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123-672: As You Like It is a pastoral comedy by William Shakespeare believed to have been written in 1599 and first published in the First Folio in 1623. The play's first performance is uncertain, though a performance at Wilton House in 1603 (the house having been a focus for literary activity under Mary Sidney for much of the later 16th century) has been suggested as a possibility. As You Like It follows its heroine Rosalind as she flees persecution in her uncle's court, accompanied by her cousin Celia to find safety and, eventually, love, in

246-473: A cowherd . Pastoral is a mode of literature in which the author employs various techniques to place the complex life into a simple one. Paul Alpers distinguishes pastoral as a mode rather than a genre, and he bases this distinction on the recurring attitude of power; that is to say that pastoral literature holds a humble perspective toward nature. Thus, pastoral as a mode occurs in many types of literature (poetry, drama, etc.) as well as genres (most notably

369-409: A terraformed planet or moon. Unlike most genres of science fiction, pastoral science fiction works downplay the role of futuristic technologies. In the 1950s and 1960s, Clifford Simak wrote stories about rural people who have contact with extraterrestrial beings who hide their alien identity. Pastoral science fiction stories typically show a reverence for the land, its life-giving food harvests,

492-734: A usurer to leave it behind for the country. Later Silver Latin poets who wrote pastoral poetry, modeled principally upon Virgil's Eclogues, include Calpurnius Siculus and Nemesianus and the author(s) of the Einsiedeln Eclogues . Italian poets revived the pastoral from the 14th century onwards, first in Latin (examples include works by Petrarch , Pontano and Mantuan ) then in the Italian vernacular ( Sannazaro , Boiardo ). The fashion for pastoral spread throughout Renaissance Europe. Leading French pastoral poets include Marot ,

615-539: A boy actor would have been playing a girl disguised as a boy impersonating a girl. Arden is the name of a large forest which conceptually incorporated Shakespeare's home town of Stratford-upon-Avon and a large area besides currently roughly corresponding to the modern West Midlands . Shakespeare likely also had in mind the French Arden Wood, featured in Orlando Innamorato , especially since

738-462: A closing scene. In contrast, the traditional movie script is divided into acts, but those categories are less frequently used in the digital technology. The scene is important for the unity of the action of the film, while a stage drama is typically divided into acts. The division of a movie into scenes is usually done in the script. Some action scenes need to be planned very carefully. In his 2008 book The Anatomy of Story , John Truby suggests that

861-399: A deliberate contrast, Silvius describes his love for Phebe in verse (II, iv, 20). As a mood of a character changes, he or she may change from one form of expression to the other in mid-scene. In a metafictional touch, Jaques cuts off a prose dialogue with Rosalind because Orlando enters, using verse: "Nay then, God be wi' you, an you talk in blank verse" (IV, i, 29). The defiance of convention

984-673: A feature of grand opera , most particularly in Meyerbeer's operas: often composers would develop a pastoral-themed "oasis", usually in the centre of their work. Notable examples include the shepherd's "alte Weise" from Wagner 's Tristan und Isolde , or the pastoral ballet occupying the middle of Tchaikovsky 's The Queen of Spades . The 20th-century continued to bring new pastoral interpretations, particularly in ballet, such as Ravel's Daphis and Chloe , Nijinsky's use of Debussy's Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune , and Stravinsky 's Le sacre du printemps and Les Noces . The Pastorale

1107-488: A golden green snake is instead seen by Orlando threateningly approaching the open mouth of "a wretched ragged man", tightening around his neck, "but suddenly seeing Orlando, it unlinked itself and with glides did slip away into a bush" (IV, iii, 106, 110–113). It can be deduced that with the appearance of the actor on stage, envy suddenly disappears. He who had fought like a Hercules, a hero not by chance invoked by Rosalind ("Now Hercules be thy speed", I, ii, 204–210), just before

1230-777: A group of three books of the canonical New Testament : the First Epistle to Timothy (1 Timothy) the Second Epistle to Timothy (2 Timothy), and the Epistle to Titus . They are presented as letters from Paul the Apostle to Timothy and to Titus . They are generally discussed as a group (sometimes with the addition of the Epistle to Philemon ) and are given the title "pastoral" because they are addressed to individuals with pastoral oversight of churches and discuss issues of Christian living, doctrine and leadership . In

1353-545: A guise for political discourse, which other forms had previously neglected. The Pastoral, he writes, has a didactic duty to “contain and enforme morall discipline for the amendment of mans behaviour”. Friedrich Schiller linked the Pastoral to childhood and a childlike simplicity. For Schiller, we perceive in nature an “image of our infancy irrevocably past”. Sir William Empson spoke of the ideal of Pastoral as being embedded in varying degrees of ambivalence, and yet, for all

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1476-468: A highly unrealistic manner. The pastoral life is usually characterized as being closer to the golden age than the rest of human life. The setting is a locus amoenus , or a beautiful place in nature, sometimes connected with images of the Garden of Eden . An example of the use of the genre is the short poem by the 15th-century Scottish makar Robert Henryson Robene and Makyne which also contains

1599-568: A life of melancholy and solitude. Milton's, On the Morning of Christ's Nativity (1629) blends Christian and pastoral imagery. Milton is perhaps best known for his epic Paradise Lost , one of the few Pastoral epics ever written. A notable part of Paradise Lost is book IV where he chronicles Satan's trespass into paradise. Milton's iconic descriptions of the garden are shadowed by the fact that we see it from Satan's perspective and are thus led to commiserate with him. Milton elegantly works through

1722-488: A pastoral view demonstrates how prestigious Penshurst was, to be worthy in the company with gods. "A Country Life", another 17th-century work by Katherine Philips , was also a country house poem. Philips focuses on the joys of the countryside and looks upon the lifestyle that accompanies it as being "the first and happiest life, when man enjoyed himself." She writes about maintaining this lifestyle by living detached from material things, and by not over-concerning herself with

