Language of Love in Shakespeares As You Like It Essay -- Shakespeare

As You give care It is love The Language of Love The most apparent concern of As You Like It is love, and particularly the attitudes and the language appropriate to younker romantic love. This is obvious from the relationships between Orlando and Rosalind, Silvius and Phoebe, Touchstone and Audrey, and Celia and O runr. The action of the play moves back and forth among these couples, inviting us to compare the different styles and to recognize from those comparisons some important facts ab out young love. Here the role of Rosalind is decisive. Rosalind is Shakespeares greatest and most vibrant comic effeminate role. She is clearly the only character in the play who has throughout an intelligent, erotic, and richly anchored sense of love, and it becomes her task in the play to try to educate others out of their false notions of love, especially those notions which suggest that the real business of love is adopting an blow up Petrarchan language and the appropriate attitude th at goes with it. Rosalind falls in love with Orlando at first sight (as is standard in Shakespeare), becomes erotically energized, and remains so throughout the play. Shes delighted and excited by the pose and is determined to live it to the full moment by moment. One of the great pleasures of watching Rosalind is that she is incessantly celebrating her passionate feelings for Orlando. She does not deny them or try to play games with her emotions. Shes witting that falling in love has made her subject to Celias gentle mockery, exactly shes not going to pretend that she isnt totally thrilled by the experience just to spare herself being laughed at (she even laughs at herself, opus taking enormous delight in the behaviour which prompts... ...anet Lloyd. Cambridge, England Cambridge University Press, 1993. McFarland, Thomas. Shakespeares Pastoral Comedy. chapel service Hill University of North Carolina Press, 1972. Marsden, Jean. I. The Re-Imagined Text Shakespeare, Adaptation , and Eighteenth-Century Literary Theory. Lexington, Kentucky University of Kentucky Press, 1995. Odell, George C. D. Shakespeare from Betterton to Irving. Vol. 2 New York capital of Delaware Publications, 1966. Russell, Anne E. History and Real Life Anna Jameson, Shakespeares Heroines and Victorian Women. Victorian Review The diary of the Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada. 17.2 (Winter 1991) 35-49. Shakespeare, William. As You Like It. in The riverbank Shakespeare. Boston Houghton, Mifflin company, 1974. Terry, Ellen. Four Lectures on Shakespeare. New York Benjamin Bloom, Inc., 1969.