The Representation of Communitas in the Forest of Arden: Shakespeare's As You Like It (original) (raw)
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Review of _What You Will: Gender, Contract, and Shakespearean Social Space_, by Kathryn Schwarz.
s monograph offers an intense exploration of will and its relation to patriarchal order in early modern England. The book's chief contribution is that it brings together a rich catalogue of historical texts alongside a densely documented exploration of theory and criticism more contemporary to the reader. There can be no doubt that Schwarz's claims are all rigorously researched and she moves with astounding agility from consulting Renaissance authors, such as Elyot and Hooker, to contemporary scholars, such as Belsey, Dolan, and Paster. Sometimes the speed of this movement is dizzying and her point verges on being lost in a sea of quotations, but for the repetition she employs.
Liminality and Gender Fluidity in Shakespearian Dramaturgy: A Postmodern Perspective
Journal of European Studies (JES)
The article seeks to compare and contrast the critical canon based on transvestism with deliberations upon androgyny. The postmodern approach explores the liminal spaces in Shakespearian dramaturgy where rigid, hide-bound compartmentalization of dichotomies in gender fuse with a fluid, liminal space of hybrid interface. The earlier readings of misogyny and chauvinism into Shakespearian heroines’ assumption of the male identity open vistas in the liminal space where these characters are conferred a privilege to navigate spaces beyond conventional fixities. By subjecting gender binaries to artistic rendition and critical canon, Shakespearian dramas offer insight into the socio-political debate around gender roles and responsibilities. By breaking free with the status quo, Shakespeare's female protagonists emerge more empowered and emancipated in their deft handling of crisis where cross-dressing only serves as an expedient measure to earn them the requisite mobility to the echelon...
The Forest of Arden as a Liminal Site for Criticism in As You Like It
The Forest of Arden as a Liminal Site for Criticism in As You Like It, 2023
The Forest of Arden in Shakespeare's As You Like It has been conceptualised as a pastoral setting and a utopian land, and the play has been a matter of discussion in green and ecocritical studies. However, the ambiguous rendering of the setting and its contradictory qualities make the play a storm centre of such critical works. Undoubtedly, these debates meet with critical acclaim, and the play still stirs up a discussion about its spatial setting. In effect, Shakespeare's play lays bare the traits of liminal place in the deliberation of the forest setting and the experiences of its inhabitants. While the first act is set at Duke Frederick's court, the rest of the play takes place in the Forest of Arden where the characters develop communitas as outsiders. When the sixteen forest scenes of the play are analysed, one may posit that there are different definitions of Arden. First and foremost, Arden's exact location cannot be identified; it might be situated in a French, English or other European border. Secondly, Arden is fused with contradictory and ambiguous characteristics. The forest is fraught with economic difficulties, hunger, coldness and dangerous threats for men and women. Yet it is a place of familial and romantic love, friendship and bliss. In addition to its ambivalent traits, the perception of the forest changes from one character to another. Each character adds a different meaning to the forest regarding their own experiences in this setting. The forest is also a place of transformation and transition as the characters leave the court, go to the forest and return to the court after establishing new identities and restoring their positions in the end. Moreover, Arden becomes a site of resistance against usurpation and banishment, and a place of political critique of the court, corruption, exile and colonialism throughout the play. Therefore, Arden emerges as a multi-layered and ambiguous place and such qualities make the forest a liminal landscape. This paper sets out to claim that the Forest of Arden in As You Like It can be regarded as a liminal site in which Shakespeare veils his critical remarks on the late Elizabethan court, implicitly questions the practices of banishment and exile, and comments on contemporary political, social and cultural issues by using liminality as a tool for criticism.
Shakespeare-Jahrbuch 155 (2019): 116-133., 2019
Mit der Verwendung dieses Dokuments erkennen Sie die Nutzungsbedingungen an. By using this particular document, you accept the terms of use stated above. Migration, Exile and Home in Shakespeare's As You Like It and Its Animated Adaptation MICHAEL MEYER Scholars have studied migration and exile in As You Like It through a historical lens. They mainly explore Shakespeare's response to literary and philosophical writings on exile on the one hand, or early modern examples of banishment and exile on the other hand. 1 In Shakespeare? Drama of Exile, maybe the most sustained study of this topic, lane Kingsley-Smith takes account of numerous historical examples of banishment and exile, but does not consider specific cases to be of great relevance to Shakespeare's plays.2 She dismisses the speculation that Shakespeare's domestic exile was material in writing about this topic, but then concedes that his displacement from Stratford to London may have had an impact on the relevance of creativity in his plays, the pressure on the exiled writer to invent a new name, adapt a new accent and construct a story and the world in language.3 Kingsley-Smith argues that philosophy and pastoral literature form the basis of the representation of exile in the comedies.4 Other scholars point out that migration and exile were widespread phenomena in the early modern period and of importance to Shakespeare: Domestic migration of the lower ranks for social and economic reasons met with distrust in England, as the wandering of workers, vagrants and masterless men was considered as a rejection of the family, the nation and the law. The English monarch, Parliament, or Justices of the Peace could and did banish gypsies, Blacks, the Irish, Catholics, Anabaptists, Puritans, beggars, minstrels and players, apart from more prominent courtiers.s The politics of favour and disfavour motivated 1 Paul Joseph Zajac combines literary and historical perspectives in his political reading of Duke Senior's community of contentment in "The Politics of Contentment: Passions, Pastoral, and Community in Shakespeare's As You Like It", Studies in Philology 113:2 (2.016), 306-336.