1845-464: A person's lifespan is a play in seven acts. These acts, or "seven ages", begin with "the infant/Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms" and work through six further vivid verbal sketches, culminating in "second childishness and mere oblivion,/Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything". Pastoral The genre is also known as bucolic , from the Greek βουκολικόν , from βουκόλος , meaning

1968-569: A poet of the French court, and Pierre de Ronsard , once called the "prince of poets" in his day. The first pastorals in English were the Eclogues (c. 1515) of Alexander Barclay , which were heavily influenced by Mantuan. A landmark in English pastoral poetry was Spenser ’s The Shepheardes Calender , first published in 1579. Spenser's work consists of twelve eclogues, one for each month of

2091-467: A presentation of Adam and Eve ’s pastorally idyllic, eternally fertile living conditions and focuses upon their stewardship of the garden. He gives much focus to the fruit bearing trees and Adam and Eve's care of them, sculpting an image of pastoral harmony. However, Milton in turn continually comes back to Satan , constructing him as a character the audience can easily identify with and perhaps even like. Milton creates Satan as character meant to destabilize

2214-510: A romantic comedy, As You Like It is a tale of love manifested in its varied forms. In many of the love-stories, it is love at first sight . This principle of "love at first sight" is seen in the love-stories of Rosalind and Orlando, Celia and Oliver, as well as Phebe and Ganymede. The love-story of Audrey and Touchstone is a parody of romantic love. Another form of love is between women, as in Rosalind and Celia's deep bond. The play highlights

2337-494: A rural region of Greece , mythological home of the god Pan , which was portrayed as a sort of Eden by the poets. The tasks of their employment with sheep and other rustic chores is held in the fantasy to be almost wholly undemanding and is left in the background, leaving the shepherdesses and their swains in a state of almost perfect leisure . This makes them available for embodying perpetual erotic fantasies. The shepherds spend their time chasing pretty girls – or, at least in

2460-456: A scene is generally thought of as a section of a motion picture in a single location and continuous time made up of a series of shots , which are each a set of contiguous frames from individual cameras from varying angles. A scene is a part of a film, as well as an act, a sequence (longer or shorter than a scene), and a setting (usually shorter than a scene). While the terms refer to a set sequence and continuity of observation, resulting from

2583-482: A sense of nostalgia for their country way of living. His next argument focuses on the artificiality of poetry, drawing upon fellow theorist, Puttenham. Kermode elaborates on this and says, "the cultivated, in their artificial way, reflect upon and describe, for their own ends, the natural life". Kermode wants us to understand that the recreation or reproduction of the natural is in itself artificial. Kermode elaborates on this in terms of imitation, describing it as "one of

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2706-723: A specifically ‘Irish pastoral'". In 2014, The Cambridge Companion to the City in Literature had a chapter on the urban pastoral subgenre. Charles Siebert's Wickerby: An Urban Pastoral describes a man who splits his time between a gritty Brooklyn apartment, where the night is filled with the sounds of pigeons, starlings, and youth gangs shouting, and driving to rural Quebec to squat in an abandoned, tumbledown cabin in rural Quebec. Theocritus's Idylls include strophic songs and musical laments, and, as in Homer , his shepherds often play

2829-404: A time of non-standardised spelling. The Oxford Shakespeare edition proceeds on the basis that there is confusion between the two Ardens, and assumes that "Arden" is an anglicisation of the forested Ardennes region of France, where Lodge set his tale, and alters the spelling to reflect this. The Arden edition of Shakespeare makes the suggestion that the name "Arden" comes from a combination of

2952-411: A tool for writers to discuss a controversial topic without repercussions. Raymond Williams argues that the foundation of the pastoral lies in the idea that the city is a highly urban, industrialized center that has removed us from the peaceful life we once had in the countryside. However, he states that this is really a "myth functioning as a memory" that literature has created in its representations of

3075-408: A voyeuristic point of view with his love, and they are not directly interacting with the other true shepherds and nature. Pastoral shepherds and maidens usually have Greek names like Corydon or Philomela, reflecting the origin of the pastoral genre. Pastoral poems are set in beautiful rural landscapes, the literary term for which is "locus amoenus" (Latin for "beautiful place"), such as Arcadia ,

3198-431: Is a form of Italian folk song still played in the regions of Southern Italy where the zampogna continues to thrive. They generally sound like a slowed down version of a tarantella , as they encompass many of the same melodic phrases. The pastorale on the zampogna can be played by a solo zampogna player, or in some regions can be accompanied by the piffero (also commonly called a ciaramella , 'pipita', or bifora ), which

3321-579: Is a primitive key-less double reed oboe type instrument. Idealised pastoral landscapes appear in Hellenistic and Roman wall paintings. Interest in the pastoral as a subject for art revived in Renaissance Italy, partly inspired by the descriptions of pictures Jacopo Sannazaro included in his Arcadia . The Pastoral Concert in the Louvre attributed to Giorgione or Titian is perhaps

3444-461: Is a scene in which the beginning and end are marked by a change in the presence of characters onstage, rather than by the lights going up or down or the set being changed. From the French scène à faire , an obligatory scene is a scene (usually highly charged with emotion) which is anticipated by the audience and provided by an obliging playwright. An example is Hamlet 3.4, when Hamlet confronts his mother. In filmmaking and video production ,

3567-417: Is continued when the epilogue is given in prose. Act II, Scene VII, Line 139, features one of Shakespeare's most famous monologues, spoken by Jaques, which begins: 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 The arresting imagery and figures of speech in the monologue develop the central metaphor:

3690-873: Is effectively bounded by Roman roads as follows: in the West by the Icknield Street , in the South by the Salt Road (the modern Alcester to Stratford Road), in the East by the Fosse Way , and in the North by the Watling Street . It includes Arden, Warwickshire , near Shakespeare's home town, which was the ancestral origin of his mother's family—whose surname was Arden. That area was once heavily wooded, giving rise to

3813-493: Is evident in the encounter of a shepherd and a goatherd who meet in the pastures in Theocritus ' poem Idylls 1 . Traditionally, pastoral refers to the lives of herdsmen in a romanticized, exaggerated, but representative way. In literature , the adjective 'pastoral' refers to rural subjects and aspects of life in the countryside among shepherds , cowherds and other farm workers that are often romanticized and depicted in

