes Hero and
  Leander?

14
Act 4, Scene 1

• Watch the clip.
• Discussion questions
• How does Rosalinds introductory conversation
  with Jaques set the scene for her more extensive
  conversation with Orlando? Can you make any
  connection to Emersons statement, Traveling is
  a fools paradise (Self-Reliance)?
• What does Rosalind teach Orlando about women,
  love, lust, and marriage? What attitude(s) is
  she trying to correct? Find quotations to
  illustrate your point?
• Rosalind is clearly teaching Orlando, but is she
  learning as well? If so, what? Is she insecure
  about anything? What about prideis she guilty
  of it?

15
First Question

• How does Rosalinds introductory conversation
  with Jaques set the scene for her more extensive
  conversation with Orlando? Can you make any
  connection to Emersons statement, Traveling is
  a fools paradise (Self-Reliance)?

16
Second Question

• What does Rosalind teach Orlando about women,
  love, lust, and marriage? What attitude(s) is
  she trying to correct? Find quotations to
  illustrate your point?

17
What does Rosalind teach Orlando?

• Men dont die from love (4.1.101-2), though
  people do die for various reasons.
• Women change after they are married (4.1.142).
• Women dont fight fairly a woman turns a
  discussion about her faults into a discussion of
  her husbands.
• Lust comes in at the eyes in Shakespeares plays
  (4.1.205) cf. doting in MSND.
• Lust is to kissing as love is to talk (4.1.68 and
  5.2.49).
• Humility? Idealism? Fear?

18
What Does This Exchange Say about Sexuality?

• Orlando at 5.2.49 Orlando says, I can live no
  longer by thinking.
• 5.2.57ff. Rosalind says, Believe then, if you
  please, that I can do strange things. I have,
  since I was three years old, conversed with a
  magician, most profound in his art and yet not
  damnable. I say I am a magician.

19
A Possible Answer

• If Rosalind makes a veiled allusion to Medea,
  the magical maiden whom Jason, the Orlando
  figure, seeks to wed, then magic may be womens
  answer to masculine lust, just as reason is mens
  defense against feminine seduction.
• --Dr. Fike

20
More on Sexuality

• Insights from Montroses The Place of a
  Brother In As You Like It Social Process and
  Comic Form, page 50
• Snake phallic sexuality, which Orlando must
  overcome in order to be appropriately married to
  Rosalind.
• Maternal lion the temptation to treat his wife
  as his mother.
• Cf. Carl Jung, CW 7, par. 316, page 197 The
  modern civilized man has to forgo this primitive
  but nonetheless admirable system of education.
  The consequence is that the anima, in the form of
  the mother-imago, is transferred to the wife and
  the man, as soon as he marries, becomes childish,
  sentimental, dependent, and subservient, or else
  truculent, tyrannical, hypersensitive, always
  thinking about the prestige of his superior
  masculinity.

21
Third Question

• Rosalind is clearly teaching Orlando, but is she
  learning as well? If so, what? Is she insecure
  about anything? What about prideis she guilty
  of it?

22
Does Rosalind Learn Too?

• She thinks that love is a sport or a game
  (1.2.24-26).
• In the forest, she tries to expose the same
  illusions that she is guilty of herself.
• In particular, when she lectures Phoebe on pride
  (Sell when you can. You are not for all
  markets 3.5.60), she may be speaking about her
  own foibles as well.
• She is in love How many fathom deep I am in
  love! (4.1.197).

23
Summary Chart

• AYLI Chart 2

24
Final Points

• Rosalinds purpose is to give Orlando a healthful
  dose of reality so that he wont be disappointed
  later on. Spin control.
• But she needs a bit of her own advice too.
• Does she get a raw deal? Orlando is inferior
  intellectually and socially, and by marrying him
  she disinherits herself. See 5.4.167-68 (Orlando
  gets a dukedom). Does this bother anybody? Here
  Blooms finest female commits herself to married
  life with a lesser, poorer man who gets her
  inheritance. Is that really as we like it?
• END