I just came across two cool articles about one of my favorite plays – Shakespeare’s As You Like It<\/i> – and so I’m going to point to them, and also rant and rave on about the play itself.<\/p>\n
Here’s a review<\/a> of As You Like It<\/i>, now playing out at BAM. Sadly, I cannot go. It sounds to me like this production really NAILED what is, for me, the magic of that whimsical piece. I would call it the complete loss of order – the complete destruction of social conventions – with dukes and duchesses stripped of their titles frolicking about in the Forest of Arden – and … at the end, quick-quick-quick, order is restored. Rosalind stops cross-dressing, she becomes a woman again, she gets married to Orlando, and all is VERY QUICKLY made well.<\/p>\n But … what I love about the play, as a whole, is that, yes, order is necessarily restored at the end. This soothes the audience’s anxieties about chaos.<\/p>\n But … still … Shakespeare does not deny that it seems like so much FUN out there in the Forest! Don’t it? Everything goes INSANE out there. These people may be dukes and duchesses and such, but the second they are freed from the court, all hell breaks loose. It’s hilarious. The Forest is a place where people can be free (“Ay, now am I in Arden: the more fool I. When I was at home I was in a better place; but travellers must be content.”) where you can run and laugh, where you can fall in love freely – without worrying about titles and courtship and stuff … and yet – civilization is always there. That’s the dark side. You never ever want to go back to civilization – but civilization doesn’t just DISAPPEAR. Everyone, eventually, must “go back”.<\/p>\n It’s a comedy, yes, and it’s “light” – but I’ve seen the play time and time again, and have pretty much despised it (except for one unbelievable production of it in Philadelphia with the Arden Theatre Company – who are still around, thank goodness). The WORST tone to take with the piece, the tone most usually taken, is one of smugness. There is nothing more insufferable than a smug Rosalind. It’s so WRONG, too.<\/p>\n No. No. She is NOT smug. She has that monologue about how to woo women, but … she’s making it up as she goes along. She’s desperately in love with Orlando. She’s out of control. SHE HERSELF has descended into chaos. Love is chaos<\/i>. She dresses up as a boy. Orlando has lost his mind because of love. He’s behaving like a lunatic. She takes it upon herself to “train” him in the ways of love, because, frankly, racing around the Forest like a madman pinning love lyrics on trees is kind of … well … ikky. Rosalind decides she needs to teach him how to woo. But … she doesn’t go into it having ANY idea what she is doing.<\/p>\n She says to Orlando: “Love is merely a madness, and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do: and the reason why they are not so punished and cured is, that the lunacy is so ordinary that the whippers are in love too. Yet I profess curing it by counsel.”<\/p>\n He says, drip that he is: “You would not cure me.”<\/p>\n She says, “I would cure you, if you would but call me Rosalind and come every day to my cote and woo me.”<\/p>\n Okay. So there’s the gamble. Hmmm. Let me see if he’ll take this bait. Hmmm. That’s where it gets exciting – when Rosalind doesn’t treat him like he’s a TOTAL idiot … because, after all, she is MADLY in love with the poor guy.<\/p>\n He says something like: “How would you cure me?”<\/p>\n She says: “He was to imagine me his love, his mistress; and I set him every day to woo me: at which time would I, being but a moonish youth, grieve, be effeminate, changeable, longing and liking, proud, fantastical, apish, shallow, inconstant, full of tears, full of smiles, for every passion something and for no passion truly any thing, as boys and women are for the most part cattle of this colour; would now like him, now loathe him; then entertain him, then forswear him; now weep for him, then spit at him; that I drave my suitor from his mad humour of love to a living humour of madness; which was, to forswear the full stream of the world, and to live in a nook merely monastic. And thus I cured him; and this way will I take upon me to wash your liver as clean as a sound sheep’s heart, that there shall not be one spot of love in’t.”<\/p>\n Heh heh. “I will show you how INSANE women can be … and I will CURE you of it.”<\/p>\n But of course, she really just wants more of an opportunity to hang out with the guy, and see where he stands, in terms of his feelings for “Rosalind”. See if he would be a suitable suitor, or just a wimpy bonehead.<\/p>\n The mistake most productions make is to turn Rosalind into a little snippety PhD candidate. “So. Here is the dissertation on love. I know everything.”<\/p>\n All of this, when done in a SMUG way, is literally disgusting. You want to smack Rosalind and tell her to stop being such a damn know-it-all.<\/p>\n However, ‘SMUGNESS’ is the opposite of what Shakespeare wrote. If you read that play, just READ the damn thing, the LAST thing you will find woven through the words is any sense of smugness.<\/p>\n Also, let us not forget her beautiful line which comes following her first “training session” with Orlando. He leaves her little forest hut … and she re-hashes the whole thing breathlessly with Celia. In typical girl fashion. “And then THIS happened … and then he said THIS … and then THIS …” Celia intercuts her ravings with more prosaic comments, basically saying to her cousin, “Babe, chill out. Don’t get too crazy yet …” Rosalind ends the scene with this beautiful line:<\/p>\n “I cannot be out of the sight of Orlando: I’ll go find a shadow and sigh till he come.”<\/p>\n Ahhh. “Go find a shadow and sigh till he come.” What a perfect description of what it feels like to be in an unrequited unfulfilled love affair. Perfect.<\/p>\n So … Uhm – please tell me: with that line in the play, why do MOST directors make Rosalind to be a smug little know-it-all? Do they just SKIP that line when they read the play, or …?? The SECOND Orlando leaves her, she drops the tutor pose, and completely falls apart. It’s hysterical, and charming, and human<\/i>, when played correctly.<\/p>\n Rosalind has NO idea what will happen when she gets dressed up like a boy. It’s a survival technique. And … strangely … oddly … she finds herself kind of liberated by the whole thing – but she doesn’t dress up to ‘stick it to male society’ … She does it because to hang out in the Forest as a woman would be unthinkably dangerous. But then a transformation occurs. She actually kind of LIKES being a boy. She is able to become “friends” with Orlando, in a way she NEVER could have, if she were in female garb. She becomes, actually, quite BUTCH. But to assume that Rosalind is OKAY with this shift in the balance, that she is ACCUSTOMED to her new powerful role, is to miss all of the clues Shakespeare has left. She is giddy, yes, she is MADLY in love with Orlando … MADLY. She is NOT smug, and she has NO idea if her gamble will work. Orlando might not <\/i>be train-able. He may continue to be a ridiculous weenie, mooning about the forest, and refuse to step up to the plate. Rosalind might get her heart broke.<\/p>\n In this way, the stakes are raised. The stakes must be just as high in a comedy, as in a tragedy. THAT’S why it’s funny. Not because oh-ho-ho everything’s-a-lark, hahahaha … NO! David Huxley, in Bringing Up Baby, is hilarious because it is literally LIFE OR DEATH to him to get that brontosaurus finished. It looks ridiculous to US, but it is IMPORTANT to him.<\/p>\n If Rosalind sashays into the forest like a little know-it-all, then … where are her high stakes? Where is her gamble? What are her obstacles? She’s the lead of the damn play. If she has no stakes in anything, then what is the point?<\/p>\n This subtlety in her character (which, I believe, is what makes the play so delicious, so fun, so HUMAN) is often lost. Directors want to make some 20th century point about gender roles, or whatever, or they LOVE the idea of a woman kicking a man around … and so they turn Rosalind into this wymyn’s-studies-petty-tyrant.<\/p>\n But that’s missing the point.<\/p>\n