As You Like It - Misplaced Pages Continue

3936-643: Is in love, has fallen in love with Ganymede (Rosalind in disguise), though "Ganymede" continually shows that "he" is not interested in Phebe. Touchstone, meanwhile, has fallen in love with the dull-witted shepherdess Audrey, and tries to woo her, but eventually is forced to be married first. William, another shepherd, attempts to marry Audrey as well, but is stopped by Touchstone, who threatens to kill him "a hundred and fifty ways". Finally, Silvius, Phebe, Ganymede, and Orlando are brought together in an argument with each other over who will get whom. Ganymede says he will solve

4059-405: Is of six 'books' only, though Spenser intended to write twelve. He wrote the poem primarily to honor Queen Elizabeth . William Cowper addressed the artificiality of the fast-paced city life in his poems Retirement (1782) and The Winter Nosegay (1782). Pastoral nevertheless survived as a mood rather than a genre, as can be seen from such works as Matthew Arnold 's Thyrsis (1867), a lament on

4182-453: Is often contrasted with the negative aspects of noisy, dirty, fast-paced cities. Some works take a Luddite tone, criticizing mechanization and industrialization and showing the ills of urbanization and over-reliance on advanced technologies. In 1994, British literature professor Terry Gifford proposed the concept of a "post-pastoral" subgenre. By appending the prefix "post-", Gifford does not intend this to refer to “after” but rather to

4305-659: Is often depicted in myth and art as at her bath. Diana was a literary epithet for Queen Elizabeth I during her reign, along with Cynthia , Phoebe , Astraea , and the Virgin Mary . Certain anachronisms exist as well, such as the minor character Sir Oliver Martext's possible reference to the Marprelate Controversy which transpired between 1588 and 1589. On the basis of these references, it seems that As You Like It may have been composed in 1599–1600, but it remains impossible to say with any certainty. Though

4428-627: Is set in a duchy in France, beginning in a courtly environment; but most of the action takes place in a location called the 'Forest of Arden'. This location is conjuring more than one place and identity. Firstly, in an Early Modern English mind the Forest of Arden roughly corresponds to the West Midlands to modern ears. It represents an area including Warwickshire and parts of Shropshire , Staffordshire and Worcestershire . The Arden area

4551-486: Is the Edenic Pastoral, which alludes to the perfect relationship between God, man, and nature in the Garden of Eden . It typically includes biblical symbols and imagery. In 1645 John Milton wrote L'Allegro , which translates as the happy person. It is a celebration of Mirth personified, who is the child of love and revelry. It was originally composed to be a companion poem to, Il Penseroso , which celebrates

4674-513: Is the first example of literature that has pastoral sentiments and may have begun the pastoral tradition. Ovid's Metamorphoses is much like the Works and Days with the description of ages (golden, silver, bronze, iron, and human) but with more ages to discuss and less emphasis on the gods and their punishments. In this artificially constructed world, nature acts as the main punisher. Another example of this perfect relationship between man and nature

4797-539: The Arcadian Forest of Arden, where the exiled Duke now lives with some supporters, including "the melancholy Jaques", a malcontent figure, who is introduced weeping over the slaughter of a deer. "Ganymede" and "Aliena" do not immediately encounter the Duke and his companions. Instead, they meet Corin, an impoverished tenant , and offer to buy his master's crude cottage. Orlando and his servant Adam, meanwhile, find

4920-596: The Hebrew word רעה ( roʿeh ), which is used as a noun as in "shepherd", and as a verb as in "to tend a flock." It occurs 173 times in 144 Old Testament verses and relates to the literal feeding of sheep, as in Genesis 29:7. In Jeremiah 23:4, both meanings are used ( ro'im is used for "shepherds" and yir'um for "shall feed them"), "And I will set up shepherds over them which shall feed them: and they shall fear no more, nor be dismayed, neither shall they be lacking, saith

5043-471: The classical region of Arcadia and the biblical garden of Eden , as there is a strong interplay of classical and Christian belief systems and philosophies within the play. Arden was also the maiden name of Shakespeare's mother and her family home is located within the Forest of Arden. The play begins in a courtly setting, where fighting, usurpation, betrayal and general disharmony are exhibited. Most of

As You Like It - Misplaced Pages Continue

5166-460: The syrinx , or pan flute, which is considered a quintessentially pastoral instrument. Virgil's Eclogues were performed as sung mime in the 1st century, and there is evidence of the pastoral song as a legitimate genre of classical times. The pastoral genre was a significant influence in the development of opera . After settings of pastoral poetry in the pastourelle genre by the troubadours , Italian poets and composers became increasingly drawn to

5289-456: The "post-pastoral" concept, as well as two other variants: "gay pastoral", the seemingly contradictory "urban pastoral" and "radical pastoral". Gifford lists further examples of pastoral variants, which he calls "prefix-pastoral[s]": " postmodern pastoral,...hard pastoral, soft pastoral, Buell’s revolutionary lesbian feminist pastoral, black pastoral, ghetto pastoral, frontier pastoral, militarized pastoral, domestic pastoral and, most recently,

5412-507: The 17th century came the Country house poem . Included in this genre is Emilia Lanier 's The Description of Cooke-ham in 1611, in which a woman is described in terms of her relationship to her estate and how it mourns for her when she leaves it. In 1616, Ben Jonson wrote To Penshurst, a poem in which he addresses the estate owned by the Sidney family and tells of its beauty. The basis of

5535-420: The City . This acknowledgment of Herrick's work is appropriate, as both Williams and Herrick accentuate the importance of labor in the pastoral lifestyle. The pastoral elegy is a subgenre that uses pastoral elements to lament a death or loss. The most famous pastoral elegy in English is John Milton 's " Lycidas " (1637), written on the death of Edward King, a fellow student at Cambridge University. Milton used

