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As You Like It
The main "scenic contrast" in the play is, as you say, between the court and the Forest of Arden. In this formulation, the court is a place of plotting and revenge, while the Forest is a place of...
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As You Like It
The most obvious contrast is Oliver's hatred of Orlando compared to Celia's loyalty to Rosalind at the beginning of the play. Despite being brothers, Oliver hates Orlando, in part because Orlando...
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Reference
Jaques is one of the main characters in the Shakespeare play As You Like It. He is one of Duke Senior's noblemen who lives with him in the Forest of Arden. Jaques' role in the play is centered more...
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As You Like It
In his famous monologue (As You Like It, Act II Scene vii), Jacques doesn't actually use alliteration as a primary rhetorical device. In fact, I think it might be more beneficial to ask why Jaques...
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As You Like It
Jaques seems to be saying that reputation for valor is fleeting. It is something that looks impressive like a large bubble, but it can vanish in an instant like a bursting bubble. Shakespeare...
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As You Like It
Jacques's monologue from As You Like It is an example of dramatic poetry, and as such, repetition of words and ideas is employed for emphasis and to intensify effect. Here are some examples of this...
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As You Like It
In Act 2, Scene 7 of As You Like It, the melancholy Jaques muses on the stages of life. The speech begins with infancy, with man "Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms" (144), and then it ends in...
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As You Like It
Jaques' "Seven Ages of Man" speech is fantastic, and one of my favorite Shakespearean speeches. There's a great example of alliteration toward the end of the speech, but, before we can look at the...
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As You Like It
Blank verse is another term for unrhymed iambic pentameter, the very specific format Shakespeare used in most of his plays and nearly all of his sonnets. While Shakespeare also used rhyming verse...
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As You Like It
In both of these plays, the pairs of lovers are separated to a certain degree by circumstance. Both Portia and Rosalind defy social convention by rejecting typical female roles: Portia decides to...
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As You Like It
These characters all serve a purpose in the play and it would be difficult to imagine As You Like It without them. Jacques is a melancholy philosopher, a character type who is often seen in...
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As You Like It
This theme of the seven ages of man dates back to antiquity. In classical literature, though, descriptions of these seven ages were generally encomiastic, praising the virtues appropriate to each...
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As You Like It
In Act 3, Scene 2 of As You Like It, Celia tells Rosalind that Orlando is in the Forest of Arden and is posting love poems about her on all the trees. The news makes Rosalind overwhelmed with...
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As You Like It
Rosalind speaks more lines than any other female character in Shakespeare’s works. She also controls many of the events in As You Like It, in a role that often goes to a male character. Rosalind...
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As You Like It
Pastoral literature celebrates the freedom and purity of life outside the city, in the rural areas. Unlike in real life rural areas, characters in a pastoral play don't need to work hard all day on...
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As You Like It
It’s important to remember that when reading a play the ideas and thoughts of the characters aren’t necessarily the playwright’s own. In poetry, often the poet herself is narrating thoughts...
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As You Like It
As You Like it opens during a state of conflict between two brothers. The true duke, or Duke Senior, as he is called in the play, has been exiled from his kingdom by his younger brother, Frederick....
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As You Like It
Rosalind plans for many of the play's central characters to be married all on the same day. Celia (or Aliena) will marry Oliver, Rosalind will appear to marry Orlando, and Touchstone will marry...
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As You Like It
In Act II, Scene 7, when Jaques says: All the world's a stage,And all the men and women merely players, he seems to be referring to what psychiatrist Carl Jung calls the "persona." Through the...
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As You Like It
If it do come to pass That any man turn ass, Leaving his wealth and ease, A stubborn will to please, Ducdame, ducdame, ducdame: Here shall he see Gross fools as he, An if he will come to me....
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As You Like It
Orlando's brother Oliver is forced to go to the Forest of Arden in search of his brother Orlando because Duke Frederick believes Orlando can tell him where to find his daughter Celia. The secondary...
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As You Like It
Orlando's grievances against his brother are pretty much encapsulated in the following passage of dialogue in Act 1, Scene 1. Orlando becomes so irate while arguing with his selfish and arrogant...
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As You Like It
As You Like It is a love story. Shakespeare must have called the play As You Like It because his audiences liked love stories, as audiences still do. There is plenty of love in the play, so...
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As You Like It
A lover sighing helplessly and pining for the object of his love is how Jaques personifies the third stage of a man’s life in “As You Like It”. Lovesick teenagers huff and sigh pitifully, and...
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As You Like It
The stage in a theater like The Globe was quite plain. It did not have curtains or allow for much in the way of props or decorations. Shakespeare relied on costumes to create the sort of setting...
