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John Gray: Shakespeare’s As You Like It, A Play on Genre
This lecture moves backwards through the text of As You Like It. Beginning with the Epilogue, it demonstrates that Shakespeare’s most loved comedy is a witty parody of medieval romance and other genres: song, dance, masque, the greenwood adventure, and courtly love.
References are to Alan Brissenden’s Oxford World’s Classics edition of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Oxford University Press, 2008. (more…)
As You Like It: Two Approaches
The first approach is a traditional textual analysis of As You Like It, which tries not to deaden the comedy with too much earnestness. However while As You Like It appeals to all audiences, including those who enjoy on-stage comic action and rude jokes, it does have serious things to say about love, sex, marriage, morals and the clash of human temperaments.
“Approach Two,” livens things up by demonstrating that As You Like It invites interpretation as a witty attack on many of the conventions that governed love, marriage and literature in the middle and upper social levels of Shakespeare’s England.