5658-504: The Duke and his men and are soon living with them and posting simplistic love poems for Rosalind on the trees. It has been said that the role of Adam was played by Shakespeare, though this story is also said to be without foundation. Rosalind, also in love with Orlando, meets him as Ganymede and pretends to counsel him to cure him of being in love. Ganymede says that "he" will take Rosalind's place and that "he" and Orlando can act out their relationship. The shepherdess, Phebe, with whom Silvius

5781-419: The Forest of Arden. In the forest, they encounter a variety of memorable characters, notably the melancholy traveller Jaques , who speaks one of Shakespeare's most famous speeches (" All the world's a stage ") and provides a sharp contrast to the other characters in the play, always observing and disputing the hardships of life in the country. Historically, critical response has varied, with some critics finding

5904-540: The Greek and Roman versions, pretty boys as well. The eroticism of Virgil 's second eclogue , Formosum pastor Corydon ardebat Alexin ("The shepherd Corydon burned with passion for pretty Alexis"), is entirely homosexual . Pastoral literature continued after Hesiod with the poetry of the Hellenistic Greek Theocritus , several of whose Idylls are set in the countryside (probably reflecting

6027-560: The Jewish world at the time of the origins of Christianity in the first century CE. A pastoral letter , often called simply a pastoral, is an open letter addressed by a bishop to the clergy or laity of a diocese or to both, containing general admonition, instruction or consolation, or directions for behavior in particular circumstances. In most episcopal church bodies, clerics are often required to read out pastoral letters of superior bishops to their congregations. The pastoral epistles are

6150-596: The LORD." ( KJV ). A pastoral economic system had great cultural significance for the Jewish people from earliest recorded times: Abraham herded flocks. Throughout the biblical accounts of the Children of Israel , a pastoral lifestyle in the harsh hinterland of the Levant related to the ideal of a society obedient to Yahweh , in contrast to the corruption and idolatry encountered in the "fleshpots of Egypt" (Exodus 16:3), in

6273-408: The ability to edit recorded visual works, a movie scene is much shorter than a stage play scene . Because of their frequent appearance in films, some types of scenes have acquired names, such as love scene, sex scene , nude scene , dream scene, action scene, car chase scene , crash scene, emotional scene, fight scene , tragedy scene, or post-credits scene . There is usually an opening scene and

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6396-405: The apparent dichotomies, and contradicting elements found within it, he felt there was a unified harmony within it. He refers to the pastoral process as 'putting the complex into the simple.' Empson argues that "... good proletarian art is usually Covert Pastoral", and uses Soviet Russia's propaganda about the working class as evidence. Empson also emphasizes the importance of the double plot as

6519-464: The audience. The direct and immediate source of As You Like It is Thomas Lodge 's Rosalynde, Euphues Golden Legacie , written 1586–87 and first published in 1590. Lodge's story is based upon " The Tale of Gamelyn ". As You Like It was first printed in the collected edition of Shakespeare's plays, known as the First Folio , during 1623. No copy of it in Quarto exists, for the play is mentioned by

6642-451: The audience’s understanding of themselves and the world around them. Through this mode, Milton is able to create a working dialogue between the text and his audience about the ‘truths’ they hold for themselves. Italian writers invented a new genre, the pastoral romance, which mixed pastoral poems with a fictional narrative in prose. Although there was no classical precedent for the form, it drew some inspiration from ancient Greek novels set in

6765-460: The beginning of a scene should frame what the whole scene will be about, and that the scene should then funnel down to a single point, with the most important word or line of dialogue stated last. Tension (also known as suspense) within a scene can be created in any of the ways discussed below: Show, don't tell is another common technique to make a scene more engaging by implying information rather than saying it directly. Each scene should have

6888-560: The challenge with "Charles, the wrestler", in allusion to the figure of the insign of Globe Theatre, which accompanied the presumed inscription: "Totus Mundus Agit Histrionem". Gender poses as one of the play's integral themes. While disguised as Ganymede, Rosalind also presents a calculated perception of affection that is "disruptive of [the] social norms " and "independent of conventional gender signs" that dictate women's behavior as irrational. In her book As She Likes It: Shakespeare's Unruly Women , Penny Gay analyzes Rosalind's character in

7011-412: The concept of Gifford's second definition of 'pastoral'. The speaker of the poem, who is the titled shepherd, draws on the idealization of urban material pleasures to win over his love rather than resorting to the simplified pleasures of pastoral ideology. This can be seen in the listed items: "lined slippers", "purest gold", "silver dishes", and "ivory table" (lines 13, 15, 16, 21, 23). The speaker takes on

7134-531: The conflicted emotions often present in the genre. A more tranquil mood is set by Christopher Marlowe 's well known lines from his 1588 The Passionate Shepherd to His Love : Come live with me and be my Love, And we will all the pleasures prove That hills and valleys, dale and field, And all the craggy mountains yield. There will we sit upon the rocks And see the shepherds feed their flocks, By shallow rivers, to whose falls Melodious birds sing madrigals. "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" exhibits

7257-702: The countryside, such as Daphnis and Chloe . The most influential Italian example of the form was Sannazzaro 's Arcadia (1504). The vogue for the pastoral romance spread throughout Europe producing such notable works as Bernardim Ribeiro "Menina e Moça" (1554) in Portuguese, Montemayor 's Diana (1559) in Spain, Sir Philip Sidney 's Arcadia (1590) in England, and Honoré d'Urfé 's Astrée (1607–27) in France. Dutch Renaissance and Golden Age Pastoral drama also emerged in Renaissance Italy. Again, there

7380-581: The court jester, and shepherd Corin establishes the contentment to be found in country life, compared with the perfumed, mannered life at court. (Act III, I). At the end of the play the usurping duke and the exiled courtier Jaques both elect to remain within the forest. Usurpation and injustice are significant themes of this play. The new Duke Frederick usurps his older brother Duke Senior, while Oliver parallels this behavior by treating his younger brother Orlando so ungenerously as to compel him to seek his fortune elsewhere. Both Duke Senior and Orlando take refuge in

