As You Like It (1982 TV) part 12 of 16

Shakespeare's fanciful play, filmed at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival before a live audience.

Roberta Maxwell ... Rosalind
Rosemary Dunsmore ... Celia
Nicholas Pennell ... Jaques
John Jarvis ... Silvius
Mary Haney ... Phebe
Andrew Gillies ... Orlando

directed by John Hirsch

Rosalind becomes the pivot around whom the other lovers move, because she is the only one with a maturely intelligent sense of the difference between love and sentiment. Thus, she can deliver stern lectures to Silvius and Phoebe about how they are denying themselves the joys that are possible because they have a false sense of love. Silvius's excessively conventional Petrarchan attitudes simply encourage Phoebe to close him out of her feelings and to develop a false sense of her own importance, as Rosalind points out very bluntly: "Sell when you can. You are not for all markets" (3.5.61). She is telling Phoebe, in effect, to wake up to the realities of the world in which she lives and to abandon the sentimental dream in which she has locked herself, thanks to the language in which she and Silvius understand their feelings.

It's significant that throughout much of the play, when Rosalind talks to others about love, she talks in prose, rejecting the formal potential of a more imaginative language, in order to keep the discussions anchored in the reality of everyday life. Rosalind wants love, but she will have it only in the language of everyday speech, without the seductive embellishments of poetical conventions, which corrupt because they take one away from the immediately reality of the experience.

Orlando profits from Rosalind's instructions because he is basically an emotionally intelligent person as well. His commitment to playing the role of the conventional lover is only luke warm; as Rosalind observes, he doesn't have the appearance of such a literary poseur. Significantly, his poetry is very bad, and he's not going to mind acknowledging the fact. He does not love his own words more than his own true feelings and hence does not strive to develop his abilities as a poet and quickly moves into the prose conversations with Rosalind/Ganymede. It's an interesting question whether or not he might recognize or have his suspicions about Rosalind/Ganymede well before the ending. There's an intriguing possibility that he knows her all along, but recognizing that she is in charge of the game, he is only going to drop the pretense when she gives him the cue. I've never seen this interpretation attempted, but if I were producing the play, I would like to try it.

-- from a lecture prepared by Ian Johnston of Malaspina University-College

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Tags:

• As-You-Like-It
• William-Shakespeare
• literature
• theater
• play
• pastoral
• Roberta-Maxwell
• Andrew-Gillies
• Rosalynde
• Forest-of-Arden

[FAILadies]

@Hambidosvinet would be better if you could spell his name.

[orliczek4]

what makes you think so?

[Hambidosvinet]

well im gonna be honest, shakespear really really suck.