As You Like It (Vol. 34) | Judy Z. Kronenfeld (essay date 1978)
Judy Z. Kronenfeld (essay date 1978)
SOURCE: "Social Rank and the Pastoral Ideals of As You Like It," in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 3, Summer, 1978, pp. 332-48.
[In the following essay, Kronenfeld argues that As You Like It, rather than reaffirming the correctness of social hierarchies—as is typical among pastorals—presents a complex examination of the virtues of the high and the low in society.]
Ever since William Empson suggested that the "old pastoral … was felt to imply a beautiful relation between rich and poor," there has been interest in pastoral as a kind of social myth.1 But if pastoral "reinforces illusions of class harmony" and thus assuages "the anxiety and guilt of the dominant classes," as some critics have suggested,2 it becomes a deliberately promulgated, self-consciously "false vision,"3 "a specious, self-interested distortion of the...
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