7503-419: The cycle of the seasons, and the role of the community. While fertile agrarian environments on Earth or Earth-like planets are common settings, some works may be set in ocean or desert planets or habitable moons. The rural dwellers, such as farmers and small-townspeople, are depicted sympathetically, albeit with the tendency to portray them as conservative and suspicious of change. The simple, peaceful rural life

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7626-460: The death of his fellow poet Arthur Hugh Clough . Robert Burns can be read as a Pastoral poet for his nostalgic portrayals of rural Scotland and simple farm life in To A Mouse and The Cotter's Saturday Night . Burns explicitly addresses the Pastoral form in his Poem on Pastoral Poetry . In this he champions his fellow Scot Allan Ramsey as the best Pastoral poet since Theocritus . Another subgenre

7749-409: The famous pastoral epic The Faerie Queene , in which he employs the pastoral mode to accentuate the charm, lushness, and splendor of the poem's (super)natural world. Spenser alludes to the pastoral continuously throughout the work and also uses it to create allegory in his poem, with the characters as well as with the environment, both of which are meant to have symbolic meaning in the real world. It

7872-407: The final scene , after which they discover that Frederick has also repented his faults, deciding to restore his legitimate brother to the dukedom and adopt a religious life. Jaques, ever melancholic, declines their invitation to return to the court, preferring to stay in the forest and to adopt a religious life as well. Finally Rosalind speaks an epilogue, commending the play to both men and women in

7995-404: The forest, where justice is restored "through nature". The ultimate recovery of harmony is marked with four weddings and a dance of harmony for eight presided over by Hymen, before most of the exiled court are able to return to the court and their previous stations are recovered. Love is the central theme of As You Like It , like other romantic comedies of Shakespeare. Following the tradition of

8118-619: The form both to explore his vocation as a writer and to attack what he saw as the abuses of the Church. Also included is Thomas Gray 's, "Elegy In a Country Churchyard" (1750). The formal English pastoral continued to flourish during the 18th century, eventually dying out at the end. One notable example of an 18th-century work is Alexander Pope 's Pastorals (1709). In this work Pope imitates Edmund Spenser 's Shepheardes Calendar , while utilizing classical names and allusions aligning him with Virgil . In 1717, Pope's Discourse on Pastoral Poetry

8241-416: The form of Pastourelle. This is the first time that the pastoral really deals with the subject of love. Scene (drama) A scene is a dramatic part of a story, at a specific time and place, between specific characters. The term is used in both filmmaking and theatre, with some distinctions between the two. In drama , a scene is a unit of action, often a subdivision of an act . A "French scene"

8364-509: The framework of these gender conventions that ascribe femininity with qualities such as "graciousness, warmth ... [and] tenderness". However, Rosalind's demanding tone in her expression of emotions towards Orlando contradicts these conventions. Her disobedience to these features of femininity proves a "deconstruction of gender roles ", since Rosalind believes that "the wiser [the woman is], the waywarder" she is. By claiming that women who are wild are smarter than those who are not, Rosalind refutes

8487-426: The fundamental laws of literary history" because it "gives literary history a meaning in terms of itself, and provides the channels of literary tradition". Kermode goes on to explain about the works of Virgil and Theocritus as progenitors of the pastoral. Later poets would draw on these earlier forms of pastoral, elaborating on them to fit their own social context. As the pastoral was becoming more modern, it shifted into

8610-649: The handling of the camera or by the editor, the term "scene" refers to the continuity of the observed action: an association of time, place, or characters. The term may refer to the division of the film from the screenplay, from the finished film, or it may only occur in the mind of the spectator who is trying to close on a logic of action. For example, parts of an action film at the same location, that play at different times can also consist of several scenes. Likewise, there can be parallel action scenes at different locations usually in separate scenes, except that they would be connected by media such as telephone, video, etc. Due to

8733-495: The kingdom who at first sight has fallen in love with Rosalind, is forced to flee his home after being persecuted by his older brother, Oliver. Frederick becomes angry and banishes Rosalind from court. Celia and Rosalind decide to flee together accompanied by the court fool, Touchstone, with Rosalind disguised as a young man and Celia disguised as a poor lady. Rosalind, now disguised as Ganymede (" Jove 's own page"), and Celia, now disguised as Aliena (Latin for "stranger"), arrive in

8856-483: The landscape of the island of Cos where the poet lived) and involve dialogues between herdsmen. Theocritus may have drawn on authentic folk traditions of Sicilian shepherds. He wrote in the Doric dialect but the metre he chose was the dactylic hexameter associated with the most prestigious form of Greek poetry, epic . This blend of simplicity and sophistication would play a major part in later pastoral verse. Theocritus

8979-484: The lush Canaanite lowlands "flowing with milk and honey" (Exodus 3:8), or in Babylon , the "great city" of Israelite exile. David , a righteous shepherd-boy associated with the arid hill-country, contrasts with Goliath and Saul , representatives of luxurious urban élites. Thus New Testament imagery of shepherds and their sheep builds on established cultural and economic distinctions familiar, directly or indirectly, to

9102-526: The most famous painting in this style. Later, French artists were also attracted to the pastoral, notably Claude , Poussin (e.g., Et in Arcadia ego ) and Watteau (in his Fêtes galantes ). The Fête champêtre , with scenes of country people dancing was a popular subject in Flemish painting. Thomas Cole has a series of paintings titled The Course of Empire , and the second of these paintings (shown on

9225-466: The most important tropes of which he cites as religion (embodied by Pan); friendship; allegory;and poetic and musical calling. He concedes though that such a categorization is open to much misinterpretation. As well, Poggioli focused on the idea that Pastoral was a nostalgic and childish way of seeing the world. In The Oaten Flue , he claims that the shepherd was looked up to was because they were “an ideal kind of leisure class." Frank Kermode discusses

9348-465: The name. Secondly the name evokes the Ardennes , a forested region covering an area located in southeast Belgium, western Luxembourg and northeastern France. Frederick has usurped the duchy and exiled his older brother, Duke Senior. Duke Senior's daughter, Rosalind, has been permitted to remain at court because she is the closest friend of Frederick's only child, Celia . Orlando, a young gentleman of

