ABSTRACT
As You Like It and Twelfth Night are often seen as the twin peaks of Shakespeare's achievement in romantic comedy, yet within the conventions of the genre they could hardly be more different. It is as though the later play was created by taking the major impulses behind its predecessor and throwing them into reverse. While As You Like It was almost without conventional comic intrigue, Twelfth Night bristles with plot complications. Instead of enjoying the freedom of the forest, with the organic cycles of nature in the background, the characters are enclosed in houses and formal gardens, and in the background is not the familiar countryside but the implacable, mysterious sea. Instead of the swift, decisive matings and friendly courtship games of the earlier play, we have unrequited love (a minor motif in As You Like It) expressing itself through unreliable messengers. Not since The Two Gentlemen of Verona has there been such emphasis on the pains rather than the pleasures of love; not since Love's Labour's Lost have we been so aware that love's means of expression are unreliable. It is as though the ground won in the intervening plays — and most notably in As You Like It — has been deliberately surrendered.
