Shakespeare 22: As You Like It
I liked "As You Like It" quite a bit. I know I seem to say this about each new comedy I read, but as I was reading it I thought this was my favorite, and the funniest, Shakespeare comedy so far.
Up until the final scene, that is. Like all the comedies, it ends with weddings; and in this case the main character Rosalind has set up an outlandishly complicated sequence of events and multiple simultaneous marriages, but then at the end when she should walk out to orchestrate it all, inexplicably Hymen the god of marriage himself walks out onstage, the very first supernatural occurrence in the whole play, and gives a little speech and marries everybody. (And by the way, yes, Hymen is a real Greek god of marriage ceremonies. I've been trying to determine whether his name is directly based on the anatomical hymen as folk etymology would insist. Answers are uncertain. The OED, usually so authoritative, just links them both back to separate but similarly spelled Greek words. Another source says that the anatomical hymen comes from a Greek word for "a thin membrane", which has a root in "sew/bind", and that the God's name similarly comes from "sew/bind" as in binding two people together in marriage.)
Wikipedia says that Hymen is meant to be a "masquer" from a "play within the play", and I guess if I was going to stage the play today, that would be a good way to handle it; set things up so it's implied that Rosalind hired someone to dress up as Hymen (maybe, in fact, Sir Oliver Martext the country curate from earlier in the play). But there's no hint of that interpretation in the dialogue, and my Pelican edition of this play, nor any of the other sources I've found online, suggests this interpretation. It seems more likely to me that it's just meant to be a kind of deus ex machina, something the audiences of the time could accept as a normal dramatic flourish, but completely bizarre to modern audiences. Instead to me, it felt like the ending of an episode of "Regular Show", as if so much marrying was going on that it summoned Hymen forth from Mount Olympus.
But enough about what was bad about the play. What did I like about it? Mainly I loved the repartee between Rosalind, her best friend Celia, and their fool, Touchstone. Indeed, Touchstone was funnier to me than most of Shakespeare's fools, and perhaps it's because he's a philosophical fool, most of whose jokes are conceptual rather than based on wordplay. Here's the first passage of his that I highlighted, where he talks about why he likes to swear "by my honor", because since he has no honor and you can't swear by something that doesn't exist, it means he doesn't have to tell the truth:
TOUCHSTONE: No, by mine honor, but I was bid to come for you.
ROSALIND: Where learned you that oath, fool?
TOUCHSTONE: Of a certain knight that swore by his honor they were good pancakes, and swore by his honor the mustard was bad. Now I’ll stand to it, the pancakes were bad, and the mustard was good, and yet was not the knight forsworn.
CELIA How prove you that in the great heap of your knowledge?
ROSALIND: Ay, marry, now unmuzzle your wisdom.
TOUCHSTONE Stand you both forth now. Stroke your chins, and swear by your beards that I am a knave.
CELIA By our beards, if we had them, thou art.
TOUCHSTONE By my knavery, if I had it, then I were; but if you swear by that that is not, you are not forsworn; no more was this knight, swearing by his honor, for he never had any; or if he had, he had sworn it away before ever he saw those pancakes or that mustard.
Celia and Rosalind themselves are quite sharp wits as well, constantly joking back and forth to each other, almost like they're talking in twin language. Here's a passage where Rosalind is sighing away, having just watched Orlando win a wrestling match against the Duke's wrestler and quite in love. Celia wonders if she is also sighing for her father, who has just recently been exiled by the Duke.
CELIA Why, cousin, why, Rosalind! Cupid have mercy, not a word?
ROSALIND Not one to throw at a dog.
CELIA No, thy words are too precious to be cast away upon curs; throw some of them at me; come, lame me with reasons.
ROSALIND Then there were two cousins laid up, when the one should be lamed with reasons and the other mad without any.
CELIA But is all this for your father?
ROSALIND No, some of it is for my child’s father. [I love that line, it's like she's already writing "Mrs. Orlando" down the pages of her notebook!] O, how full of briers is this working-day world!
CELIA They are but burrs, cousin, thrown upon thee in holiday foolery; if we walk not in the trodden paths, our very petticoats will catch them.
ROSALIND I could shake them off my coat; these burrs are in my heart.
CELIA Hem them away.
ROSALIND I would try, if I could cry “a-hem,” and have him.
CELIA Come, come, wrestle with thy affections.
ROSALIND O, they take the part of a better wrestler than myself!
Anyway, the mean Duke, who is Celia's father, exiles Orlando to the forest as well. And then he exiles Rosalind as well. Celia, her best friend, decides to run away with her, and Rosalind declares she'll take the opportunity to dress in drag and pretend to be a man.
