February, 2005
"It goes like this..."
As You Like It: The Plot Plays On
by Rob Kendt
A plot in a play is like a melody in a song: It's the clearest
characteristic the layman can point to and say, "It goes like
this..." It's also the thing the average theatregoer or listener is apt to
find missing from a piece he doesn't like. A tune we can hum, a story we can
followÑthat's all the people ask for. Is that so wrong?
Well, it may not be wrong, but based on many of the works that have
survived as classics, it would seem to be mistaken. Try to hum a Bach tune, if
you would, or a Chopin etude. And while you're at it, try to recount the plot
of As You Like It, one of Shakespeare's most beloved romantic comedies.
You're forgiven if you falter, for As You Like It doesn't have a
fully operative story so much as a riot of incident early onÑmultiple
banishments and a would-be deadly wrestling matchÑand another rash of
reconciliations at play's end. These storm-like outbreaks of plot are separated
by several cloudless acts of sharp, funny chatter in the Forest of Arden, a
seemingly timeless and weightless idyll where not much is in a hurry to
happenÑunlike, say, the woods of A Midsummer Night's Dream, where mischief and
mayhem are the norm.
So why do we keep returning to this smiling, saturnine meditation
on love and forgiveness from 1599? And why is RosalindÑa banished noblewoman
disguised for much of the play as a boy, mainly for her own perverse
amusementÑconsidered such a great role, played in recent times by the likes of
Peggy Ashcroft, Katharine Hepburn, Vanessa Redgrave, Juliet Stevenson, and
Adrian Lester (in Cheek by Jowl's all-male 1991 production)? Surely it can't
just be that she's got the most lines of any female in the Bard's male-dominated
ouevre, though that's closer to the mark.
For in As You Like It, Shakespeare comes as close as he ever did
to a kind of Socratic dialogue in theme-and-variations form, with characters
gathering in various combinations in their languorous forest exile less to
advance the plot than to talk, mock, and muse. The mere wisps of story
Shakespeare provides are there primarily to usher the characters into the
forest as quickly as possible, and later to provide a quick and painless
ending. At the play's center, then, are some of the Bard's great ruminative
exchanges on life and love, sharpened by contrastsÑmale and female, jaded and
hopeful, city and countryÑand leavened by an easy laughter that bubbles
throughout like an unhurried brook.
One clue to the play's unbuttoned, conversational tone is the
relative scarcity of verse: The lovesick Orlando writes doggerel poems to his
beloved, and there are verse passages almost arbitrarily scattered throughout,
but for the most part As You Like It is as unconstrained by linguistic form as
by story structure. Not even Rosalind's Epilogue, in which she steps out of the
action and addresses the audience directly, is written in verse.
But there is a form behind the seeming formlessness, or a genre,
at leastÑone that would have been familiar to Shakespeare's contemporaries. The
"pastoral" narrative, which juxtaposed the rustic, idealized lives of
shepherds with the craven, petty society of the court or the city, was
commonplace at the time. Indeed, Shakespeare's source for As You Like It, Thomas Lodge's Rosalynde, had been a popular
pastoral romance only 10 years before Shakespeare's play. Lodge himself took
inspiration from a 14th century poem, "The Tale of Gamelyn," which
concerned itself greatly with the injustices and intrigues of a usurper who
sent his enemies into exile.
Both Lodge and then Shakespeare, by focusing more on the exile
than the usurping, turned to the pastoral tradition for inspiration. As a
style, the pastoral is distinguished more by poetry and song than story; by
eulogy as much as mirth; and above all by a conscious idealization of the
bucolic over what we might call the cosmopolitan. Most writers in the pastoral
modeÑwhich dates back to Greek and Roman literatureÑdid not intend this
elevation of country life over court intrigues literally, like some kind of
Elizabethan version of our own Jeffersonian myth of the gentleman farmer.
Instead they used it figuratively, formally, as a way to critique the mores of
contemporary society. The moralizing of the pastoral could also be prone to
extremes: Lodge's Rosalynde includes a number of deaths, as well as
justice for the story's usurpers.
Shakespeare not only excised the fatalities and the payback, he
largely ignored the verse form that characterized most pastorals. Perhaps most
importantly, Shakespeare did not use the rustic setting primarily to mock the
manners of the court but allowed both "sides"Ñwise shepherds as well
as witty courtiersÑplenty of stage time to share and compare points of view.
Rosalind is at the center of this lively symposium, and her
willful, even manipulative personality is the key to the play's tone. Dressed
as a boy, Ganymede, for her own safety in transport from the court to the
country, she remains disguised well past the need for safetyÑto test the love
of Orlando, presumably, but more generally, as she puts it to her friend Celia,
to "play the knave." When she chooses to end the charade, it's in her
own good time, not because her hand has been forced by an ever-thickening web
of lies built on mistaken identities, as with Shakespeare's "twin"
comediesÑThe Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night. Nor is she
cross-dressing to pull off a specific scam, as do Portia and Nerissa in The
Merchant of Venice.
This Rosalind is such a cool customer, in fact, that when she
meets her long-estranged father, the banished Duke, in the woods, she stays in
disguise till play's end. Compare this attitude to Twelfth Night's passionate Viola,
whose feigned role as servant boy to the man she loves causes her more anguish
than joy, and whose reunion with her surviving twin Sebastian, which clears up
all the confusion, is sincere and immediate.
There's a subversive appeal, of course, in such a smart, contrary
leading lady. Think of the snappy Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing, or even of Kate in
The Taming of the Shrew: These are not shrinking violets at men's mercy, though
both are ultimately humbled (in wildly varying degrees) into matrimony.
Rosalind is no less feisty, but she's considerably slyer: She realizes she can
be both more saucy and more mock-subservient as a boy than she ever could be as
a strong, thoughtful woman. And she finds that funÑfun to pull off the ruse,
and rapturous to hear her lover talk about her as if she's not there. How can
we not root for a woman who gives in to such harmless pleasuresÑwho has the
savvy, essentially, to treat exile like a sort of vacation? After all, she even
packs her fool from court, Touchstone, for the journey.
Comedies are characterized by a movement from discord to harmony,
which is why so many of them end in marriages and reconciliations. The special
genius of As You Like ItÑa title whose self-confidence mirrors its heroine'sÑis
that Shakespeare managed to minimize the discord so he could vamp expertly on his
chosen themes, like a composer holding a suspended chord in mid-air until he's
good and ready to resolve it. It's a rarefied comedy form, certainly, but
consider the durability of such plot-light and argument-heavy antecedents as The
Importance of Being Earnest, Heartbreak House, or the entire ouevre of Chekhov,
who famously thought of his plays as comedies. As You Like It proves, as if we
needed proof, that Shakespeare's virtuosity is in his insights as much as his
imagination.
Rob Kendt writes about theatre for the Los Angeles Times,
American Theatre, LA Stage, and the Downtown News.