As You Like It (Vol. 34) | Donn Ervin Taylor (essay date 1982)
Donn Ervin Taylor (essay date 1982)
SOURCE: "'Try in Time in Despite of a Fall': Time and Occasion in As You Like It," in Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. XXIV, No. 2, Summer, 1982, pp. 121-36.
[In the following essay, Taylor argues that rather than presenting contradictory descriptions of time-typified by the timelessness of the forest and the time consciousness of court—As You Like It evinces a unified vision of time as the seizing of fortune and occasion.]
One of the more provocative interpretive problems of As You Like It is presented by the coexistence of two obvious but apparently contradictory facts. Under normal standards of rhetorical emphasis, the frequency with which time and the effects of time are mentioned throughout the play attests that time is one of the play's fundamental concerns, and thus that understanding the dramatist's vision of time is essential to interpreting the play. At the...
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