Video As You Like It

11 12 2010

Video As You Like It animated in the BBC




Mimetic Love in As You like It

8 12 2010

Love through hearsay, as a matter of fact, is the literary form to talk about the philosophic term of mimetism. Mimetism is shown all along Shakespeare work, that is, in most of works love or hate is developed by means of mimetism. What I see or hear from others has an influence upon my reactions.
As you like It, however seems to be an antimimetic work . It is because originally pastoral bucolic plays lack of mimetism. Nobody knows nothing about mimetic rivality. Everything , in fact , seems to be ideal. All feelings are pure and independent from what other people thinks about it.
That is the case of Orland and Rosalind. From the very beginning everything is solved, everything seems to be ideal. For Shakespeare it is an absurd, that is, he make an irony of the bucolic plays. But in fact, the love of Orland and Rosalind has a hidden mimetic pulsion. Because, mimetic pulsion is the source of the antimimetic dream.
One of the most clear text to appreciate the hidden mimetism of the play occurs in the conversation of Celia and Rosalind
Cel. O, a good wish vpon you: you will trie in time in dispight of a fall: but turning these iests out of seruice, let vs talke in good earnest: Is it possible on such a sodaine, you should fall into so strong a liking with old Sir Roulands yongest sonne?
Ros. The Duke my Father lou’d his Father deerelie
Cel. Doth it therefore ensue that you should loue his Sonne deerelie? By this kinde of chase, I should hate him, for my father hated his father deerely; yet I hate not Orlando
Ros. No faith, hate him not for my sake
Cel. Why should I not? doth he not deserue well?
Enter Duke with Lords.
Ros. Let me loue him for that, and do you loue him Because I doe.
(I, 3, 26 – 39 )
Love him because I do. Here it is the point of the hidden mimetism of this play. At first sight we cannot appreciate love through hearsay in this play, but afterwards when we analize it deeper we can distinguish the inner mimetic tension.

The absurd of the pastoral love is tipical of the bucolic literature. Mimetic desire looks always for the presence of the lover, but much deeper, this presence is horrible because of the delussion of which accompaings it.

When lovers have free access to the other one, they go into the inminent risk of loosing their love, they are getting out of love .Their passion is excesivelly related to the metaphisic trascendence of the couple, and therefore, they need the permanent or temporal separation. Briefly, the bucolic love is held by an ilussion, not by the reality.

That is why obstacles and impediments are an indispensable phase and maybe, if it is possible neverending phase, of the love misticism. Both, manipulates mimetic desire. If Rosalind is fully available for the flirting with her own name, this would make disapear the metaphisical charge accumulated in the phase of separation.

When Rosalind is hidden in the figure of a men, she can take advantage of the presence of his lover without loosing the benefit of his absence. She is accesible but she doesn’t loose the fruits of innaccebility. She exploits her lover. She becomes present with out paying the charge of his presence. She is really cheatting.




The Language of Love in As You Like It

8 12 2010

The most obvious concern of As You Like It is love, and particularly the attitudes and the language appropriate to young romantic love. This, I take it, is obvious enough from the relationships between Orlando and Rosalind, Silvius and Phoebe, Touchstone and Audrey, and (very briefly) Celia and Oliver. The action of the play moves back and forth among these couples, inviting us to compare the different styles and to recognize from those comparisons some important facts about young love.

Here the role of Rosalind is decisive, and much of one’s response to this play (especially in performance) will depend upon our reaction to her. Rosalind is Shakespeare’s greatest and most vibrant comic female role, and there’s a old saying to the effect that in any successful production of As You Like It, the audience members will all leave the theatre in love with her.

She is clearly the only character in the play who has throughout an intelligent, erotic, and fully anchored sense of love, and it becomes her task in the play to try to educate others out of their false notions of love, especially those notions which suggest that the real business of love is adopting an inflated Petrarchan language and the appropriate attitude that goes with it.

