ABSTRACT

Pretty pastoral or exploration of the dark recesses of the psyche? Or damning indictment of a power-hungry urban society? The conventions of pastoral, which Shakespeare drew on so extensively in As You Like It, allow for all these interpretive emphases, and more. The play’s social framework is clear, but in commentaries it tends to take second place to the fantasy of transformation in the greenwood —self-sufficiency, sudden conversions, and above all, a marvellously fluid sexuality, independent of conventional gender signs and embodied in the image of the free woman in love, Rosalind. Recent critics have stressed the way the powerful fantasy of liberation, particularly sexual liberation, is contained by a reassertion of the patriarchal system, which is always there in the greenwood anyway (in a fantastically benign version) in the exiled Duke’s ‘court’. Rosalind’s last two speeches in the play’s narrative are a ritual of voluntary re-entry into the patriarchy:

(To the Duke) To you I give myself, for I am yours. (To Orlando) To you I give myself, for I am yours. …I’ll have no father, if you be not he. I’ll have no husband, if you be not he.