Some notes from Katherine and Cat from the lecture on As You Like It, 2-23.

The Forest of Arden

-The Pastoral tradition:

-Pastoral poetry: poetry dealing dealing with the lives of shepherds or rural life in general; typically draws a contrast between the innocence and serenity of a simple life and the misery and corruption of city and especially court life (Origins: Sicilian poet Theocritus and Virgil’s Eclogues)

-The woods as an escape from the city and a site of contemplation

-The historical Forest of Arden

-A forest near Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire where Shakespeare grew up

-However...the forest in As You Like It is both realistic and whimsical (it contains lions, snakes and palm trees). Also, by the time Shakespeare wrote this play (1598-1600) Arden had been deforested and turned into farmland.

-Shakespeare’s Arden as a nostalgic, mythic version of the historical Arden. It invokes several myths/legends (Sherwood Forest of Robin Hood and the Garden of Eden).

-The woods/court contrast:

-Parallels with other Shakespearian comedies—A Midsummer Night’s Dream

-The woods as a place where characters go to escape the law and resolve their problems.

-Duke Senior’s speech in 2.1: “Are not these woods / More free from peril than the envious court?”

-And yet...these woods also have a dangerous side.

-“The seasons’ difference, as the icy fang / And churlish chiding of the winds, / Which when it bites and blows upon my body / Even till I shrink with cold, I smile and say / ‘This is no flattery; these are counselors / That feelingly persuade me what I am.’ (2.1.6-11)

-Nature as a threat: the threat of wild animals and death by exposure. Adam and Orlando almost die of hunger!

-Parallels to King Lear, a much darker kind of pastoral.

-Connection to the snake in Hermia’s dream in MND.

-Orlando’s entrance with sword drawn (2.7.88).

-The stark contrast between The Duke’s civilized picnic and Orlando’s violence and desperation: “Speak you so gently? Pardon me, I pray you. / I thought that all things had been savage here...” (2.7.106-107)

CONVENTIONS OF GENDER/PETRARCHAN WOOING

I. Petrarchan ideal of wooing

-sonnets of Petrarch to Laura

- Suitor places object of desire on a pedestal/creates a fantasy and idealizes her

-“Ideal” female love objects were typically chaste, submissive, silent, and out of reach.

- Female virginity essential

- The female figure is an object to watch, worship, and ultimately to blame for the lover’s own feelings of woe and angst about her absence from his life.

II. Humanist ideology of Elizabethan England

- companionate marriages, based on classical models of friendship and equality

- women/wives were consistently referred to as “the weaker vessel” whose willing submission to a husband’s control was expected.

III. Implicit within both the Petrarchan form of wooing, and the humanist ideology of marriage

- female voice and sexual energy are implicitly suppressed

- anxiety about female sexuality- thought to be unquenchable once “awakened”- hence the many cuckold jokes

- Verbal wit, loquaciousness often associated with sexual promiscuity.

ORLANDO AS CONVENTIONAL LOVER:

I. Learns how lovers should act from some kind of romantic ideal- Examples include:

-in the beginning fights like a warrior (1.2)

- When he is faced with the “sport” of love, he is left speechless! “ Can I not say ‘I thank you’? My better parts/ Are all thrown down, and that which here stands up/ Is but a quintain, a mere lifeless block” (1.2.236).

- -Performs love by carving love poems into trees- SEE 3.2.132 (page 52)- splits Rosalind into many “parts”, objectifies and deifies her

-Complains that he will die of love. He says if he can not have Rosalind, “Then, in mine own person, I die” (4.1.86).

-Rosalind mocks these “conventional”/Petrarchan tropes.

ROSALIND AS UNCONVENTIONAL LOVE-OBJECT

I.Rosalind attempts to take love outside the traditional framework of romance in the way that people write about romance.

- witty

- gets close to her lover, getting to know him and his intentions before revealing herself as a woman

- convinces her lover she is a man

- teases love conventions

II. Tries to educate Orlando about love, while simultaneously challenging the traditional ideas about romance

- inevitable “destiny” of men to be cuckolds (4.1.50-52)

- kiss when he can’t think of something good to say (4.1.69-72)

- mocks him for saying he will die of love for her: “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” (4.1.87-90).

III. Gets Celia to perform a fake marriage between two men and then teases Orlando about what marriage will “really” be like:

- wife will be a nag, greedy, emotional, annoying, and unfaithful, and that his woman will “make her fault her husband’s occasion” (4.1.163

- Orlando promises to return- but remember, he is not returning to the “real” woman or relationship, but a “curative” fake man and a very alive fantasy of his idealized lover.

IV. Is Rosalind a traitor to her sex?

- Celia: “You have simply misused our sex in your love/ prate. We must have your doublet and hose plucked/ over your head, and show the world what the bird hath/done to her own next.” (4.1.188-91)

THE FUNCTION OF CROSS-DRESSING

I. Layering of sexuality, gender and desire

- no clear answer about the issue of same-sex attraction.

II. Homoerotic tension imbedded in the play

- Celia and Rosalind- Charles says, “never two ladies loved as they do” (1.1.106-107)

- Later, Celia forsakes her family to be with Rosalind in exile: “ If she be a traitor,/ Why, so am I. We still have slept together;/ Rose at an instant, learned, played, eat together;/ And wheresoe’er we went, like Juno’s swans,/ Still we went coupled and inseparable” (1.3.71-74).

-Rosalind (as Ganymede) to Orlando

-Phebe and Ganymede

III. Once Rosalind is dressed as Ganymede, she takes a more dominant role over Celia,

- Celia says “I’ll put myself in poor and mean attire/ And with a kind of umber smirch my face…” (1.3.108-109).

-Rosalind says she won’t “disgrace my man’s/ apparel and to cry like a woman; but I must comfort the weaker vessel…” (2.4.4-6).

- bond becomes an inequality, eventually separated by marriage.

IV. Rosalind uses her costume to assert her independence.

- “safe” from potential danger in the woods- but she does not take the costume off when she gets into the Forest.

-she is protected from “feminine” emotions

- interacts with Orlando as an equal, friend and lover

- Does she have the upper hand with Orlando? “There is a man haunts the forest that/ abuses our young plants with carving ‘Rosalind’ on/ their barks, hangs odes upon hawthorns, and elegies on/ their brambles; all, forsooth, deifying the name of Rosalind” (3.2.348-50).

-warns against love, saying it is a “cage of rushes” and a mere “madness” and then convinces him that she can “cure” him of this lunacy: See 3.2.392-408 (pg. 61)

- meets her father, Duke Senior, in the Forest, but she avoids the “exchange of women”

- Rosalind is able to critique “traditional” and “literary” feminine roles in love and mocks the relationship between Phebe and Silvius: ‘Tis such fools as you/That makes the world full of ill-favored children” (3.5.51-53).

ACTING/PERFORMING

I. Rosalind first suggests that gender is a performance- she can don the guise of bravery, which, as she says, many “real” men must do too- (1.3.118-20)

II. Rosalind is “performing” as Ganymede, and Orlando is “performing” a love for Ganymede as the “pretend” Rosalind- when the costume is shed, will real and fictitious love become clear?

III. What will the future be for the love between Orlando and Rosalind? What will happen when she takes off the costume for good? What will happen to her wit? Her confidence?