ROSALIND Were it not better,
Because that I am more than common tall,
That I did suit me all points like a man?
A gallant curtal ax upon my thigh,
A boarspear in my hand; and, in my heart
Lie there what hidden woman’s fear there will,
We’ll have a swashing and a martial outside,
As many other mannish cowards have
That do outface it with their semblances.
CELIA What shall I call thee when thou art a man?
ROSALIND I’ll have no worse a name than Jove’s own page,
And therefore look you call me Ganymede.
Did I mention that this also seems to be Shakespeare's gayest play? Or at least, it has a lot of playing with gender. The main action of the play has Rosalind pretending to be a pretty young man (named after Ganymede, who was not only Jove's page but also his young male lover), and getting involved in love-triangles with people of both genders. A beautiful and stuck-up shepherdess named Phebe falls for "Ganymede" when he is unstirred by Phebe's charms. And when Rosalind-as-Ganymede meets Orlando, who is love-sick over absent Rosalind, he convinces Orlando that he can cure him of his love if Orlando will pretend that Ganymede is Rosalind, and woo him as if he were a girl.
ROSALIND But are you so much in love as your rhymes speak?
ORLANDO Neither rhyme nor reason can express how much.
ROSALIND Love is merely a madness, and, I tell you, deserves a whip and a dark house as well as madmen do;
and the reason why they are not so punished and cured is that the lunacy is so ordinary that the whippers are in love too. Yet I profess curing it by counsel.
ORLANDO Did you ever cure any so?
ROSALIND Yes, one, and in this manner. He was to imagine me his love, his mistress; and I set him every day to woo me. At which time would I, being but a moonish youth, grieve, be effeminate, changeable, longing and liking, proud, fantastical, apish, shallow, inconstant, full of tears, full of smiles; for every passion something and for no passion truly anything, as boys and women are for the most part cattle of this color; would now like him, now loathe him; then entertain him, then forswear him; now weep for him, then spit at him; that I drove my suitor from his mad humor of love to an actual madness, which was, to forswear the full stream of the world and to live in a nook merely monastic. And thus I cured him; and this way will I take upon me to wash your liver as clean as a sound sheep’s heart, that there shall not be one spot of love in’t.
ORLANDO I would not be cured, youth.
ROSALIND I would cure you, if you would but call me Rosalind and come every day to my cote and woo me.
ORLANDO Now, by the faith of my love, I will. Tell me where it is.
So now you've got the double tension, that Orlando, who's off living in the forest surrounded by men, is uneasily wooing an effeminate young man as a substitute woman (and he gradually becomes more and more strident of a wooer); coupled with the fact that the young man he's pretending to be Rosalind is, in fact, Rosalind herself.
It's perhaps also worth noting, this play has the famous "all the world's a stage line", spoken by the melancholic Jaques to Rosalind's exiled father, the good Duke Senior, where both are off living in exile in the forest. The context is that Orlando has just stumbled into their forest camp with his aged and starving servant Adam, and the Duke is saying to Jaques, look, we're not the only unhappy people in the world, there are other things going on outside of our lives. Jaques responds by launching into his "all the world's a stage" speech, in which he describes the life of man as a play in 7 acts, ending in feebleness and death. But I actually liked the Duke's line better; after reading the play, I can see now that Jaques response is characteristically melancholic and self-centered.
DUKE SENIOR: Thou seest we are not all alone unhappy:
This wide and universal theater
Presents more woeful pageants than the scene
Wherein we play in.
JAQUES: 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 seen ages. etc
Anyway, that's "As You Like It", and indeed, I liked it very much. Except for that weak ending. A lot of Shakespeare's plays have abrupt or otherwise somewhat unsatisfying endings, though.
In a formatting note, there were few versions of "As You Like It" available on the Kindle store. The only one I was able to find with footnotes, was one where the footnotes were at the bottom of each page, which of course, in the non-paginated Kindle format, means they were stuck in random clumps periodically throughout the text. This was pretty annoying, and I didn't bother trying to read it on my Kindle itself. Instead, I used the Kindle desktop application and Kindle cloud reader side by side on my computer, so that I could get more text on-screen at once. Mercifully, this was a fairly short play.
Next up, Hamlet, Shakespeare's longest play, over 4000 words, and thus at the standard estimate of 1000 words/hour, over 4 hours if performed in full! And that's without pausing to read the footnotes. Annoyingly, even though there are dozens of results for Hamlet in the Kindle store, I found none with decently formatted footnotes. So, I'm resorting to the Signet Classic edition, which again has them "at the bottom of the page" in random clumps throughout the Kindle edition. At least this one puts a little "degree" circle after each word that has an annotation, so that I'll know to check the footnotes.