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As You Like It
In this scene, the Duke is trying to convince his compatriots that traveling to the woods, far from being a form of self-imposed exile, is actually a desirable action. By speaking the lines in...
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The Road Not Taken
This is an interpretative question and, ironically but perhaps fittingly, the speaker of The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost would probably both agree and disagree with Jacques' well-known,...
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As You Like It
The beginning of the play does seem to offer a pessimistic view of life, with Duke Frederick and Oliver both being immoral characters in positions of power, indulging in such vices as usurpation,...
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As You Like It
The song is split into three sections interspersed between dialogue in Act II, scene 5 of As You Like It. In the first section, Amiens, a courtier, sings: Under the greenwood tree Who loves to lie...
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As You Like It
The idea of belonging is of vital importance to both works. The structure and choice of language in each work is reflective of what it means to belong, and be separated from a world of belonging....
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Under the Greenwood Tree
Shakespere's poem, "Under the Greenwood Tree," extolls the values of a simple country life, away from all of the ambitions and stresses of feudal courts. As the poem notes, it's a happy man Who...
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As You Like It
Duke Frederick as a character is shown to be somewhat similar to Oliver. Both are in dysfunctional relationships with their brothers; just as Oliver has taken what was rightfully Orlando's and used...
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As You Like It
This comedy is pastoral in that it is written in the tradition of many works at the time that sought to compare the simplicity of country life to the complex and stressful life of cities and towns....
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As You Like It
There are definitely many contrasts between Phebe and Audrey. One significant contrast is their level of intelligence. Phebe has the ability to not only understand figurative language but even to...
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As You Like It
Rosalind looks masculine enough that without looking closely a person would mistake her for a man while in disguise. The clothes make the man, as they say. The human eye can get fooled by...
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As You Like It
Shakespeare's comedies are known to be a celebration of both family structure and society at large. The fact that his comedies end with weddings, or at least plans for weddings, with all of society...
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As You Like It
While romantic comedies certainly can make us laugh, and As You Like It certainly does contain some laughable moments, the definition of a romantic comedy actually goes beyond creating laughter....
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As You Like It
It is early in Act 1, Scene 2 that Touchstone says the line, "The more pity, that fools may not speak wisely what wise men do foolishly" (86-87). What he is saying here is that it is a pity that a...
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As You Like It
Duke Senior's very first speech in Act 2, Scene 1 is a good passage to use to analyze the differences he expresses between pastoral life and court life. One significant difference he refers to is...
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As You Like It
In Act 4, Scene 1, Jaques speaks to Rosalind (still disguised as Ganymede) about why he is melancholy. As he described the stages of a person's life in Act 2, Jaques categorizes different kinds of...
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As You Like It
In Shakespeare’s play ‘As You Like It’ the girls (Rosalind and Celia) enjoy the garden of the Duke's palace, but are disturbed by The Fool (named Touchstone) who is on an errand from...
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As You Like It
There is definite truth in these words, and this statement can be used to make a powerful argument about gender, and the way that Rosalind, when she performs the role of a man, is actually much...
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As You Like It
The maiden name of Shakespeare's mother was Mary Arden and her father, Robert Arden (died 1556) owned substantial parcels of rich farmland around Stratford that he leased to farmers, including...
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As You Like It
As You Like It is a genial satire of the pastoral romance genre, and plainly Shakespeare recognized that his London audiences would enjoy humor at the expense of bucolic pretensions and country...
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As You Like It
Even before he appears on stage, we learn through a report by Duke Senior's men that Jaques is given to a chronic melancholy as they humorously relate how he has pined over the death of a stag that...
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As You Like It
Touchstone is one of the many "fools" who populate Shakespeare's comedies, romances, and tragedies. Touchstone has absolutely no part in the central proceedings of the play, nor does he represent...
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As You Like It
One significant difference between Touchstone the court jester and Audrey the simple shepherdess is their intellect. Touchstone has enough of a courtly education to qualify as a court jester. Court...
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As You Like It
William Shakespeare's As You Like It is not considered a political play. A political play refers to a drama which tends to address issues related to society as a whole. Political plays tend to...
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As You Like It
The role of the Forest of Arden is to serve as the pastoral setting needed to make the play satrical of pastoral literature. The plot of As You Like It was borrowed from a popular pastoral novel...
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As You Like It
When Rosalind disguised as Ganymede first meets Phebe in Act 3, Scene 5, a scene in which we witness Silvius pleading for Phebe to return his love, Rosalind actually flat out insults Phebe's...