As You Like It

Summary

A masterpiece is not to be explained, and to attempt to explain it is apt to seem ridiculous. I must say at once that I propose nothing so ambitious. I merely hope, by looking at one play, even in what must necessarily be a very fragmentary way and with my own imperfect sight, to illustrate something of what Shakespeare’s method in comedy may be. And I have chosen As You Like It because it seems to me to exhibit, most clearly of all the comedies, Shakespeare’s characteristic excellences in this kind. This is not to say that As You Like It is exactly a representative specimen. Indeed I am going to suggest that it is not. In this play, what I take to be Shakespeare’s distinctive virtues as a writer of comedy have their fullest scope; but in order that they may have it, certain of the usual ingredients of Shakespeare’s comdey, or indeed of any comedy, have to be—not of course eliminated, but very much circumscribed. In As You Like It, I suggest, Shakespeare took his comedy in one direction nearly as far as it could go. And then, as occasionally happens in Shakespeare’s career, when he has developed his art far in one direction, in the comedy which succeeds he seems to readjust his course.