Notes on Shakespeare's 'As You Like It'

Fortune and Nature in As You Like It

• The play resolves conflict by mixing "Fortune" (circumstances) and "Nature" (playfulness, boldness, virtue, wit).
• Romantic action centers on Rosalind and Orlando's courtship, complicated by social assumptions.
  • Rosalind is a princess; Orlando, a gentleman.
  • Misfortune leads to their meeting and apparent equality in the forest.
• Their relationship affects ties to family; Orlando's union strengthens ties to his brother and patron.
• Orlando's reconciliation with men precedes his union with Rosalind, showing worthiness.
• Atonement in Hymen's wedding song reunites man with man.

Early Scenes: Conflict and Hostility

• The play begins with Orlando and Adam discussing a paternal will, quickly escalating to fraternal resentment and violence.
• Orlando is victimized by a tyrant Duke and brother, exposing familial and state hostilities.
• Modern criticism downplays these scenes as mere mechanisms to propel characters into the forest.
• Harold Jenkins sees the plot's interest in Shakespeare's haste to move to the forest.
• The play's comic form resolves conflicts generated within it, transforming relationships according to comic teleology.

Drama, Cycles, and Rites of Passage

• Shakespeare's plays connect to agrarian and ecclesiastical cycles.
• Connections exist between comic/tragic forms and the human life cycle.
• Action originates in conflict among families, generations, sexes, and classes.
• Plays turn upon transition points in the life cycle (birth, puberty, marriage, death), requiring social adjustments.
• Actions are analogous to rites of passage with symbolic markers and social order for personal existence.

Inheritance and Primogeniture

• Initial conflict arises from inheritance by primogeniture.
  • Differential relationship between firstborn and younger brothers is augmented at their father's death.
  • Eldest son assumes a paternal role; sibling conflict increases.
  • The transition of the father from life to death both fosters and obstructs the transition of his sons from childhood to manhood.
• Comedy accomplishes successful passages between life stages and social ranks.
• Orlando progresses from impoverished adolescence to wealth, title, and marriage.
• Inheritance practices transmit property between generations and structure interpersonal relationships.
• The manner of splitting property creates ties/cleavages between family members.
• Playwrights powerfully anatomize family politics, with intertwined material and spiritual motives.
• Primogeniture: The prime factor affecting families owning property and determining behaviours and relationships.
• Shakespeare alters the terms of the paternal will in Lodge's story so as to alienate Orlando from the status of a landed gentleman. The effect is to intensify the differences between the eldest son and his siblings, and to identify the sibling conflict with the major division in the Elizabethan social fabric: that between the landed and the unlanded, the gentle and the base.
• Radical pamphleteers used "elder brother" and "younger brother" as synonyms for propertied/enfranchised and unpropertied/unenfranchised classes.
• The tense situation which begins As You Like It was a familiar and controversial fact of Elizabethan social life.

Younger Sons' Grievances

• Hardships and inequities of primogeniture led to a literature of protest by and for younger sons.
• John Earle's description of a "younger Brother" in Micro-Cosmographie (1628) illustrates this:
  • Tasked to be a gentleman without means, dependent on his brother and the world.
  • Commonly discontented and desperate, exclaiming against his brother.
• Gentry's drive to perpetuate estates led to ruthless primogeniture, leaving younger sons without adequate means.
• Consequences included downward mobility, inability to marry, and fewer children.
• Thomas Wilson's analysis of England's social structure reveals personal involvement and the miserable state of younger brothers.

Orlando's Plight and Audience Engagement

• Orlando accuses Oliver of enforcing idleness and denying him means to preserve gentility.
  • His gentility is mined with lack of education.
  • Natural virtue is marred with idleness.
• Shakespeare's audience may have responded intensely to Orlando's indictment of "the courtesy of nations."
• Sir Thomas Smith observes that those living idly and bearing the port of a gentleman shall be taken for a gentleman.
• Shakespeare uses the machinery of pastoral romance to remedy the lack of fit between deserving and having, between Nature and Fortune.
• Without actually violating the primary Elizabethan social frontier separating the gentle from the base, the play achieves an illusion of social leveling and of unions across class boundaries.
• Shakespeare's treatment of primogeniture may have been a vital source of engagement for his Elizabethan audience.
• The public theatre brought together diverse groups, including students, apprentices, soldiers, professionals, and servants.
• Orlando's situation resonated with gentleborn younger sons and socially subordinate apprentices.

Deviations from Source Material

• Shakespeare alters paternal will to intensify differences between siblings and identify sibling conflict with the division between landed and unlanded.
• Those who did not have land and were not considered gentle were called "base".
• Primogeniture complicates sibling and generational relationships.
• Shakespeare's plays feature ambivalently bound subjects, sons, and younger brothers.
• Scholars see father-figures everywhere in Shakespeare due to patriarchal society.

Filial bonds and Patriarchal order

• Sir Rowland de Boys is dead, but influences men's attitudes through memory and will.
• Orlando's filial feeling is ambivalent, resenting his paltry inheritance and dependence on his brother.
• Absent is the special paternal affection shown to Lodge's Rosader.
• Orlando's declaration of independence repudiates bondage to his brother.
• Oliver, as Rowland's inheritor, perpetuates Orlando's subordination and usurps his selfhood.
• Oliver is simultaneously a father and a brother blocking the generational passage of the younger brother.
• Orlando asserts that all brothers are equally their father's sons, repudiating Oliver's authority.
• As in Hamlet each of these young Elizabethan heroes involves a process of