Rosalind falls in love with Orlando at first sight (as is standard in Shakespeare), becomes erotically energized, and remains so throughout the play. She’s delighted and excited by the experience and is determined to live it to the full moment by moment. One of the great pleasures of watching Rosalind is that she is always celebrating her passionate feelings for Orlando. She does not deny them or try to play games with her emotions. She’s aware that falling in love has made her subject to Celia’s gentle mockery, but she’s not going to pretend that she isn’t totally thrilled by the experience just to spare herself being laughed at (she even laughs at herself, while taking enormous delight in the behaviour which prompts the mockery).

At the same time, Rosalind has not an ounce of sentimentality. Her passionate love for Orlando does not turn her into a mooning, swooning recluse. It activates her. She takes charge of her life. She knows what she wants, and she organizes herself to seek it out. If she has to wait to pursue her marriage, then she is going actively to enjoy the interim in an improvised courtship and not wrap herself in a mantle of romantic attitudinizing. She initiates the game of courtship with Orlando and keeps it going. She has two purposes here. This gives her a chance to see and court Orlando (in her own name) and thus to celebrate her feelings of love, but it also enables her to educate Orlando out of the sentimental pose he has adopted.

Orlando, too, is in love with Rosalind. But his view of love requires him to write drippy poems and walk through the forest hanging them on trees. He sentimentalizes the experience (that is, falsifies it), so that he can luxuriate in his feelings of love rather than focusing sharply on the reality of the experience. In their conversations, Rosalind/Ganymede pointedly and repeatedly deflates his conventional rhetoric. This comes out most clearly in her famous reply to his claim that, if Rosalind rejects him, then he will die.

No, faith; die by attorney. The poor world is almost six thousand years old, and in all this time there was not any man died in his own person, videlicet, in a love-cause. Troilus had his brains dashed out with a Grecian club, yet he did what he could to die before, and he is one of the patterns of love. Leander, he would have lived many a fair year though Hero had turned nun if it had not been for a hot midsummer night, for, good youth, he went but forth to wash him in the Hellespont and, being taken with the cramp, was drowned; and the foolish chroniclers of that age found it was Hero of Sestos. But these are all lies. Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love. (4.1.81-92)

It needs to be stressed that Rosalind’s view of love is highly intelligent (that is, emotionally intelligent) and sensitive. This is not the statement of a cynic, because we know that Rosalind is very much in love, passionately eager to be with Orlando or to talk about him as much as she can. But the experience is not corrupting her response to life. She will not permit herself or Orlando to be deceived into thinking love is something other than the excitingly real experience she is going through—love is the most wonderfully transforming experience for her but it is not the sum total of everything life has to offer (as Orlando’s poems make out). This fusion of passion and intelligence, shot through with a humour which enables her to laugh at herself as much as at other people, makes Rosalind a wonderfully attractive character.

This complex attitude first emerges when she discovers Orlando’s poetry. Of course, she knows the poetry is really poor, and she can laugh heartily at Touchstone’s damning parody of all the words which rhyme with “Rosalind.” But at the same time she is erotically thrilled that Orlando is around and that he is in love with her. Rather than being embarrassed by the wretched sentimentality of her lover, she simultaneously loves the fact that her feelings are returned and can laugh at his attempt to express them. This is not laughter at Orlando, but at the incongruity of the situation and joy at the mutuality of their feelings.

Consider also her sense that the youthful love she is now enjoying will not last. She knows that and is not going to shield herself from that awareness in conventionally romantic platitudes: “No, no, Orlando; men are April when they woo, December when they wed. Maids are May when they are maids, but the sky changes when they are wives” (4.1.124-127). Of course, time will change the passionate excitement she now feels. But she’s not going to act like Marlowe’s Nymph who denies the passionate shepherd his love because she’s afraid of the destructive powers of time. No, she will not let any future fear interrupt or qualify the enormous joy she derives out of being in love right at this moment. What the future will bring will happen. That is no reason not to appreciate the immediate joys of the love she feels for Orlando.

