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As You Like It: Study Guide
Comedy in Shakespeare’s time tended to fall into several categories, requiring varied levels of sophistication on the part of the listener for fullest enjoyment:
Burlesque — purely physical comedy: potty and sexual jokes, pratfalls, food fights, drinking/drug jokes, drag costumes. This level of comedy requires almost no prior knowledge — references are to the most basic kinds of human experience.
Farce — plot-oriented comedy (similar to situation comedy today): disguise/mistaken identity, eavesdropping (intentional or unintentional), coincidences and accidents, get-rich-quick schemes that backfire, etc. Familiarity with the formulas and conventions of plot increase enjoyment.
Romantic comedy — boy-get-girl/boy-loses-girl/boy-gets-girl-back: humor is based on the delusions and pretensions of young people in love, misunderstandings, etc. Familiarity with the conventions of love poetry often required for appreciation of satire about lovers.
Comedy of manners — humor requires a knowledge of the social mores and fashions referred to in the plays; jokes center around social hypocrisies and pretensions. This type of comedy would probably only be funny to people who were familiar with the values and behaviors of the elite characters being satirized.
Witty comedy — humor based on wordplay (puns and literary allusions) and on comic heroes who use intelligence and language to outwit their adversaries and get what they want. This type of comedy requires the highest level of previous knowledge on the part of the audience, since much of the humor assumes a sophisticated command of the nuances of language and the uses of formal logic and rhetoric.
No one play ever featured only one type of humor exclusively — most comic plays feature a mixture of all these types. You will note, though, a decided hierarchy of humor in this list, from “low-class” to “high-class.” Shakespeare’s theater was not overly concerned with observing decorum, or a separation of comic styles — that would come later, at the turn of the 18th century.
As You Like It also explores the literary conventions of the Early Modern pastoral. In this genre, based on the work of classical poets such as Horace and Pliny, an idyllic world of nature and romance is presented. Shepherds and shepherdesses (the Latin “pastor” means “shepherd”) sing of their innocent love for one another, and their affectionate elders discuss the superiority of a simple life in the country over the decadence and cynicism of court/city life.
The pastoral ideal is strongly related to the ideal of the golden age – a mythical age of humankind before the corrupting influence of time, money, war, and civilization. Christianity applied the myth of the Golden Age to images of Eden. A fantasy of a mode of living in which humans live in complete harmony with nature can be found in Duke Senior’s ecstatic speech about the moral superiority of natural life at the beginning of Act 2:
And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.
For Dr. Debora Schwartz' terrific discussion of Pastoral comedy and study questions for As You Like It, click here.
As you read As You Like It, consider that the title of the play itself announces to the audience that we are invited to consider what we expect and prefer when it comes to romantic comedy. It also asks such questions as:
v Is ‘liking’ the same as ‘loving’? If so, which is preferable?
v Do we like the same kind of people we love? Is this a good or bad thing?
v How do most people like to talk about love?
v Are we defined by what we like? Is this good or bad?
v Who is better at loving — women or men? Why?
v Who is better at loving — aristocrats or country folk?