9471-715: The nymph responds realistically to the idealizing shepherd of The Passionate Shepherd to His Love by embracing and explaining the true course of nature and its incompatibility with the love that the Shepherd yearns for with the nymph. Terry Gifford defined the anti-pastoral in his 2012 essay "Pastoral, Anti-Pastoral and Post-Pastoral as Reading Strategies" as an often explicit correction of pastoral, emphasizing "realism" over romance, highlighting problematic elements (showing tensions, disorder and inequalities), challenging literary constructs as false distortions and demythologizing mythical locations such as Arcadia and Shangri-La . In

9594-427: The past four hundred years, a range of writers have worked on theorizing the nature of pastoral. These include Friedrich Schiller , George Puttenham , William Empson , Frank Kermode , Raymond Williams , Renato Poggioli , Annabel Patterson, Paul Alpers, and Ken Hiltner. George Puttenham was one of the first Pastoral theorists. He did not see the form as merely a recording of a prior rustic way of life but

9717-417: The past. As a result, when society evolves and looks back to these representations, it considers its own present as the decline of the simple life of the past. He then discusses how the city's relationship with the country affected the economic and social aspects of the countryside. As the economy became a bigger part of society, many country newcomers quickly realized the potential and monetary value that lay in

9840-408: The pastoral elegy). Terry Gifford, a prominent literary theorist, defines pastoral in three ways in his critical book Pastoral . The first way emphasizes the historical literary perspective of the pastoral in which authors recognize and discuss life in the country and in particular the life of a shepherd. This is summed up by Leo Marx with the phrase "No shepherd, no pastoral." The second type of

9963-512: The pastoral is literature that "describes the country with an implicit or explicit contrast to the urban". The third type of pastoral depicts the country life with derogative classifications. Hesiod 's Works and Days presents a 'golden age' when people lived together in harmony with nature. This Golden Age shows that even before the Alexandrian age , ancient Greeks had sentiments of an ideal pastoral life that they had already lost. This

10086-480: The pastoral within the historical context of the English Renaissance. His first condition of pastoral poetry is that it is an urban product. Kermode establishes that the pastoral is derived as an opposition between two modes of living, in the country and in the city. London was becoming a modern metropolis before the eyes of its citizens. The result of this large-scale urban sprawl left the people with

10209-543: The pastoral". He gives examples of post-pastoral works, including Cormac McCarthy ’s The Road (2006), Margaret Atwood ’s The Year of the Flood (2009) and Maggie Gee ’s The Ice People (1999), and he points out that these works "raise questions of ethics, sustenance and sustainability that might exemplify [Leo] Marx’s vision of the pastoral needing to find new forms in the face of new conditions". Gifford states that British eco-critics such as Greg Garrard have used

10332-421: The pastoral. Musical settings of pastoral poetry became increasingly common in first polyphonic and then monodic madrigals : these later led to the cantata and the serenata , in which pastoral themes remained on a consistent basis. Partial musical settings of Giovanni Battista Guarini 's Il pastor fido were highly popular: the texts of over 500 madrigals were taken from this one play alone. Tasso 's Aminta

10455-471: The perception of women as passive in their pursuit of men. University of Wisconsin professor Richard Knowles, the editor of the 1977 New Variorum edition of this play, in his article "Myth and Type in As You Like It ", pointed out that the play contains mythological references in particular to Eden and to Hercules . As You Like It is known as a musical comedy because of the number of songs in

10578-409: The play a work of great merit and some finding it to be of lesser quality than other Shakespearean works. The play has been adapted for radio, film, and musical theatre. Main characters: Court of Duke Frederick: Household of Old Sir Rowland de Boys ('of the woods'): Exiled court of Duke Senior in the Forest of Arden: Country folk in the Forest of Arden: Other characters: The play

10701-415: The play is consistently one of Shakespeare's most frequently performed comedies, scholars have long disputed over its merits. George Bernard Shaw complained that As You Like It is lacking in the high artistry of which Shakespeare was capable. Shaw liked to think that Shakespeare wrote the play as a mere crowdpleaser , and signalled his own middling opinion of the work by calling it As You Like It —as if

10824-450: The play is then a celebration of life in the country, where after intensifying disorder, harmony is recovered. The inhabitants of Duke Frederick's court suffer the perils of arbitrary injustice and even threats of death; the courtiers who followed the old duke into forced exile in the "desert city" of the forest are, by contrast, experiencing liberty but at the expense of some easily borne discomfort. (Act II, i). A passage between Touchstone,

10947-574: The play was written in a room there, although the authority for this is modern and originates in a claim in the 1976 book Folklore of Warwickshire by Roy Palmer. As You Like It was entered into the Register of the Stationers' Company on 4 August 1600 as a work which was "to be stayed", i.e., not published till the Stationers' Company were satisfied that the publisher in whose name the work

11070-512: The play who embraces and appreciates both the real and idealized life and manages to make the two ideas coexist. Therefore, Shakespeare explores city and country life as being appreciated through the coexistence of the two. Pastoral science fiction is a subgenre of science fiction which uses bucolic, rural settings, like other forms of pastoral literature. Since it is a subgenre of science fiction, authors may set stories either on Earth or another habitable planet or moon, sometimes including

11193-516: The play, Rosalind, who in Shakespeare's day would have been played by a boy, finds it necessary to disguise herself as a boy, whereupon the rustic Phebe, also played by a boy, becomes infatuated with this " Ganymede ", a name with homoerotic overtones. In fact, the epilogue, spoken by Rosalind to the audience, states rather explicitly that she (or at least the actor playing her) is not a woman. In several scenes, "Ganymede" impersonates Rosalind, so

11316-418: The play, Shakespeare employs various characters to illustrate pastoralism . His protagonists Rosalind and Orlando metaphorically depict the importance of the coexistence of realism and idealism, or urban and rural life. While Orlando is absorbed in the ideal, Rosalind serves as a mediator, bringing Orlando back down to reality and embracing the simplicity of pastoral love. She is the only character throughout

