As You Like It (Vol. 57) | Robert Schwartz (essay date 1989)
Robert Schwartz (essay date 1989)
SOURCE: “Rosalynde Among the Familists: As You Like It and an Expanded View of Its Sources,” in The Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 20, No. 1, Spring, 1989, pp. 69-76.
[In the following essay, Schwartz argues that Shakespeare's emphasis on Familist ideology, a sixteenth-century libertine movement, accounts for the variations between As You Like It and Lodge's Rosalynde.]
Geoffrey Bullough, considering the ways in which Shakespeare used Thomas Lodge's Rosalynde, observed that As You Like It “is more than a pastoral play of escape to an idyllic world; it is rather an inquiry into the different ideas of country life current at the time, and a reconciliation between them.” Actually Shakespeare's play is an inquiry into, and a reconciliation of, quite a bit more than this. Nonetheless, Bullough is correct in stressing, as have scholars since, that, while pastoral in its...
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