As You Like It (Arden Shakespeare: Third Series) [Hardcover]

William Shakespeare (Author), Juliet Dusinberre (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 25, 2006

With its explorations of sexual ambivalence, As You Like It speaks directly to the twenty-first century. Juliet Dusinberre demonstrates that Rosalind’s authority in the play grows from new ideas about women and reveals that Shakespeare’s heroine reinvents herself for every age. But the play is also deeply rooted in Elizabethan culture and through it Shakespeare addresses some of the hotly debated issues of the period. "This will be the definitive edition of As You Like It for many years to come" - Phyllis Rackin, University of Pennsylvania

Editorial Reviews

Review

"This will be the definitive edition of As You Like It for many years to come" - Phyllis Rackin, University of Pennsylvania

About the Author

Juliet Dusinberre is the author of the pioneering work in feminist criticism, Shakespeare and the Nature of Women, of Virginia Woolf's Renaissance: Woman Reader or Common Reader?, and of Alice to the Lighthouse: Children's Books and Radical Experiments in Art. She is a Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge, and was its first M.C. Bradbrook Fellow in English.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 472 pages
• Publisher: Arden Shakespeare; 3rd edition (July 25, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1904271219
• ISBN-13: 978-1904271215
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,209,941 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in April 1564, and his birth is traditionally celebrated on April 23. The facts of his life, known from surviving documents, are sparse. He was one of eight children born to John Shakespeare, a merchant of some standing in his community. William probably went to the King's New School in Stratford, but he had no university education. In November 1582, at the age of eighteen, he married Anne Hathaway, eight years his senior, who was pregnant with their first child, Susanna. She was born on May 26, 1583. Twins, a boy, Hamnet ( who would die at age eleven), and a girl, Judith, were born in 1585. By 1592 Shakespeare had gone to London working as an actor and already known as a playwright. A rival dramatist, Robert Greene, referred to him as "an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers." Shakespeare became a principal shareholder and playwright of the successful acting troupe, the Lord Chamberlain's Men (later under James I, called the King's Men). In 1599 the Lord Chamberlain's Men built and occupied the Globe Theater in Southwark near the Thames River. Here many of Shakespeare's plays were performed by the most famous actors of his time, including Richard Burbage, Will Kempe, and Robert Armin. In addition to his 37 plays, Shakespeare had a hand in others, including Sir Thomas More and The Two Noble Kinsmen, and he wrote poems, including Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. His 154 sonnets were published, probably without his authorization, in 1609. In 1611 or 1612 he gave up his lodgings in London and devoted more and more time to retirement in Stratford, though he continued writing such plays as The Tempest and Henry VII until about 1613. He died on April 23 1616, and was buried in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford. No collected edition of his plays was published during his life-time, but in 1623 two members of his acting company, John Heminges and Henry Condell, put together the great collection now called the First Folio.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Finally, the third series AYL, April 2, 2007

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David Cope (Grandville, Mi. USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: As You Like It (Arden Shakespeare: Third Series) (Paperback)

Over the years, despite the fact that The Riverside Shakespeare is my primary course text, I've found the third series Arden paperbacks as an indispensable source for my college-level Shakespeare classes (the second series versions, of course, feature an older and often quite out-of-date understanding of the criticism and characters). As You Like It is one play that I teach consistently, semester by semester, so I was naturally very pleased when this volume arrived. It does not disappoint: the introductory material is superb and, as always, the notes quite helpful. Viva Rosalind!

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Major Third, April 20, 2010

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Jon Chambers (Birmingham, England) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: As You Like It (Arden Shakespeare: Third Series) (Paperback)

We might expect an academic who has made her name as a feminist critic to find something interesting to say about 'As You Like It'. Juliet Dusinberre doesn't disappoint. Although its aspects of performance history can be a little wearisome, her Introduction is richly rewarding. Not surprisingly, she makes much of the play's cross-dressing and role-playing (boy playing woman playing man). She finds questions of gender much more ambiguous and complex than they first appear and presents an account of a play in which liberating modes of behaviour can be adopted as easily as costumes can be donned. It is a play which 'redefines gender'.

Equally subversive, she thinks, are the play's allusions to Robin Hood. Duke Senior's comradely courtiers are partners rather than subjects, and his court more communal than hierarchic. Together with the animal welfare concerns expressed in the play, the Duke's vegetarian tendencies (which echo the real-life courtier John Harington's) and Orlando's 'challenge to primogeniture' (it is he, after all, who inherits a dukedom), the 'alternative', revolutionary elements of AYL are neatly drawn attention to.

There are some inspired insights. Touchstone's 'dreadful joke', as Dusinberre calls it (about pancakes in 1.2), makes sense if the court performance at Richmond Palace took place on the Shrove Tuesday of 1599, as she thinks highly likely. And Dusinberre further suggests that some of the play's exotic features (like the lion in 3.2.) were matched by the elaborate wood carvings in Richmond's outer court, while Rosalind's reference to Troilus not dying for love might have been accompanied by a gesture to the tapestry depicting Troy hanging in Richmond's Great Hall where plays were performed. In essence, therefore, she sees the palace as the 'perfect ambience' for the play, with its sense of rural retreat and with deer roaming outside its west wall.

But Dusinberre is careful to present the Forest of Arden as more than just a fairy-tale rural retreat. It is a place that represents the challenge of the unfamiliar and of harsh political exile. It is also a place which reflects the real, contemporary world of displacement brought about by land enclosure and political instability (in the year of Essex's fateful Irish campaign).

The Introduction is also radical and illuminating in its discussion of Elizabethan play reading. Dusinberre argues that AYL is particularly rewarding as a text to be read at leisure and that its wordplay is often better appreciated on the page than on the stage. She argues that puns such as Touchstone's 'faining/feigning' 'could only be appreciated by readers'. Dusinberre examines a recent school of thought (led by Lukas Erne) inclining to the view that not only did the printed word add an extra witty dimension, but that Shakespeare actively took readers into account when writing plays.

The comprehensively researched Commentary is equally impressive. It bears testimony to the rich heritage of Shakespearean scholarship which has unearthed a staggering amount of detail about the halcyon period of English drama, 1590-1610. This edition will probably allow for as full an appreciation of the play as is currently possible.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Review of Arden's 'As You Like It', January 18, 2011

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Ryan S. Mease "scott.godwin" (Chicago, IL, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: As You Like It (Arden Shakespeare: Third Series) (Paperback)

It's hard to insult the Arden editions of Shakespeare. Even if a scholar were to find specific points within the editions vast fields of footnotes and several waves of appendices, this would not outdo the beauty of these editions. There is a certain virtue to making scholarship so utterly prolific and thorough-going that one can almost expect some failures. This is essentially a presentation of the play accompanied by many, many interpretations and thematic rabbit trails. One comes to understand the history, content (and so the context) of the work to as full a measure as possible in one volume.