Links about 'As You Like It'
Analysis of major characters:
http://neboliterature.mrkdevelopment.com.au/drama/as-you-like-it/belonging-in-as-you-like-it.html
Analysis of characters and setting:
http://neboliterature.mrkdevelopment.com.au/drama/as-you-like-it/belonging-in-as-you-like-it.html
Analysis of characters and setting:
aos_as_you_like_it.pdf | |
File Size: | 1212 kb |
File Type: |
Ideas of belonging in 'As you like it'
BBC lecture on The Pastoral literature
The Pastoral Tradition
Agricultural life and the natural world has often been a theme in the expressions of mankind because we are directly connected to the earth for food and shelter. This expression is known as the pastoral tradition and is seen in literature, art, and music.This course will study literary works responding to the significance of agriculture and nature.
Pastoral literature - class of literature that presents the society of shepherds as free from the complexity and corruption of city life. Many of the idylls written in its name are far remote from the realities of any life, rustic or urban.
Source: Britannica and Oregon State University
As You Like It and The Pastoral
‘As You Like It’ was most likely written around 1598–1600, during the last years of Elizabeth’s reign. The play belongs to the literary tradition known as pastoral: which has its roots in the literature of ancient Greece, came into its own in Roman antiquity with Virgil’s Eclogues, and continued as a vital literary mode through Shakespeare’s time and long after. Typically, a pastoral story involves exiles from urban or court life who flee to the refuge of the countryside, where they often disguise themselves as shepherds in order to converse with other shepherds on a range of established topics, from the relative merits of life at court versus life in the country to the relationship between nature and art. The most fundamental concern of the pastoral mode is comparing the worth of the natural world, represented by relatively untouched countryside, to the world built by humans, which contains the joys of art and the city as well as the injustices of rigid social hierarchies. Pastoral literature, then, has great potential to serve as a forum for social criticism and can even inspire social reform.
In general, Shakespeare’s ‘As You Like It’ develops many of the traditional features and concerns of the pastoral genre. This comedy examines the cruelties and corruption of court life and gleefully pokes holes in one of humankind’s greatest artifices: the conventions of romantic love. The play’s investment in pastoral traditions leads to an indulgence in rather simple rivalries: court versus country, realism versus romance, reason versus mindlessness, nature versus fortune, young versus old, and those who are born into nobility versus those who acquire their social standing. But rather than settle these scores by coming down on one side or the other, As You Like It offers up a world of myriad choices and endless possibilities. In the world of this play, no one thing need cancel out another. In this way, the play manages to offer both social critique and social affirmation. It is a play that at all times stresses the complexity of things, the simultaneous pleasures and pains of being human.
Source: Sparknotes
BBC lecture on The Pastoral literature
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p003c1cs
Pastoral literature - class of literature that presents the society of shepherds as free from the complexity and corruption of city life. Many of the idylls written in its name are far remote from the realities of any life, rustic or urban.
Source: Britannica and Oregon State University
As You Like It and The Pastoral
‘As You Like It’ was most likely written around 1598–1600, during the last years of Elizabeth’s reign. The play belongs to the literary tradition known as pastoral: which has its roots in the literature of ancient Greece, came into its own in Roman antiquity with Virgil’s Eclogues, and continued as a vital literary mode through Shakespeare’s time and long after. Typically, a pastoral story involves exiles from urban or court life who flee to the refuge of the countryside, where they often disguise themselves as shepherds in order to converse with other shepherds on a range of established topics, from the relative merits of life at court versus life in the country to the relationship between nature and art. The most fundamental concern of the pastoral mode is comparing the worth of the natural world, represented by relatively untouched countryside, to the world built by humans, which contains the joys of art and the city as well as the injustices of rigid social hierarchies. Pastoral literature, then, has great potential to serve as a forum for social criticism and can even inspire social reform.
In general, Shakespeare’s ‘As You Like It’ develops many of the traditional features and concerns of the pastoral genre. This comedy examines the cruelties and corruption of court life and gleefully pokes holes in one of humankind’s greatest artifices: the conventions of romantic love. The play’s investment in pastoral traditions leads to an indulgence in rather simple rivalries: court versus country, realism versus romance, reason versus mindlessness, nature versus fortune, young versus old, and those who are born into nobility versus those who acquire their social standing. But rather than settle these scores by coming down on one side or the other, As You Like It offers up a world of myriad choices and endless possibilities. In the world of this play, no one thing need cancel out another. In this way, the play manages to offer both social critique and social affirmation. It is a play that at all times stresses the complexity of things, the simultaneous pleasures and pains of being human.
Source: Sparknotes
BBC lecture on The Pastoral literature
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p003c1cs