Up until the final scene, that is. Like all the comedies, it ends with weddings; and in this case the main character Rosalind has set up an outlandishly complicated sequence of events and multiple simultaneous marriages, but then at the end when she should walk out to orchestrate it all, inexplicably Hymen the god of marriage himself walks out onstage, the very first supernatural occurrence in the whole play, and gives a little speech and marries everybody. (And by the way, yes, Hymen is a real Greek god of marriage ceremonies. I've been trying to determine whether his name is directly based on the anatomical hymen as folk etymology would insist. Answers are uncertain. The OED, usually so authoritative, just links them both back to separate but similarly spelled Greek words. Another source says that the anatomical hymen comes from a Greek word for "a thin membrane", which has a root in "sew/bind", and that the God's name similarly comes from "sew/bind" as in binding two people together in marriage.)
Wikipedia says that Hymen is meant to be a "masquer" from a "play within the play", and I guess if I was going to stage the play today, that would be a good way to handle it; set things up so it's implied that Rosalind hired someone to dress up as Hymen (maybe, in fact, Sir Oliver Martext the country curate from earlier in the play). But there's no hint of that interpretation in the dialogue, and my Pelican edition of this play, nor any of the other sources I've found online, suggests this interpretation. It seems more likely to me that it's just meant to be a kind of deus ex machina, something the audiences of the time could accept as a normal dramatic flourish, but completely bizarre to modern audiences. Instead to me, it felt like the ending of an episode of "Regular Show", as if so much marrying was going on that it summoned Hymen forth from Mount Olympus.
But enough about what was bad about the play. What did I like about it? Mainly I loved the repartee between Rosalind, her best friend Celia, and their fool, Touchstone. Indeed, Touchstone was funnier to me than most of Shakespeare's fools, and perhaps it's because he's a philosophical fool, most of whose jokes are conceptual rather than based on wordplay. Here's the first passage of his that I highlighted, where he talks about why he likes to swear "by my honor", because since he has no honor and you can't swear by something that doesn't exist, it means he doesn't have to tell the truth:
TOUCHSTONE: No, by mine honor, but I was bid to come for you.
ROSALIND: Where learned you that oath, fool?
TOUCHSTONE: Of a certain knight that swore by his honor they were good pancakes, and swore by his honor the mustard was bad. Now I’ll stand to it, the pancakes were bad, and the mustard was good, and yet was not the knight forsworn.
CELIA How prove you that in the great heap of your knowledge?
ROSALIND: Ay, marry, now unmuzzle your wisdom.
TOUCHSTONE Stand you both forth now. Stroke your chins, and swear by your beards that I am a knave.
CELIA By our beards, if we had them, thou art.
TOUCHSTONE By my knavery, if I had it, then I were; but if you swear by that that is not, you are not forsworn; no more was this knight, swearing by his honor, for he never had any; or if he had, he had sworn it away before ever he saw those pancakes or that mustard.
Celia and Rosalind themselves are quite sharp wits as well, constantly joking back and forth to each other, almost like they're talking in twin language. Here's a passage where Rosalind is sighing away, having just watched Orlando win a wrestling match against the Duke's wrestler and quite in love. Celia wonders if she is also sighing for her father, who has just recently been exiled by the Duke.
CELIA Why, cousin, why, Rosalind! Cupid have mercy, not a word?
ROSALIND Not one to throw at a dog.
CELIA No, thy words are too precious to be cast away upon curs; throw some of them at me; come, lame me with reasons.
ROSALIND Then there were two cousins laid up, when the one should be lamed with reasons and the other mad without any.
CELIA But is all this for your father?
ROSALIND No, some of it is for my child’s father. [I love that line, it's like she's already writing "Mrs. Orlando" down the pages of her notebook!] O, how full of briers is this working-day world!
CELIA They are but burrs, cousin, thrown upon thee in holiday foolery; if we walk not in the trodden paths, our very petticoats will catch them.
ROSALIND I could shake them off my coat; these burrs are in my heart.
CELIA Hem them away.
ROSALIND I would try, if I could cry “a-hem,” and have him.
CELIA Come, come, wrestle with thy affections.
ROSALIND O, they take the part of a better wrestler than myself!
Anyway, the mean Duke, who is Celia's father, exiles Orlando to the forest as well. And then he exiles Rosalind as well. Celia, her best friend, decides to run away with her, and Rosalind declares she'll take the opportunity to dress in drag and pretend to be a man.
ROSALIND Were it not better,
Because that I am more than common tall,
That I did suit me all points like a man?
