ABSTRACT
In As You Like It, the shepherd Corin criticizes his master by remarking that he “is of churlish disposition, / And little recks to find the way to heaven / By doing deeds of hospitality” (2.4.75-77).1 Whether any character recks to find the way to heaven by doing such deeds, scenes of hostility (between Oliver and Orlando, not to mention between Duke Frederick and just about everyone) create the play’s conflicts, while scenes of hospitality (when Duke Senior invites Orlando to feast and when Rosalind invites Orlando to her cote) enable its resolutions. These scenes, we will see, are highly stylized, even theatrical in the extent to which they foreground their artifice, and in this essay I explore the play’s distinctly theatrical hospitality, with an eye to its politics.
