ABSTRACT
The ritual pattern of comedy, like that of tragedy, was linked to the annual festival rhythms, whether these were the consciously christian celebrations of birth, death and resurrection, of Christmas, Good Friday and Easter-day, or the mythical archetypes of ‘birth, copulation and death’ in the rhythms of the natural year: the fecundity of summer, the ripe maturity of autumn, the death and burial of winter and the renewal and birth of spring. For criticism, from E. K. Chambers to C. L. Barber by way of Northrop Frye, has made us richly aware of these fundamental and frequently unconscious sources of comic action. As You Like It squares with Frye’s account of the issues of ‘green-world’ comedy, charged ‘with the symbolism of the victory of summer over winter’, and one of the instruments of this happy resolution is the highly sophisticated dramatic form of a masque.
