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ENGL 348: As You Like It (Full Notes)
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An in-depth compilation of my class notes from ENGL 348 (As You Like It unit)
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Unit 2: As You Like ItJanuary 25th, 2023
Introduction: 1.1
This is a world where the best possible outcome this society can imagine is provided.
● One of the things that the play hints at is that there are better ways to find happiness than
the ways the characters are provided.
● The play is partly about celebrating the body and its will to pleasure, while also
celebrating the ways in which we hilariously idealize the body’s will to pleasure.
○ Also seems to explore the human will to decorate and idealize bodily “destiny”
(reproduction) and bodily pleasure.
○ The ills of pleasure contrasted with the Arcadian experiment.
Adam: a labourer. He is an idealized servant (who serves for duty, not for need) in a play that
deconstructs hierarchy. Insofar as Adam is a good person, we respect him. Insofar as Adam
subscribes to a hierarchy that marginalizes him, he’s a fool.
● He thinks that his dutiful service warrants better treatment.
● Adam is Iago’s opposite: he’s the servant that is so loyal (not only does he speak his
mind) and gives the 500 crowns that he’s managed to save to Orlando since he was 18
(who has no future and has been robbed of his patriarchal inheritance) and will ask him if
already giving him his entire life savings if he can still remain his servant.
○ Adam is so excessively virtuous. That is a problem! He espouses views that aren’t
only feudal but futile.
○ There are a lot of games that this play engages.
Title, As You Like It: we can’t really tell if Orlando likes Ganymede more than Rosalind (or vice
versa). There’s some homoeroticism here. There’s no indication that Ganymede is Rosalind.
● We don’t know if Celia marries Oliver because Rosalind is marrying Orlando (to stay
close to her) or if she’s marrying Oliver because she falls in love instantly.
Oliver is trying to depreciate Orlando: he hasn’t given any education, training, money, etc. to his
brother. The play asks a serious question about the shallowness and arbitrariness of social rank
– it rests on things that can be taken away (and not blood!)
● There is a doubleness about a lot of what goes on in this play – part of it is about the lies
of culture, and another part is a playful pretense – that you can pick which reality to live.
● The play includes a lot of trees that aren’t there! (But they are also there… the theatre is
made out of trees, as is human life)
○ The presence of the trees could be indicated by the bushes in the Globe prop
room. The actors keep referencing to the forests and trees that aren’t there.
○ In the theatre, to have a forest, we must imagine it. What about this world?
○ What is the relationship between the characters and the trees? Orlando carves
words into them to his mistress…
● Our relationship with nature seems to be destructive. Orlando damages nature as he
carves things into trees. Had they not returned to court, how many trees would they have
defaced and how many deer would have they killed?
○ Those who are pasturing sheep don’t belong in the forest – there are no pastures
in the forest! We have to imagine that they either live in peaceful coexistence with
nature or that the forest runs up to the pasture.
, ○ We might never touch nature – we might only touch our human projections of
nature. There’s a sense that Orlando, The Duke, and Jaques, only encounter the
nature that they have self-projected.
■ Wherever they go, they try to leave their mark (e.g., heavy footprints)
■ They’re supposed to be like Robin Hood of Old…
○ There seems to be no limit to the extent to which the aristocrats will keep
appropriating things… While some people were still seeing Robin Hood as an
outlaw, others were seeing him as a fallen noble trying to survive in the woods.
Shakespeare is giving us a skeptical version of the Tudor revision of Robin Hood, imported from
Italy and France (for the audience to determine for themselves).
● Humanity in this play is both animal (hungry, cold) and oddly amorphous
○ Oliver and the Duke will suddenly become good guys because the play must have
a happy ending. The play is very clear about its artificiality.
○ Good characters flee a bad place, going to a place they hope will be a safe place.
Everybody falls in love and almost everyone goes home.
○ Why is this play valuable? The details in the text are super good!
■ In As You Like It, we have the Forest of Arden ruled by no one (despite
the hierarchy that is continually enforced by characters)
● All sorts of reasons Rosalind puts on male dress disappear when she has a male protector:
○ She is the magician in this play. This play does not rely largely on magic (unlike
A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest).
● Two cross-dressing women: Rosalind dressing as a man, Celia dressing as a lower-class
figure (she’s dressing for class, not for gender).
○ We have a villain (Oliver) rescued by the very brother he has injured.
■ Should we laugh at how ridiculous this is? Or should we feel happy and
touched by it?
Rosalind and Orlando are doubles: they were both valued by the old Duke, and both have a
family member that wants to harm them. They are distrusted, suspected, and marginalized.
● Rosalind falls in love with Orlando out of sympathy (the underdog), and secondly, falls in
love with Orlando, the champion (his strength).
● It’s the perfect kind of romantic, heteronormative recipe for love!
● He falls in love with her because she’s the old Duke’s daughter and because she notices
him. In the forest, Rosalind decides that Orlando who she is hearing in those verses has
no idea what a woman is.
○ The Orlando in the forest through the verses terrifies Rosalind. She tutors him and
teaches him how to fall out of love to transcend this madness. She draws on every
misogynistic satire that she can draw on. She paints women as uncontrollable,
talking all night like parrots, refusing to do things that they’re told, etc.
○ The imaginary antithesis of what he’s created.
● Gradually, she begins to feel that Orlando does not know who she is. He gradually cares
for Ganymede. She wants Orlando to be tested – she wants to break down his idealism
and replace it with a modified realism.
○ She wants somebody she can depend on.
The play has some positive anti-idealistic energies. It’s a network of fantasies. Yet, it doesn’t
rely on the fantasies to do its work – indeed, it pulls the fantasies apart to highlight their
absurdities.
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