No, that same wicked bastard of Venus, that was begot of thought, conceived of spleen, and born of madness, that blind rascally boy that abuses everyone’s eyes because his own are out, let him be judge how deep I am in love. I’ll tell thee, Aliena, I cannot be out of the sight of Orlando. I’ll go find a shadow and sigh till he come.

Here she is, in part, laughing at herself as a victim, one more person hit by naughty Cupid. But she’s obviously thrilled by the experience and is not going to deny herself one bit of the joy she is feeling.

Rosalind becomes the pivot around whom the other lovers move, because she is the only one with a maturely intelligent sense of the difference between love and sentiment. Thus, she can deliver stern lectures to Silvius and Phoebe about how they are denying themselves the joys that are possible because they have a false sense of love. Silvius’s excessively conventional Petrarchan attitudes simply encourage Phoebe to close him out of her feelings and to develop a false sense of her own importance, as Rosalind points out very bluntly: “Sell when you can. You are not for all markets” (3.5.61). She is telling Phoebe, in effect, to wake up to the realities of the world in which she lives and to abandon the sentimental dream in which she has locked herself, thanks to the language in which she and Silvius understand their feelings.

It’s significant that throughout much of the play, when Rosalind talks to others about love, she talks in prose, rejecting the formal potential of a more imaginative language, in order to keep the discussions anchored in the reality of everyday life. Rosalind wants love, but she will have it only in the language of everyday speech, without the seductive embellishments of poetical conventions, which corrupt because they take one away from the immediately reality of the experience.

Orlando profits from Rosalind’s instructions because he is basically an emotionally intelligent person as well. His commitment to playing the role of the conventional lover is only luke warm; as Rosalind observes, he doesn’t have the appearance of such a literary poseur. Significantly, his poetry is very bad, and he’s not going to mind acknowledging the fact. He does not love his own words more than his own true feelings and hence does not strive to develop his abilities as a poet and quickly moves into the prose conversations with Rosalind/Ganymede. It’s an interesting question whether or not he might recognize or have his suspicions about Rosalind/Ganymede well before the ending. There’s an intriguing possibility that he knows her all along, but recognizing that she is in charge of the game, he is only going to drop the pretense when she gives him the cue. I’ve never seen this interpretation attempted, but if I were producing the play, I would like to try it.

http://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/eng366/lectures/Ayl.htm




Love and Pastoral Genre in As you Like It

8 12 2010

Shakespeare also used the Pastoral genre in As You Like It to ‘cast a critical eye on social practices that produce injustice and unhappiness, and to make fun of anti-social, foolish and self-destructive behaviour’ , most obviously through the theme of love, culminating in a rejection of the notion of the traditional Petrarchan lovers.
Petrach was a 14th century poet, whose collection of poems to a lady named Laura formed the basis of the Renaissance love rhetoric. For the Renaissance, the Petrarchan lover ‘worshipped and idealises a woman who is inaccessible to him, either because of her rank or because of her cold heart. He burns with passion, he wastes with despair, she does not respond’ . Orlando and Silvius both try and occupy the role of the Petrarchan lover, and in the role of Petrachan lover are both rejected by Rosalind and Phebe. In the extract below Silvius is taking on the role of the Petrarchan lover pining for love, and he is also trying to put upon Phebe the role of the idealised woman who is inaccessible to him because of her cold heart. Phebe’s reaction to Silvius is a violent rebuttal. The extract below that Silvus attempt to woo Phebe in the role of the Petrarchan lover will not work.
Act III:V:1-19
Enter SILVIUS and PHEBE
Silvius
Sweet Phebe, do not sorn me; do not, Phebe;
Say that you love me not, but say not so
In bitterness. The common executioner,
Whoes heart the accustom’d sight of death makes hard,
Falls not the axe upon the humbled neck
But first begs pardon; will you sterner be
Than he that dies and lives by bloody drops?

