Historical Context
In the year 1599, Queen Elizabeth
sat on the throne of England. One of the most brilliant political minds of her
century, she had presided over nearly fifty years of change and struggle, and
brought her country to a position of global power where it would remain for
centuries.
The last half of the sixteenth
century had been, as they say, pretty busy. England had become irrevocably
Protestant, with Elizabeth's excommunication by the Pope in 1570; English
explorers had reached the New World, and English armies had bloodily subjugated
their Irish neighbors; England's warships (and bad weather) had defeated the
Spanish Armada in 1588, cementing the country's position as ruler of the seas
and confirming, in the minds of its people, that they had been chosen by God to
forge ahead in the new century. On the cultural front, the printing press,
invented about a hundred years before, was fundamentally changing the way
literature reached ordinary people. The city of London had seen its population
double in the decades following 1563, to top 200,000 people for the first time,
and a massive new middle class was influencing the economic, cultural, and
literary development of the nation. The Renaissance Humanistic movement,
spilling in from Europe, had ushered in a new era of interest in learning and
the classics; and in the past half century, English writers and poets had, for
the first time, begun to try to create literature in their native tongue that
could stand up to the greatest works written in Latin, French, or Italian.
And in 1599, a thirty-five-year-old
playwright named William Shakespeare was enjoying his prosperity as one of the
most successful people working in the London theatre. His acting company, called
The Lord Chamberlain's Men, had great favor with the Queen, and that very year
the troupe was in the process of building its own theatre on the south shore of
London's Thames River; the theatre would be called the Globe.
As You Like It was written in this year, just after Much Ado About
Nothing, Henry V, and Julius Caesar, and just before the
writing of Hamlet in 1600. Unlike many of Shakespeare's plays, As You
Like It seems to contain few references to the world outside the theatre;
unlike the political history Shakespeare reworked in his "history
plays," or the commentaries on kingship and power that pervade his
tragedies, Shakespeare's comedy plays generally seem to be light-hearted works,
meant to entertain and amuse, but not to provoke thought about anything more
politically sensitive than the nature of love or poetry. To be sure, As You
Like It contains good and bad rulers - Duke Frederick and Oliver are
tyrannous siblings, who usurp the rights of their nobler kin, Duke Senior and
Orlando - but their wickedness comes straight out of fairy tales, and, the
nature of their badness left unexplored, it is easy to create a happy ending by
simply letting them reform. Shakespeare seems to be more interested in
developing characters like Rosalind, Orlando, Touchstone and Jacques, through
whom he can explore questions of identity, semiotics, self-knowledge and (of
course) love.
Some basic historical details are
useful for a richer understanding of the play. For instance, modern readers
should remember that all roles in Renaissance drama were played by men and boys,
so that Rosalind and Celia (as well as Phoebe and Audrey) would really have been
played by youths in women's clothing; this puts the theme of cross-dressing in a
whole new light. And the "mode" in which As You Like
It is written - in which noble people flee the court to a simpler life
as shepherds and woodsmen - is part of an allegorical literary genre called the
"pastoral," which was based on classical writings and was extremely
popular in Shakespeare's day; well-known contemporaries like Edmund Spenser,
Christopher Marlowe and Sir Philip Sidney also wrote pastoral works. (You can
read more about these issues in the "Did You Know?" and "Points
to Ponder" sections, if you're really interested.)
There are a few references in As
You Like It to potentially controversial points of Renaissance law. For
instance, Oliver is legally allowed to tyrannize Orlando because oldest sons
inherited all their fathers' land under ancient English property laws - which
some people thought was a bad idea. And Duke Senior's men are technically
violating the law by shooting deer in Arden Forest: all the deer legally
belonged to the current ruler (as you'll know if you've read the even older
stories of Robin Hood!) However these themes are not pursued very strongly in As
You Like It, and, after all, everything comes out well in the end; the play
seems to be intended to entertain and stimulate, rather than to bear any
political message.