Renaissance Quarterly, 2021
through her "insurrectionary moment," the women's narrative triumphs (Butler, Excitable, 145; quoted in Alfar, 156). In the final chapter, the book's painstaking analysis generates fresh interpretations of The Winter's Tale and Cymbeline. Haunted by Othello, each play resists and revises the established pattern. Leontes's jealously and imagined cuckoldry, lacking a prompter, are self-generated and so can't be proved false. Hence both marriage and patrilineal rule are disrupted. Restoration requires that for sixteen years, Perdita is lost; that Hermione voluntarily withdraw from marriage and kingdom; and that Paulina strenuously enforce Leontes's penance. Hermione's return to see Perdita is tortuous and leads only to a "wary and melancholy reunion" (185). Cymbeline diffuses and reconceives the cuckoldry narrative. Innogen, like Cressida, without any defender, nevertheless defies her father to marry Posthumous, excoriates her husband's accusation of infidelity, and seeks autonomy in male disguise. Posthumous, the most clueless and credulous of husbands, wagers on Innogen's chastity and believes his Italian deceiver's flimsy proof. But uniquely, Posthumous needs no woman's defense to accuse himself, forgive his wife even if guilty, and seek self-punishment in battle. Giacomo, his prompter, likewise acknowledges guilt and vows to die. Alfar claims Cymbeline abandons his masculinist principles by seeking peace with Rome and becoming a "Mother to the birth of three" at the restoration of his lost sons. But women's narratives seem in abeyance here, and, as Alfar notes, jarring reconciliations call permanent harmony into question. Christina Alfar lays out this pattern more subtly and persuasively than earlier scholarship and lucidly reveals the power and limits of women's agency. I would have welcomed more attention to the part genre plays in the pattern's shifts. Additional exploration of how the plays work as theater performance to affect audiences could have broadened the book's scope. But such additions would have diluted the deep focus that is its strength.
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF EDUCATION & PHILOLOGY, 2022
ABSTRACT In William Shakespeare’s As You Like It (1623/1994), cross-dressing is used not only as a theatrical tool to fill in a gap resulting from female physical absence on the Elizabethan stage; it also serves as a symbolic act that opens new perspectives and raises questions about socio-cultural issues related to gender roles and gender performance. This research follows the development of the cross-dressed Rosalind, a female character played by a man and disguised as a man. The study equally considers the question of female agency and power through the female character’s act of disguise. It attempts to show whether Rosalind manages or fails to acquire a self-sufficient identity through her physical transvestism. The scrutiny of cross-dressing as a metatheatrical device enhances the problematization of the matter of gender performance in the play. Keywords: cross-dressing – identity – femininity – resilience – submissiveness – metatheatre.
Renaissance Quarterly
also models how particular poetic forms (e.g., the quatrain or the couplet) furnished mechanisms for argumentation and thinking. In advocating for critical accounts that consider how "representations shift in meaning over time" (135), Harrison's essay supports Griffin's suggestion that the "early modern history play" merits consideration as a distinctive generic category. By attending to Henry V 's habit of announcing its approaches to history, Griffin complicates contemporary purchase on any past to demonstrate drama's role in forcing us to rethink the "intelligibility" of the past, whether recent or remote. Munro resituates Beaumont's play-including original and recent stagings-by showing how its most obtrusive characters are also its most modish cultural critics, fluent in conventions culled variously from theater's "current output" (145) to popular romance's "familiar poetic archaisms" (147). Lara Dodds's essay on Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedy of Mariam works to craft terminology out of a reading of the play's "complex temporal effects" (194). Her careful parsing of discrete kinds of temporalities available in different story lines within the play supports an account of counterfactuals that showcases how imagined, invented, and competing temporalities supply resources for communicating affective response. Her compelling argument surpasses her taxonomy (the splicing of "narrative" and "passionate" counterfactuals), but the explicit conceptual framing provides a useful guide, sometimes elusive in other contributions to the volume. Still, this intriguing collection of essays works both to begin and to extend a valuable conversation, and indeed offers provocative sketches toward "analytic models for future investigations of permutations unplumbed" (6).