As You Like It (Vol. 34) | Eamon Grennan (essay date 1977)
Eamon Grennan (essay date 1977)
SOURCE: "Telling the Trees from the Woods: Some Details of As You Like It," in English Literary Renaissance, Vol. 7, No. 2, Spring, 1977, pp. 197-206.
[In the following essay, Grennan examines the means through which Shakespeare extends the pastoral conventions of his source material to create in As You Like It a work that is allusive, ironic, and "pastoral in the fullest sense possible."]
Some general assumptions about the nature of As You Like It tend to divert critical attention from certain of the play's specific details, either drawing them without distinction under the "pastoral" or the "anti-pastoral" umbrella or ignoring them altogether.1 The aim of the present essay is to subject a few of these usually neglected details to a scrutiny more exact and speculative than they normally receive. Such a reading will establish, I trust, the precise manner in which the...
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