11439-465: The play. There are more songs in it than in any other play of Shakespeare. These songs and music are incorporated in the action that takes place in the forest of Arden, as shown below: Shakespeare uses prose for about 55% of the text, with the remainder in verse. Shaw affirms that as used here the prose, "brief [and] sure", drives the meaning and is part of the play's appeal, whereas some of its verse he regards only as ornament. The dramatic convention of

11562-441: The playwright did not agree. Tolstoy objected to the immorality of the characters and Touchstone's constant clowning. Other critics have found great literary value in the work. Harold Bloom has written that Rosalind is among Shakespeare's greatest and most fully realised female characters. The elaborate gender reversals in the story are of particular interest to modern critics interested in gender studies . Through four acts of

11685-486: The poem is a harmonious and joyous elation of the memories that Jonson had at the manor. It is beautifully written with iambic pentameter, a style that Jonson eloquently uses to describe the culture of Penshurst. It includes Pan and Bacchus as notable company of the manor. Pan, Greek god of the Pastoral world, half man and half goat, was connected with both hunting and shepherds; Bacchus was the god of wine, intoxication and ritual madness. This reference to Pan and Bacchus in

11808-521: The printers of the First Folio among those which "are not formerly entered to other men". By means of evidences, external and internal, the date of composition of the play has been approximately fixed at a period between the end of 1598 and the middle of 1599. A local tradition holds that the play may have been written in the Kenilworth area, at Rowington . Billsley Manor, now a hotel, claims

11931-439: The problem, having Orlando promise to marry Rosalind, and Phebe promise to marry Silvius if she cannot marry Ganymede. Orlando sees Oliver in the forest and rescues him from a lioness, causing Oliver to repent for mistreating Orlando. Oliver meets Aliena (Celia's false identity) and falls in love with her, and they agree to marry. Orlando and Rosalind, Oliver and Celia, Silvius and Phebe, and Touchstone and Audrey are all married in

12054-696: The right) depicts the perfect pastoral setting. Pastoral imagery and symbolism feature heavily in Christianity and the Bible. Jesus calls himself the "Good Shepherd" in John 10:11 , contrasting his role as the Lamb of God . Many Christian denominations use the title " Pastor ", a word rooted in the Biblical metaphor of shepherding. ( Pastor in Latin means "shepherd"). The Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament) uses

12177-630: The same time, Italian and German composers developed a genre of vocal and instrumental pastorals, distinguished by certain stylistic features, associated with Christmas Eve. The pastoral, and parodies of the pastoral, continued to play an important role in musical history throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. John Gay may have satirized the pastoral in The Beggar's Opera , but also wrote an entirely sincere libretto for Handel 's Acis and Galatea . Rousseau 's Le Devin du village draws on pastoral roots, and Metastasio 's libretto Il re pastore

12300-422: The sense of “reaching beyond” the contraints of the pastoral genre, but while continuing the core conceptual elements that have defined the pastoral tradition. Gifford states that the post-pastoral is "best used to describe works that successfully suggest a collapse of the human/nature divide whilst being aware of the problematics involved", noting that it is "more about connection than the disconnections essential to

12423-405: The theme of usurpation and injustice on the property of others. However, it ends happily with reconciliation and forgiveness. Duke Frederick is converted by a hermit and he restores the dukedom to Duke Senior who, in his turn, restores the forest to the deer. Oliver also undergoes a change of heart and learns to love Orlando. Thus, the play ends on a note of rejoicing and merry-making. In this play,

12546-454: The time required the courtly characters to use verse, and the country characters prose, but in As You Like It this convention is deliberately overturned. For example, Rosalind, although the daughter of a Duke and thinking and behaving in high poetic style, actually speaks in prose as this is the "natural and suitable" way of expressing the directness of her character, and the love scenes between Rosalind and Orlando are in prose (III, ii, 277). In

12669-419: The traditional pastoral conventions of Theocritus. He was the first to set his poems in Arcadia, an idealized location to which much later pastoral literature will refer. Horace 's Epodes , ii Country Joys has "the dreaming man" Alfius, who dreams of escaping his busy urban life for the peaceful country. But as "the dreaming man" indicates, this is just a dream for Alfius. He is too consumed in his career as

12792-514: The two Orlando epics, Orlando Innamorato and Orlando Furioso , have other connections with the play. In the Orlando mythos, Arden Wood is the location of Merlin's Fountain, a magic fountain causing anyone who drinks from it to fall out of love. Many editions keep Shakespeare's "Arden" spelling, partly because that the pastoral mode depicts a fantastical world in which geographical details are irrelevant, and also because Shakespeare wrote in

12915-453: The universal globe, inhabited by ordinary mortals, is shown at the end as the audience liked it: happy and reconciled by love. However, the text can be seen as a pretext. "This wide and universal theatre present more woeful pageants" (II, vii, 137–138). The comedy in fact establishes a respite from the so-called War Stage. "Are not these woods more free from peril than the envious court?" (II, i, 3–4). From Oliver's description (IV, iii, 98–120),

13038-419: The untouched land. Furthermore, this new system encouraged a social stratification in the countryside. With the implementation of paper money came a hierarchy in the working system, as well as the "inheritance of titles and making of family names". Poggioli was concerned with how death reconciled itself with the pastoral, and thus came up with a loose categorization of death in the pastoral as 'funeral elegy',

13161-506: The widow Eleanor Bull in 1593. The 1598 posthumous publication of Hero and Leander would have revived interest in his work and the circumstances of his death. These words in act IV, i, in Rosalind's speech, "I will weep for nothing, like Diana in the fountain", may refer to an alabaster image of Diana which was set up in Cheapside in 1598. However, it should be remembered Diana is mentioned by Shakespeare in at least ten other plays, and

13284-405: The woods, the river, his Pupil Mary, and the future. Marvell used nature as a thread to weave together a poem centered around man. We once again see nature fully providing for man. Marvell also continuously compares nature to art and seems to point out that art can never accomplish on purpose what nature can achieve accidentally or spontaneously. Robert Herrick 's The Hock-cart, or Harvest Home

