ABSTRACT
On his appointment as Director of the National Theatre in 2002, Nicholas Hytner published a meditation on the endings in Shakespearean comedy. Though tempted, perceptively, “by the idea that, in Shakespeare, there is always a secret play behind the offi cial play”, he nonetheless argued Shakespeare to have allowed his psychological and social realism, his “addiction to the truth”, to be undermined by “respect for the rules of the genres in which he worked” to the point where his endings “land [him] in real trouble.” Surveying comedic closure in Twelfth Night (Shakespeare has the drama “shoot itself in the foot by marrying Viola to Orsino”), Measure for Measure (conclusions “throb like raw wounds on the body of the play”), as well as The Winter’s Tale and As You Like It, he concluded “You can sense the playwright’s unease with the ending demanded by the genre.” It reminds him, he says, of “low-rent opera buffa”. Yet he abruptly rebukes his own verdict of Shakespearean insincerity, on opining peremptorily “the truth is that when Shakespeare seems unplayable, it is almost always our fault.”1 Professional literary critics, however, have often shared the unease. Even the astute Louis Montrose, for instance, reads Shakespeare in As You Like It as attempting to “resolve confl ict” (that of the younger brother specifi cally, and more generally of Elizabethans lacking full identity through not being male heads of household), and succeeding only “by the conjurer’s art”.2 Occasional voices have been raised in protest: “In essence, Montrose sees the comic form as a vehicle for articulating, only to erase, the contradictions of a particular social formation. I would simply argue that a text such as As You Like It is more subversive of formulations of reconciliation than Montrose’s reading allows”, counters Jean E. Howard.3 Yet it remains to examine the particulars and deduce the model of what alternative goal Shakespeare might be pursuing. It is therefore to this project that I now turn, positing that the unease of As You Like It’s fi nale is calculatingly designed, its anti-realism pointed, and its telos that subversive effect of fl aunted political disavowal one might christen the dysresolution.
