The definition of comedy has changed considerably over time. The Ancient Greeks, who had no specific genre for satire (the only literary form invented by the Romans), tended to produce satirical comedies which made didactic political or moral points. Aristotle says in the Poetics that tragedy shows men at their best, and comedy shows them at their worst. This is a reference to the traditional vices of the stock comic characters: greed, lechery, vanity, and foolishness. While the characters in As You Like It are by no means Aristophanic stereotypes, several critics, including Tolstoy, have remarked on their loose morals.
By the time Shakespeare wrote As You Like It (probably in or around 1599), the conventions of Elizabethan comedy were well defined. Chief among these was a happy ending with one or more marriages. As You Like It has considerably more; it has four, in fact: Orlando and Rosalind, Oliver and Celia, Silvius and Phoebe, and Touchstone and Audrey. Another convention was the liberal use of prose. While tragedies were written mainly in verse, a comedy could be more than half prose, as is the case with As You Like It. Various other conventions are specific to sub-genres of comedy, such as the opposition of court and rural life in pastoral comedy, the sub-genre to which As You Like It belongs.
Shakespeare's As You Like It is a classic example of a Shakespearian comedy; more specifically, As You Like It is a pastoral comedy, or a comedy that presents life in the countryside in an idealized, fantastical way. Pastoral comedies draw attention to the aspects of court life that are corrupt or otherwise unpleasant, emphasizing the beauty and ease of living in nature, and As You Like It certainly meets these descriptions.
In this comedy, many of the characters choose to escape to the forest, where different characters engage in acts meant to amuse the audience: they don disguises, play with language, and plot to overthrow members of their own family, which was Shakespeare's way of satirizing the corruption of the court. Rosalind presents herself as a boy, which makes for a multitude of jokes and double meanings, while Orlando and Oliver carry on treating each other badly. Also typical of Shakespeare's comedy is the fact that As You Like It ends with a wedding ceremony (four wedding ceremonies, to be exact), complete with double entendres about wives cheating on their husbands.
"As You Like It" has many shared elements with some of Shakespeare's more famous comedies: the idea of the forest as a magic or transformative space away from restrictive and tyrannical society ("A Midsummer night's dream"); the theme of unrequited love and gender switching from ("Twelfth night"); and the exiled Duke and his playful daughter from ("The Tempest").
The mood is light, and it is easy to read, even though it may not be as compelling a read as the aforementioned comedies.
My college professor always asked this question when we were trying to categorized the plays: Did anyone...
See This Answer Now
Start your 48-hour free trial to unlock this answer and thousands more. Enjoy eNotes ad-free and cancel anytime.
Already a member? Log in here.
die? If the answer is "no," then it is most likely a comedy. The tragedies and most of the histories record deaths within the text. The comedies never do...not even "The Taming of the Shrew".
The play is a comedy for several reasons. First, it is a comedy in the sense of its dramatic form: the good characters end up together, and the lovers marry happily. Second, the mood is rarely darkened; it is easy to believe in a good universe here. Third, though, it is also a comedy in the sense of being funny. Some of the humor ranges is pretty obvious: Touchstone is a clown, and is an open exaggeration and parody. Other elements of humor are somewhat lighter, like the word play between the characters, the puns, and so on.
Explain Shakespearian comedy features in As You Like It.
In the Elizabethan era, comedy was one of two standard types of plays; the other was tragedy. Comedy meant that the play had a happy ending; in tragedy, the hero and other important characters died at the end. Both types of play feature complicated plots. In comedy, these plots are resolved to the benefit of the hero, but in tragedy, they thwart the hero's objectives. Comedies also typically feature two lovers or love interests as the protagonists, rather than a single hero. The numerous twists and turns in the plot involve separating the lovers, matching them up with different partners, and placing various obstacles in their paths before the eventual joyous resolution (usually marriage).
The humor in comedies generally turns on plot complications, which often involve cases of mistaken identity. One or both of the lovers becomes the object of a different person’s adoration, and that lovesick admirer provides much of the humor. Disguise, along with mistaken identity, compounds the aura of trickery. However, there is also a villain, who thwarts the young lovers but then loses out. A character with a dark, pessimistic personality often appears at various points; his darkness offers a counterpoint to the protagonists’ general cheerfulness. Minor characters are often musicians, and songs, dances, and other musical numbers are interspersed throughout the action.
Finally, wordplay plays a huge role in Shakespearean comedy. Puns, rhymes, metaphors (often mixed or inappropriate), similes, and other types of wordplay are liberally used in the dialogue. Sexual innuendo is extremely common. While some of this language sounds strange to the modern viewer, Shakespeare’s audiences would have been very familiar with the double meanings and enjoyed new puns he created. Bantering between two lovers—who often don’t like each other at first—is also a standard feature. Shakespeare’s comedies often give equal billing to both the male and female hero, or have the woman saying the best lines or winning these verbal skirmishes.
