As You Like It (Vol. 90) | Linda Woodbridge (essay date 2004)
Linda Woodbridge (essay date 2004)
SOURCE: Woodbridge, Linda. “County Matters: As You Like It and the Pastoral-Bashing Impulse.” In Re-Visions of Shakespeare: Essays in Honor of Robert Ornstein, edited by Evelyn Gajowski, pp. 189-214. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004.
[In the following essay, Woodbridge attempts to rescue the genre of pastoralism from critical and cultural malignity, demonstrating how it serves as a viable romantic antithesis to the intrigue and manipulation of the court in As You Like It.]
Audiences delight in As You Like It, but critics often get twitchy about it, which seems odd. The play after all features cross-dressing, the biggest female speaking role in all of Shakespeare, an intriguingly intimate friendship between two women, an exploited agricultural laborer, and a set speech on animal rights—one would think that this comedy offered satisfactions for gender theorists, feminists,...
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