A gallant curtal ax upon my thigh,
A boarspear in my hand; and, in my heart
Lie there what hidden woman’s fear there will,
We’ll have a swashing and a martial outside,
As many other mannish cowards have
That do outface it with their semblances.
CELIA What shall I call thee when thou art a man?
ROSALIND I’ll have no worse a name than Jove’s own page,
And therefore look you call me Ganymede.
Did I mention that this also seems to be Shakespeare's gayest play? Or at least, it has a lot of playing with gender. The main action of the play has Rosalind pretending to be a pretty young man (named after Ganymede, who was not only Jove's page but also his young male lover), and getting involved in love-triangles with people of both genders. A beautiful and stuck-up shepherdess named Phebe falls for "Ganymede" when he is unstirred by Phebe's charms. And when Rosalind-as-Ganymede meets Orlando, who is love-sick over absent Rosalind, he convinces Orlando that he can cure him of his love if Orlando will pretend that Ganymede is Rosalind, and woo him as if he were a girl.
ROSALIND But are you so much in love as your rhymes speak?
ORLANDO Neither rhyme nor reason can express how much.
ROSALIND Love is merely a madness, and, I tell you, deserves a whip and a dark house as well as madmen do;
and the reason why they are not so punished and cured is that the lunacy is so ordinary that the whippers are in love too. Yet I profess curing it by counsel.
ORLANDO Did you ever cure any so?
ROSALIND Yes, one, and in this manner. He was to imagine me his love, his mistress; and I set him every day to woo me. At which time would I, being but a moonish youth, grieve, be effeminate, changeable, longing and liking, proud, fantastical, apish, shallow, inconstant, full of tears, full of smiles; for every passion something and for no passion truly anything, as boys and women are for the most part cattle of this color; would now like him, now loathe him; then entertain him, then forswear him; now weep for him, then spit at him; that I drove my suitor from his mad humor of love to an actual madness, which was, to forswear the full stream of the world and to live in a nook merely monastic. And thus I cured him; and this way will I take upon me to wash your liver as clean as a sound sheep’s heart, that there shall not be one spot of love in’t.
ORLANDO I would not be cured, youth.
ROSALIND I would cure you, if you would but call me Rosalind and come every day to my cote and woo me.
ORLANDO Now, by the faith of my love, I will. Tell me where it is.
So now you've got the double tension, that Orlando, who's off living in the forest surrounded by men, is uneasily wooing an effeminate young man as a substitute woman (and he gradually becomes more and more strident of a wooer); coupled with the fact that the young man he's pretending to be Rosalind is, in fact, Rosalind herself.
It's perhaps also worth noting, this play has the famous "all the world's a stage line", spoken by the melancholic Jaques to Rosalind's exiled father, the good Duke Senior, where both are off living in exile in the forest. The context is that Orlando has just stumbled into their forest camp with his aged and starving servant Adam, and the Duke is saying to Jaques, look, we're not the only unhappy people in the world, there are other things going on outside of our lives. Jaques responds by launching into his "all the world's a stage" speech, in which he describes the life of man as a play in 7 acts, ending in feebleness and death. But I actually liked the Duke's line better; after reading the play, I can see now that Jaques response is characteristically melancholic and self-centered.
DUKE SENIOR: Thou seest we are not all alone unhappy:
This wide and universal theater
Presents more woeful pageants than the scene
Wherein we play in.
JAQUES: 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 seen ages. etc
Anyway, that's "As You Like It", and indeed, I liked it very much. Except for that weak ending. A lot of Shakespeare's plays have abrupt or otherwise somewhat unsatisfying endings, though.
In a formatting note, there were few versions of "As You Like It" available on the Kindle store. The only one I was able to find with footnotes, was one where the footnotes were at the bottom of each page, which of course, in the non-paginated Kindle format, means they were stuck in random clumps periodically throughout the text. This was pretty annoying, and I didn't bother trying to read it on my Kindle itself. Instead, I used the Kindle desktop application and Kindle cloud reader side by side on my computer, so that I could get more text on-screen at once. Mercifully, this was a fairly short play.
Next up, Hamlet, Shakespeare's longest play, over 4000 words, and thus at the standard estimate of 1000 words/hour, over 4 hours if performed in full! And that's without pausing to read the footnotes. Annoyingly, even though there are dozens of results for Hamlet in the Kindle store, I found none with decently formatted footnotes. So, I'm resorting to the Signet Classic edition, which again has them "at the bottom of the page" in random clumps throughout the Kindle edition. At least this one puts a little "degree" circle after each word that has an annotation, so that I'll know to check the footnotes.