Enter ROSALIND, CELIA, and CORIN, behind
PHEBE
I would not be thy executioner;
I fly thee, for I would not injure thee.
Thou tell’st me that the frail’st and softest thigns,
Who shut their coward gates on atomies,
Should be call’d tyrants, butchers, murderers!
Now I do frown on thee with all my heart;
And if mine eyes can wound, now let them kill thee:
Now counterfeit to swoon; why now fall down;
Or it thou canst not, O, for shame, for shame,
Lie not, to say mine eyes are murderers!
Orlando’s attempts at taking on the role of the Petrarchan lover are no more successful than Silvius, although he has the added advantage to his cause that Rosalind is also in love with him. Orlando’s attempts at poetry are greeted by Rosalind with derision, when they are read to her by Touchstone and Celia
‘O most gentle Jupiter, what tedious homily of love have you wearied your parishioners withal, and never cried, ‘Have patience good people’ III:ii:152-154.

Of course at this point, Rosalind does not realise who the author of the ‘lame’ verses are, and when she realises it is Orlando who has written them, she is overcome with a very feminine passion!

‘Alas the day, what shall I do with my doublet and hose? What did he saw when thou saw’st him? What said he? How looked he? Wherein went je? What makes he here? Did he ask for me> Where remaims he? How parted he with thee? And when shalt though see him again? Answer me in one word.’ II:ii:215 – 220
But Rosalind is still a very strong character, strong enough to challenge and test Orlando’s love through the guise of Ganymede, which gives Rosalind the freedom to both ridicule and expose the artifice of Orlando’s Petrarchan lover and discover the true feeling beneath. Rosalind/Ganymede repeatedly questions Orlando’s love, and highlights the ridiculous nature of the Petrarchan lover, ‘Men have dies from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love’ VI:i:91-92. Rosalind can engage in this open dialogue with Orlando because the Forest of Arden and her male Ganymede disguise, both features of the Pastoral genre, have presented an arena where she can be free her from the constraints of her social situation, and in, she is freed from her constraints of her gender and can never instruct Orlando to woo her – and correct him when he does it wrong, as she could never do as Rosalind!
Orlando: My fair Rosalind, I come within an hour of my promise.
Ros.: Break an hour’s promise in love! He that will divide a minute into a thousand parts, and break but a part of the thousand part of a minute in the affairs of love, it may be said of him that Cupid hath clapped him o’ th’ shoulder, but I’ll warrant him heart-whole.
Orlando: Pardon me dear Rosalind.
Ros.: Nay, and you be so tardy, come no more in my sight. I had life be wooed of a snail.
http://www.sheffieldtheatres.co.uk/creativedevelopmentprogramme/productions/asyoulikeit/comedy.shtml

The theme of pastoral comedy is love in all its guises in a rustic setting, the genuine love embodied by Rosalind contrasted with the sentimentalised affectations of Orlando, and the improbable happenings that set the urban courtiers wandering to find exile, solace or freedom in a woodland setting are no more unrealistic than the string of chance encounters in the forest, provoking witty banter, which require no subtleties of plotting and character development. The main action of the first act is no more than a wrestling match, and the action throughout is often interrupted by a song. At the end, Hymen himself arrives to bless the wedding festivities.
William Shakespeare’s play As You Like It clearly falls into the Pastoral Romance genre; but Shakespeare does not merely use the genre, he develops it. Shakespeare also used the Pastoral genre in As You Like It to ‘cast a critical eye on social practices that produce injustice and unhappiness, and to make fun of anti-social, foolish and self-destructive behaviour’, most obviously through the theme of love, culminating in a rejection of the notion of the traditional Petrarchan lovers.[6]
The stock characters in conventional situations were familiar material for Shakespeare and his audience; it is the light repartee and the breadth of the subjects that provide texts for wit that put a fresh stamp on the proceedings. At the centre the optimism of Rosalind is contrasted with the misogynistic melancholy of Jaques. Shakespeare would take up some of the themes more seriously later: the usurper Duke and the Duke in exile provide themes for Measure for Measure and The Tempest.
A play which turns upon chance encounters in the forest and several entangled love affairs, all in a serene pastoral setting has been found, by many directors, to be especially effective staged outdoors in a park or similar site.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_You_Like_It