As You Like It
This play has two principal settings: the court that Frederick has usurped from his brother, the rightful Duke, and the Forest of Arden, where the Duke and his followers (including the disgruntled Lord Jaques and the jester Touchstone) are living.
Stats for nerds
2recommend
11mentions
10people
2009–2025years
18% recommend64% neutral18% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Shakespeare is from around the same time period as Rabelais in OP. If you haven't read Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, As You Like It, they also take some getting used to but are worth it in the end.
- My school had 'As You Like It' and Animal Farm in its curriculum. I must say, Shakespeare was a lot of fun to read, especially finding so many hidden puns in simple looking passages.
My teacher also showed us a movie adaptation at the end, and watching it as a drama while you understood the nuances of their dialogues actually enhanced the experience.
- All four of Dr. (as he is now) Henderson's major points: handwringing over family structure, unifying social edifice of religion, role of luck in success, and white privilege, are not first world problems: they are specifically US problems. Eg: maybe the lower classes need religion in the US, but that is not a universal truth.
I suspect I may be part of Dr. Henderson's "elite", but since I follow[0] these idealistic viewpoints as well as promoting them, and in order to avoid the Lie Direct and stick with the Retort Courteous[1]: having read the fine article my opinion is otherwise.
[0] to the point of having voted with my feet to live in a better society than the States had, and (to judge from the news) has.
[1] see As You Like It V:iv
- "As a kid having to read Shakespeare what was lost on me,…"
What age was that? I reckon most kids think Shakespeare is difficult at the beginning because of the language, and that brings me back to a point made in the article:
"For me, Richard II is the most dull of the Henriad plays."
I now think so too, but when I was studying the play it was the first one I'd encountered with a solid story to it, so it encouraged me to figure out the language so I could follow the plot by myself.
I was introduced to Shakespeare at age 12 and in that year we studied two plays, As You Like It and A Midsummer Night's Dream and I was bored with both. The language wasn't difficult as our teacher explained everything well but I didn't find the stories interesting, they were a bit of a yawn really.
As I said that changed with Richard II and by then I was 14. Being older helped to understand nuances in the script but that was only part of it, the play simply had more substance to it which made it more interesting and worthy of study. Moreover, by then we had to first read the text without the teacher's help which would only come afterwards in class discussions.
Thus Richard II was the first play where Shakespeare actually made sense to me, it too was the first one where the language made sense without the teacher having to 'translate' every paragraph.
Putting Richard II behind me as an enjoyable experience rather than drudgery was important as it made me prepared for the great plays like Lear. That appreciation may not have happened if the order of introduction to the plays had been different.
- I know this is Heathen Heresy but I never enjoyed Shakespeare. As part of my English studies I have read the following ones - Antony and Cleopatra, As You Like It, The Comedy of Errors, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Measure for Measure, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, The Tempest, Twelfth Night, The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Winter’s Tale.
Average grades on them were between A+ to B's but dayamn! that olde timee englishee is hard to parse (even with the crib notes) and made me question the validity of them as an example of 'good English writing'
'Get Thee to a Nunnery!' Indeed.
And don't even get me started on Chaucer <shudder>.
- As Shakespeare wrote in As You Like It:
And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot / And thereby hangs a tale
Which is wittier when you realise that hour was pronounced like whore in his day.