13407-468: The words of Touchstone, "When a man's verses cannot be understood, nor a man's good wit seconded with the forward child understanding, it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room", allude to Marlowe's assassination. According to the inquest into his death, Marlowe had been killed in a brawl following an argument over the "reckoning" of a bill in a room in a house in Deptford , owned by

13530-418: The world around her. Andrew Marvell 's " Upon Appleton House " was written when Marvell was working as a tutor for Lord Fairfax's daughter Mary, in 1651. The poem is very rich with metaphors that relate to religion, politics and history. Similar to Jonson's "To Penshurst", Marvell's poem is describing a pastoral estate. It moves through the house itself, its history, the gardens, the meadows and other grounds,

13653-418: The world in a very anti-pastoral view. In “The Twenty-Third Psalm,” Nature is portrayed as something we need to be protected from, and in “The Nightingale,” the woe of Philomela is compared to the speaker's own pain. Sidney also wrote Arcadia , which is filled with pastoral descriptions of the landscape. " The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd " (1600) by Sir Walter Raleigh also comments on the anti-pastoral as

13776-612: The year, and is written in dialect. It contains elegies , fables and a discussion of the role of poetry in contemporary England. Spenser and his friends appear under various pseudonyms (Spenser himself is "Colin Clout"). Spenser's example was imitated by such poets as Michael Drayton ( Idea, The Shepherd's Garland ) and William Browne ( Britannia's Pastorals ). During this period of England's history, many authors explored "anti-pastoral" themes. Two examples of this, Sir Philip Sidney 's "The Twenty-Third Psalm" and "The Nightingale", focus on

13899-507: Was also a favourite. As opera developed, the dramatic pastoral came to the fore with such works as Jacopo Peri 's Dafne and, most notably, Monteverdi 's L'Orfeo . Pastoral opera remained popular throughout the 17th-century, and not just in Italy, as is shown by the French genre of pastorale héroïque , Englishman Henry Lawes 's music for Milton's Comus (not to mention John Blow 's Venus and Adonis ), and Spanish zarzuela . At

14022-473: Was also written in the 17th century. In this pastoral work, he paints the reader a colorful picture of the benefits reaped from hard work. This is an atypical interpretation of the pastoral, given that there is a celebration of labor involved as opposed to central figures living in leisure and nature just taking its course independently. This poem was mentioned in Raymond Williams ', The Country and

14145-459: Was an incomplete inventory of Shakespeare's plays to that date (1598). The new Globe Theatre opened some time in the summer of 1599, and tradition has it that the new playhouse's motto was Totus mundus agit histrionem —"all the Globe's a stage"—an echo of Jaques' famous line "All the world's a stage" (II.7). This evidence posits September 1598 to September 1599 as the time frame within which the play

14268-441: Was derived from Thomas Lodge 's pastoral romance Rosalynde ) and The Winter's Tale , of which Act 4 Scene 4 is a lengthy pastoral digression. The forest in As You Like It can be seen as a place of pastoral idealization, where life is simpler and purer, and its inhabitants live more closely to each other, nature and God than their urban counterparts. However, Shakespeare plays with the bounds of pastoral idealization. Throughout

14391-594: Was entered was the undisputed owner of the copyright. Thomas Morley's First Book of Ayres , published in London in 1600 contains a musical setting for the song "It was a lover and his lass" from As You Like It . This evidence implies that the play was in existence in some shape or other before 1600. It seems likely this play was written after 1598, since Francis Meres did not mention it in his Palladis Tamia . Although twelve plays are listed in Palladis Tamia , it

14514-485: Was imitated by the Greek poets Bion and Moschus . The Roman poet Virgil adapted pastoral into Latin with his highly influential Eclogues . Virgil introduces two very important uses of pastoral, the contrast between urban and rural lifestyles and political allegory most notably in Eclogues 1 and 4 respectively. In doing so, Virgil presents a more idealized portrayal of the lives of shepherds while still employing

14637-476: Was likely written. In act III, vi, Phebe refers to the famous line "Whoever loved that loved not at first sight" taken from Marlowe's Hero and Leander , which was published in 1598. This line, however, dates from 1593 when Marlowe was killed, and the poem was likely circulated in unfinished form before being completed by George Chapman . It is suggested in Michael Wood 's In Search of Shakespeare that

14760-699: Was little Classical precedent, with the possible exception of Greek satyr plays . Poliziano 's Orfeo (1480) shows the beginnings of the new form, but it reached its zenith in the late 16th century with Tasso 's Aminta (1573), Isabella Andreini 's Mirtilla (1588), and Guarini 's Il pastor fido (1590). John Lyly 's Endimion (1579) brought the Italian-style pastoral play to England. John Fletcher 's The Faithful Shepherdess , Ben Jonson 's The Sad Shepherd and Sidney's The Lady of May are later examples. Some of Shakespeare 's plays contain pastoral elements, most notably As You Like It (whose plot

14883-496: Was published as a preface to Pastorals. In this work Pope sets standards for pastoral literature and critiques many popular poets, one of whom is Spenser, along with his contemporary opponent Ambrose Philips . During this time period Ambrose Philips, who is often overlooked because of Pope, modeled his poetry after the native English form of Pastoral, employing it as a medium to express the true nature and longing of Man. He strove to write in this fashion to conform to what he thought

15006-402: Was set over 30 times, most famously by Mozart . Rameau was an outstanding exponent of French pastoral opera. Beethoven also wrote his famous Pastoral Symphony , avoiding his usual musical dynamism in favour of relatively slow rhythms. More concerned with psychology than description, he labelled the work "more the expression of feeling than [realistic] painting". The pastoral also appeared as

15129-469: Was the original intent of Pastoral literature. As such, he centered his themes around the simplistic life of the Shepherd, and, personified the relationship that humans once had with nature. John Gay , who came a little later was criticized for his poem's artificiality by Doctor Johnson and attacked for their lack of realism by George Crabbe , who attempted to give a true picture of rural life in his poem The Village. In 1590, Edmund Spenser also composed

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