As You Like It (Vol. 34) | R. Chris Hassel (essay date 1980)
R. Chris Hassel (essay date 1980)
SOURCE: "'Most Faining': Wits and Wise Fools in As You Like It," in Faith and Folly in Shakespeare's Romantic Comedies, The University of Georgia Press, 1980, pp. 110-48.
[In the following essay, Hassel concentrates on Shakespeare's comic vision in As You Like It, describing it as an "affirmative celebration of man's follies and his potentialities. "]
As You Like It is a banquet of the follies of human perception and human behavior. But unlike Much Ado about Nothing the emphasis is decisively on the celebration rather than the discovery and acknowledgment of this folly. Partly because of the uniqueness of Arden and its inhabitants, absurd behavior is readily acknowledged throughout the play by the lovers, the shepherds, and the courtiers. Paradoxically, only the fool and the would-be fool in Arden, Touchstone and Jaques, seem to lack this humility. Their naiveté is especially...
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