AS YOU LIKE IT AS A TYPICAL SHAKESPEAREAN ROMANTIC COMEDY

Abstract

As You Like It is a typical Shakespearean romantic comedy. The structure deals with a love story which, though for a time frustrated, is in the end brought to a happy conclusion. There is a secondary action of strife and conflict (Orlando-Oliver, and the two Dukes) which impinges upon and obstructs the love story but which is likewise happily resolved before the end of the play.What gives Shakespeare’s romantic comedies their uniqueness is the nature of the special conflict which for a time frustrates their love stories, for the characteristic on Shakespeare’s romantic comedy deals with the conflict and comic resolution of attitudes to love. One of these attitudes is the rejection of love by persons who later succumb to it; another is the sentimental idealizing of it, and a third is the realistic concern with its physical aspect-a view generally serving to satirize and reduce the other two. Celia and Rosalind (disguised as Ganymede) Orlando and Touchstone, not to mention Phebe, Silvius and Audrey exhaust the gamut of attitude to love among them in As You Like It. Out of comic juxtaposition of these attitudes, the chief characters emerge with an ideal attitude- the best that can be hoped for in the world we know. Indeed, in As You Like It, the ideal attitude is represented throughout by the temperament of the heroine Rosalind.