"As You Like It" from 1600 to the Present: Critical Essays

Initially the title may seem to be a misnomer; some of the essays are indeed "critical essays" but the work is more accurately described as "Reactions to 'As You Like It' From 1600 to the Present." The book contains a variety of these "reactions" spanning the seventeenth, eighteenth (about a third of the total number of pages is devoted to material from or about the eighteenth century), nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, including material classified as scholarly criticism, theater reviews, Charles Johnson's eighteenth-century adaptation, Love in the Forest, as well as actors' reactions to the experience of playing Shakespeare. However, a guiding concept behind the selection process seems to be an editorial premise that any writing about or based on Shakespeare's text, even Charles Johnson's adaptation, may be analyzed as a "critical essay"--a premise that by and large the choices support, particularly in respect to Love in the Forest.

As You Like It is an unusual example of Shakespeare's plays in that there is no definite record of its performance until Love in the Forest (1723). Tomarken's introduction exploring the political factors that could have caused this paucity of seventeenth-century performance contributing one of the highlights of this collection, with Margaret Maurer contributing a complementary and similarly pivotal essay. Both Tomarken and Maurer use analysis of Love in the Forest to help elucidate Shakespeare's original. Norman Rabkin employs a similar technique in "Tragic Meanings: The Redactor as Critic" in Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), as does Martin Strier in "Impossible Radicalism and Impossible Value: Nahum Tate's 'King Lear' " in Resistant Structures (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). Tomarken's approach is particularly striking in its similarity to Strier's, with both emphasizing and demonstrating the influence of the surrounding political environment on the later author/reviser's choices to alter or retain portions of Shakespeare's text.

Maurer's treatment also touches on the political; however, her focus is more on the theatrics of performance, identity, and gender roles. She demonstrates how a major crux of the play is the question of identity, particularly the stability of identity. This analysis provocatively brings in the discussion of Plato's transmigration of souls (488), as well as the Ovid-based belief that female hyenas changed gender after mating (494-9).

Another thought-provoking article on gender and identity is Jeanne Addison Roberts' "Shakespearean Comedy and Some Eighteenth-Century Actresses." Roberts, like Tomarken and Maurer, uses the critical record of the past to help elucidate the present. Roberts provides insight into both eighteenth and twentieth-century attitudes towards literature and the theater by exploring the theatrical careers of the great actors Kitty Clive, Susannah Cibber, Hannah Pritchard, and Peg Woffington. None of these women is as formally lauded as their male contemporary, David Garrick, and yet Roberts demonstrates how vital these female performers were to a successful audience reception of Shakespeare's plays--often times even more so than Garrick. Maurer goes so far as to demonstrate convincingly that despite Garrick's revival of Shakespearean tragedy, his "influence in the revival of Shakespeare's comedy was actually negative" (558).

