As You Like It - William Shakespeare (1623)

Résumé du document

Northrop Frye, in A Natural Perspective, explains that there is often in Shakespearian comedies what he calls "a displacement from a world of chaos to a forest". The world of chaos is in As You Like It the Court, the spatial framework which used to prevail in the first Act of the play. Normally associated with the beautiful and the orderly, the Court needs here to be understood as a "chaos". The resolution of this chaos will be initiated in the wood, normally the place of the irrational and the dangerous. It gives us a first key idea to analyse Shakespeare's comedy As You Like It: it operates a reworking of the traditional lairs and plays on paradoxes. The scene (II, 4) which is going to be analysed functions as a specific instance of "displacement" that Frye writes about. One must bear in mind though that displacement only is not enough; characters also have to master the codes of the new place, to avoid the state of penury and be able to nurture themselves.

Extraits

[...] In this scene, Rosalind is among the characters who speak the least but who understand the most. Thus, she remains central. She reaches success in two ways: first, in her being disguised as a man and in performing a perfect illusion, second, by her understanding she needs to feed her reflection thanks to the others, to borrow from the others in order to reshape her vision of love. She takes risks and gains knowledge, in between the pastoral extravagances of Silvius – more a slave than a lover - and the exaggerated earthly pragmatism of Touchstone – the motley fool. [...]

[...] This is the case especially when dealing with the notion of “identity”. Rosalind uses two metonymies to refer to this inner self: “spirits” line 1 and “my heart” line 4. If transvestism works and makes a perfect illusion, then it implies that the fluidity of gender identities is being suggested. Rosalind, by her very first words, delivers us the solution: she evokes her “spirits” line 1 and not her “spirit”, implying a certain multiplicity of identity(s) she is free to select and embodies. [...]

[...] The truth is delivered through lies and simulations. It is to be viewed for instance when Rosalind declares: “Alas, poor shepherd, searching of thy wound, / I have by hard adventure found mine own.” (Lines 41-42). She says things bluntly and deliberately speaks about her intimate wounds to the others. Plus, several words in the extract prove that it works as a prosopopeia, belonging to the theatre lexical field: “actions” line 27 and “fantasy” line 28 both pronounced by Silvius, “apparel” line “adventure” line 42 and “entertainment” line 71, both uttered by Rosalind, and finally “capers” line 51, another word for “actions”, delivered by Touchstone. [...]

[...] As the characters operate a metamorphosis, the external doubles are erased, for the internal double to exist. The only character who remains untouched by this process is Touchstone and it appears logical: he endorses the role of the one who cannot evolve in the play, the villain. Just as the costumes of Rosalind and Celia function as clues to get their capacity to change, the greend and yellow apparel of Touchstone points to his incapacity to evolve. His only function consists of going to the extremes, as when he systematically lowers elevated abstract considerations to body parts. [...]

[...] They function through repeated automatisms. Actually, Touchstone systematically displaces a philosophical concern or a moral idea to transform it to a physical part. It happens throughout the scene and right from the beginning. The scene opens itself on Rosalind speaking about her “spirits” and Touchstone replies: “I do not care for my spirits if my legs were not weary.” To him, legs, and by extension other body parts, are to be considered prior to the mind. It happens in the exact same way when Rosalind tells him “Thou speak'st wiser than thou art aware of” line 53. [...]