As You Like It has all these elements. Orlando, cheated by his older brother, leaves home with the family servant, Adam. In parallel, Rosalind, accompanied by her cousin Celia, goes to find her father, who has lost his dukedom and is holding “court” in the Forest of Arden. Orlando and Rosalind, the audience can tell, are made for each other, but it takes the whole play before they really get together. While she did fall in love with him at first sight, to travel safely, Rosalind has to disguise herself as a young man, Ganymede, when speaking to Orlando. Ganymede's encounters and verbal jousting with Orlando, including discussions about the nature of true love, provide much of the humor—of course the audience knows her true identity and wonders how long it will take Orlando to figure it out. And of course, another woman, Phoebe, falls for Ganymede. The counterpoint to this frivolity is the melancholy Jaques, whose gloomy meditations cast a damper on the silliness. He is the one who gives a now-classic monologue that uses the extended metaphor of life compared to theater: “all the world’s a stage.”
The happy resolution of the play puts all the elements in their rightful spots—not only the lovers but also the political fortunes of Orlando and Rosalind’s father. Happy as everyone (except Jaques) was in the idyllic forest, they return to their normal lives and homes (except for Jaques, who decides to stay). Jaques's role in general, and this alteration to the usual formula of the comedies, is part of what makes As You Like It distinctive and has given it staying power.
Explain Shakespearian comedy features in As You Like It.
In Shakespeare's day, the definition of a comedy was not the same as it is today. Elizabethan/Shakespearean comedy usually involved a plotline that revolved around young lovers in difficult situations, deception among the characters (and often cross-dressing), and an ending that involved more than one marriage. The comedies emphasized the situation over the relationship and frequently dealt with class issues. All of these elements show up in As You Like It. Rosalind is in a difficult situation because her uncle has deposed her father and sent him to live in the woods; she disguises herself to join him; she falls in love with Orlando; her cousin, who has accompanied her, also falls in love, as does the court fool Touchstone. After many silly adventures, all of the lovers are married and her father regains his throne.
Explain how Shakespeare has struck a balance of romance and comedy in As You Like It.
Audiences in Shakespeare’s time would have expected any comedy to include romance. The two main characters of a comedy would have been a pair of lovers or two people destined to fall in love. Much of the plot would revolve around their initial attraction, short separation, and happy ending. A comedy also usually has a set of improbable circumstances or settings, such that a group of people is thrown together who will relate in unlikely ways, even through comic hijinks.
Love and the foolishness of human behavior (particularly in love) is a central theme of As You Like It. The primary romance between Rosalind and Orlando has many comic elements. Witty dialogue about love pervades the play. It also contains two of Shakespeare’s most famous lines about love. The characters are always falling for each other immediately, and Phoebe has the line,
Whoever loved that loved not at first sight?
In response to Orlando saying he will die of love, Rosalind says,
Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.
Their dialogue about love is generally more comic than serious and sets the tone for other characters' talk.
Shakespeare includes many layers of romance, often between characters who are not well suited to each other, to create some of the comedy’s humorous aspects. He also creates a mix-up in the identities of the beloved which has to be sorted out. This is especially true for Rosalind and Orlando. The audience learns early on that she has fallen for him when she sees him wrestle. But her father’s misfortunes cause her to flee to the forest, where she disguises herself as a youth to travel safely. Her encounters with Orlando mostly occur while she is disguised.
Added to this confusion are two more characters, Silvius and Phoebe. His love for her is unrequited, and their talks of love are full of humorous plays on words. She, in turn, falls for Ganymede, not realizing he is really Rosalind. A third love trio of Touchstone, the court jester; Audrey, a shepherdess; and William, a country boy, round out the general silliness. Their interactions have added humor from Touchstone’s commentaries about human nature.
Explain how Shakespeare has struck a balance of romance and comedy in As You Like It.
In As You Like It Shakespeare balances romance and comedy by wrapping the romance in the comedy through comedic antics that flow naturally from the character's temperament and personality traits and through situational irony. For instance, Orlando, distractedly in love with Rosalind, goes (or as he says, runs) around Arden forest attaching badly written poetry to trees and carving "Rosalind" in the bark of trees. This is pretty funny, and it flows naturally from the traits we learn about him earlier: he is exuberant; daring; full of energy; and poorly educated (which explains the bad poetry).
Another instance is that Rosalind, who is at first all distraught to think that Orlando might catch her in her man's clothing, takes advantage of the confessions of love Orlando makes while she and Celia are eavesdropping and plays a protracted and very silly joke on Orlando. This flows from what we already know of her traits: she is romantic and can be silly; she is courageous and assertive; she is playful and enjoys word play.
The situational irony in which she, of course, knows her identity while Orlando doesn't, adds to the amusement of Rosalind/Ganymede's teasing joke played on Orlando while also moving the romance forward. In the joke as she contrived it, Orlando pretends to be courting Rosalind while he is talking to Ganymede, so the audience learns his romantic sentiments.
Explain how As You Like It functions as a Shakespearean comedy.
As You Like It functions as a Shakespearean comedy is several ways. First and most simply, it ends not just happily, but with an open festival and celebration. This shows the positive aspects of life, and a community coming back together. Second and related, romance is involved, and the lovers move from separate and together (another form of both happiness and unity). Third, there are the stock techniques Shakespeare used in his comedies, like disguise and doubling. Fourth, it is funny.