One of the real scholarly pleasures this volume affords is the insight into the twenty-first century "culture of criticism" (a.k.a. the post-postmodern cultural poetics of academia) that the analysis of eighteenth-century critics and criticism frequently brings. One of the many examples is the dispelling of the myth of Garrick's positive influence on Shakespearean theater in general--Garrick was far more interested in Shakespearean tragedy, presumably, as Roberts suggests, because the romances and the comedies offered him smaller and less important parts (558-9). However, the preference for tragedy runs deeper, creating a tendency even in the twenty-first century to trivialize the frequently serious issues of political and social transgressions confronted in comedy, transgressions this volume artfully explores. One of the transgressions of As You Like It could also be defined as the importance of Rosalind to production, a centrality that Susan Willis in "The Televised Shakespeare Canon" notes probably discouraged production entirely during one cultural period because the importance and emphasis on the female leads "did not offer much scope to [male] Restoration actors" (625). Roberts goes further, noting that failure to give due credit to actresses can be traced to the male bias of "theatrical managers, actors, and reviewers of the period who strongly influenced public opinion, but it has been perpetuated by scholars" (556). This point is uncomfortably unrevealing in terms of a peculiarity of twenty-first century western culture, a tendency to, as a whole, persistently deny misogynist tendencies and yet still demonstrate marked cultural misogyny. For example, in Charles Boyce's scholarly reference/encyclopedia Shakespeare A to Z, (New York: Delta, 1990) the deficiency that Robert notes in earlier reference books of giving only passing mention to the contributions of the great women actors Clive, Cibber, Pritchard, and Woffington is largely corrected here. (While I am uncomfortable with the term "women writers" both because it is ungrammatical and also because it seems to symbolically reify the objectification of women, e.g., as in the antebellum term "men slaves," I will nonetheless use the terminology as it is the standard feminist form). Such a change perhaps may leave the impression that the failure to appreciate women actor's contributions to the theater has been addressed and that this tendency to slight women actors is one aspect of culture that has not only changed over time but changed for the better and hence such a text can (and frequently does) deny that it is misogynist. Much, after all, has changed since G. C. D. Odell's Shakespeare form Betterton to Irving (2 vols. New York: Scribner's. 1920. repr. 1963) with, as Roberts notes, "its major divisions named for actors and its merely passing references to Cibber, Pritchard, Clive, and Woffington" (556).

Unfortunately, these changes can be misleading indicators of twenty-first century attitudes. Despite many social changes since the 1920s and even 1960s, much as with the official marginalization of important eighteenth-century actresses, even late twentieth-century women actors are similarly applauded and then ignored. For example, Michael Jamieson's contribution, "As You Like It--Performance and Reception," demonstrates how the well-known and accomplished women actors Vanessa Redgrave (638-9) and Maggie Smith (641-2) were far more important to the successful performance of As You Like It than their male leads (which comedy or not is still one of Shakespeare's canonized plays). However, in a situation analogous to that which Roberts discusses, these women actors, while having substantial name recognition and theatrical credits, have not generally received the same kind of official commendation as their male counterparts. For example, in Boyce's otherwise commendable Shakespeare A to Z John Gielgud is given a thirteen-line entry (Boyce 215), Ralph Richardson another thirteen-line entry (Boyce 548-9), and Ian McKellan a seven-line entry (Boyce 407), while Boyce only mentions Vanessa Redgrave in the entry of her father, Michael Redgrave (Boyce 533), and Maggie Smith's only mention is in the caption of an included movie clip from the 1965 film version Othello--picturing both Smith and Lawrence Olivier (Boyce 474). Olivier has a lengthy entry of sixty-three lines (Boyce 466-7) as compared to Hannah Pritchard's eleven lines (Boyce 518) and Peggy Ashcroft's twenty-one (Boyce 42). Similarly, there are less than half as many entries for mid to late twentieth-century women actors as for males, with the entries correspondingly about half the length for women actors than for their male counterparts. Two of these entries are particularly telling: Vivien Liegh's consists of six-lines and primarily notes that she was at one time married to Olivier (Boyce 365), while another brief mention of Olivier's widow, Joan Plowright, consists of eight lines, similarly emphasizing her relationship to Olivier (Boyce 507). It would be more comfortable to assume that this lack of recognition applies only to women actors, but such an assumption is unsustainable. To quote one of the most well-known lines from As You Like It, "all the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players." Thus, as in As You Like It, it would seem that any woman actor or woman "player," who seeks an identity outside of that dictated by the patriarchy faces Rosalind's dilemma. She may find freedom outside the confines of mainstream society (and most likely in notably male occupations) but to be incorporated back into the main cultural body, she must, as does Rosalind when she asks her father to "bestow" her on Orlando, be defined in terms of her relationship to the men in her life. However, I note that in making this assertion, I am as guilty of reinterpreting the play from my own cultural and personal biases as any of the "critics" included in the volume under review. As Tomarken astutely notes in the introduction, all the "critics" he includes in the volume read the play from a perspective of cultural bias and thereby focus on "some generic aspects of As You Like It" while ignoring others (16).