Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Looking Like a Child – or – Titus: The Comedy
- Comedy and Epyllion in Post-Reformation England
- (Peter) Quince: Love Potions, Carpenter’s Coigns and Athenian Weddings
- ‘When Everything Seems Double’: Peter Quince, the other Playwright in A Midsummer Night's Dream
- Cultural Materialism and Intertextuality: The Limits of Queer Reading in A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Two Noble Kinsmen
- As You Liken It: Simile in the Wilderness
- Infinite Jest: The Comedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
- Othello and the End of Comedy
- Shakespeare as a Joke: The English Comic Tradition, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Amateur Performance
- Falstaff’s Belly, Bertie’s Kilt, Rosalind’s Legs: Shakespeare and the Victorian Prince
- The Sixth Act: Shakespeare after Joyce
- The Return of Prospero’s Wife: Mother Figures in The Tempest’s Afterlife
- Directing Shakespeare’s Comedies: In Conversation with Peter Holland
- ‘To Show our Simple Skill’: Scripts and Performances in Shakespearian Comedy
- John Shakespeare’s ‘Spiritual Testament’: A Reappraisal
- Shakespeare as a Force for Good
- Timon of Athens and Jacobean Politics
- Man, Woman and Beast in Timon’s Athens
- Rough Magic: Northern Broadsides at Work at Play
- Shakespeare Performances in England, 2002
- Professional Shakespeare Productions in the British Isles January–December 2001
- The Year's Contributions to Shakespearian Study 1 Critical Studies
- 2 Shakespeare’s Life, Times and Stage
- 3 Editions and Textual Studies
- Books Received
- Index
As You Liken It: Simile in the Wilderness
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2007
- Frontmatter
- Looking Like a Child – or – Titus: The Comedy
- Comedy and Epyllion in Post-Reformation England
- (Peter) Quince: Love Potions, Carpenter’s Coigns and Athenian Weddings
- ‘When Everything Seems Double’: Peter Quince, the other Playwright in A Midsummer Night's Dream
- Cultural Materialism and Intertextuality: The Limits of Queer Reading in A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Two Noble Kinsmen
- As You Liken It: Simile in the Wilderness
- Infinite Jest: The Comedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
- Othello and the End of Comedy
- Shakespeare as a Joke: The English Comic Tradition, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Amateur Performance
- Falstaff’s Belly, Bertie’s Kilt, Rosalind’s Legs: Shakespeare and the Victorian Prince
- The Sixth Act: Shakespeare after Joyce
- The Return of Prospero’s Wife: Mother Figures in The Tempest’s Afterlife
- Directing Shakespeare’s Comedies: In Conversation with Peter Holland
- ‘To Show our Simple Skill’: Scripts and Performances in Shakespearian Comedy
- John Shakespeare’s ‘Spiritual Testament’: A Reappraisal
- Shakespeare as a Force for Good
- Timon of Athens and Jacobean Politics
- Man, Woman and Beast in Timon’s Athens
- Rough Magic: Northern Broadsides at Work at Play
- Shakespeare Performances in England, 2002
- Professional Shakespeare Productions in the British Isles January–December 2001
- The Year's Contributions to Shakespearian Study 1 Critical Studies
- 2 Shakespeare’s Life, Times and Stage
- 3 Editions and Textual Studies
- Books Received
- Index
Summary
God said, Let us make man in our image according to our likenes, and let them rule over the fish of the sea, and over the foule of the heaven, and over the beastes, and over all the earth.
(Genesis 1:26, Geneva Bible)A Similitude is a likenesse when two thinges, or moe then two, are so compared and resembled together, that they both in some one propertie seeme like. Oftentimes brute Beastes, and thinges that have no life, minister great matter in this behalfe. Therefore, those that delite to prove thinges by Similitudes, must learne to knowe the nature of divers beastes, of mettalles, of stones, and al such as have any vertue in them, and be applied to mans life.
(Thomas Wilson, The arte of Rhetorique)For why should I presume to prefermy conceit and imagination, in affirming that a thing is thus or thus in its own nature, because it seemeth to me to be so; before the conceit of other living creatures, who may as well think it to be otherwise in its own nature, because it appeareth otherwise to them than it doth to me?
(Sir Walter Raleigh, 'The Sceptic')In the four syllables of its title, As You Like It contains both the words used to signal simile, and puts a 'like' as a barrier between 'you' and 'it'. From that title onward, this pastoral play is permeated with the idea of likeness, which is to say, imperfect identity - and the way that 'liking', even in apparently benign forms, necessarily imposes on its objects. Shakespeare describes the chronic nostalgia for nature as a sentimental manifestation of pyrrhonist anxieties, the suspicion that we can know things only as we liken them, never in or as themselves.
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- Information
- Shakespeare SurveyAn Annual Survey of Shakespeare Studies and Production, pp. 79 - 92Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003