Article "As You Like It"

Before I came to London I have to admit I was not much of a Shakespeare fan. But being here I have grown to love it, and I guess it has to do a lot with the fact that I am in a Shakespeare class and I am assigned to read his plays. But seriously I think Shakespeare is fascinating! :) I was assigned to read an article of someone critiquing one of Shakespeare’s amazing plays As You Like It. The article I chose to read was by Sylvan Barnet called Improbability. In this article it talks about how Shakespeare makes his plays in so little detail to allow your imagination do a lot of the thinking. Here is my summary of the article and what I felt about it! But I recommend that everyone should read As You Like It, it was a well-written play and very creative!

Summary of Barnet, Sylvan, Strange Events: Improbability in As You Like It, Shakespeare Studies, 4 (1968) p.119

 

Summary: This lecture is very entertaining and interesting because it is going back and forth from the original story of Rosader and As You like It. It is explaining the difference between the two stories and how Shakespeare changes his plays to make them more mysterious, more beautiful and intense, and leaving you with more to think about. For example, in a lot of Shakespeare’s plays he doesn’t explain why things are happening, instead they just do. In As You Like It how did everyone end up in the forest and falling in love? Why was wrestling going on in the beginning of the play? In this article it mostly kept giving the examples between the two stories and how Shakespeare’s are less detailed, but what the article didn’t explain at all was why he did that. Was he purposely trying to make the audience wonder? Shakespeare was aware of what he was writing and what he was changing between Rosader and As You Like It. People need to learn to accept the way he writes his plays and realize the way he was writing them was not a mistake, that he left out those small details on purpose.

 

Comment: This article goes on and on about how Shakespeare’s plays leave you wanting to ask questions, how he changes things to just happen instead of having something lead to why it is happening. The article was interesting and was fun to read, but what about an explanation of why Shakespeare decided to do that? However, the article was right. As I read As You Like It I was a little confused about why the wrestling was going on in the first place, or how everyone ended up in the forest, or why Oliver and Celia randomly fell in love, but I appreciate that because it lets my imagination do the thinking. Overall, the article wasn’t descriptive enough to be an article on As You Like It; rather an Article on the way Shakespeare changes his plays.