Will in the Wild continued: As You Like It

In honor of Shakespeare's birthday this week, I've got a series of posts about the play, As You Like It, and specifically the current production at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland.

(Following these posts are a couple concerning the Canadian comedy series about producing Shakespeare (Slings and Arrows), a new book on Shakespeare's plays, and a short recollection of Shakespeare birthdays past.)

As You Like It has been called"one of the rarest few of the greatest comedies ever written" (Michael Gelven, Truth and the Comedic Art) and "the greatest pastoral in the English language" (A.D. Nuttall in Shakespeare the Thinker.) While these may not be majority views, I subscribe to them.

Let me borrow from my review of the OSF production to summarize the story: Orlando and Rosalind fall for each other, both are separately exiled from the court to the Forest of Arden (she by the Evil Duke, he by his evil brother) where they find the Good Duke and each other. Disguised as a boy, Rosalind tutors the clueless Orlando on how to win his lady. In the enchanted wild, order is eventually restored, brothers are reconciled with brothers, and just about everybody gets married.

The OSF production moves the action from 16th century France to 1930s America. In my column and in some of the "gallery" captions below, I discuss ramifications of this. But let's specify here as well that the time and place Shakespeare chose is at best vague, and perhaps even mythical. The real Forest of Arden was in England, for example--very close to where Shakespeare was born. So in principle there's nothing wrong with changing locations, but in practice it is often dangerous. The relevant questions are: What is gained? And what is lost?

In my column I discussed what is gained: mostly an easy identification of some of the power relationships and other aspects of the play from what audiences know about the early 1930s as portrayed in the movies: Al Capone, Okies, etc. But what I want to mention here is what is lost. The oppositions in the play are the court versus the wilderness, which means not only the forest but the country, with its farming and herding. The court thinks of itself as civilized, and the country as an uncivilized "desert." But the country folk view the court as dishonest, artificial and snobbish.

There's some sense of this in the American opposition of the period (and its fictions and films) between city and country: the city slicker versus the rural rube. But in Shakespeare there is much more to it. There is a deep theme here of where true civilization exists, in what Shakespeare calls "gentleness." (Shakespeare used the word more than any other known writer of his time.) Gentleness as in "gentleman": courtly manners that include kindness to the weak and the young, fairness to others, generosity, understanding, and romantic (or "courtly") love itself.

These oppositions are in the lines throughout the play. They are even in the contrast of Fools--the court Fool, an "artificial" fool who uses the pretense of being silly and not right in the head, versus the "natural" fool, who in the extreme would be the truly addled, as well as the congenitally different ("little people" for example), but in general could be construed as the basic country bumpkin. Touchstone is the artificial fool (and so in a different way is Jacques, the melancholy philosopher) while William is the natural fool. And both of them have ongoing subplots that comically pose the question of who is really a fool.

This particular opposition comes down to us as the distinction between "comedian" (the verbal descendant of the artificial Fool, or Jester) and "clown" (the name refers to cloddish country bumpkins and their awkward behavior.) But within this play, the differences refer to true value. Neither court/artifical Fool or country/clown turns out to have the monopoly on virtue, or on silliness. It's the pretense of each side to believe they are perfectly in the right--always fertile for comedy. And noting this complexity, even comically (as irony or buffoonery), is very Shakespearian, and one reason we still find his characters and stories true to life.

But in this production, the irony of the court pretending to represent "gentleness" while being in the business of killing and stealing is lost when the court is represented by gangsters. Orlando's complaint at the beginning of the play that he is not being educated to express his gentle or noble qualities is also lost when it appears that he is more like Cinderella--oppressed materially and in dignity by his evil brother. So the nobility that Orlando finds in the forest and fields, both in the exiled courtiers and the rural folk, as well as perhaps in what the forest itself and their relationship to it evokes, is also diminished.

But this production has many virtues--above all, clarity. It is not extreme: neither particularly brilliant nor ever very bad. The one daring bit of action I noted was in Rosalind's encounters with Audrey, "a country wench" who the ardent William is in love with, but who takes a shine to the glossy young man Rosalind is pretending to be. There is a certain homoerotic quality to Orlando's attraction to Rosalind in her disguise as a boy. But this is the first time I saw it doubled by Rosalind appearing to be sexually excited by Audrey, even as she rejects her.

It is the overall quality of the production and its transparency that causes me to admire it and recommend it. Its theatricality connected with the audience when I saw it, and I certainly don't dismiss that. Yet it also restrained the excesses of many productions these days, such as an overabundance of physical theatre at the expense of the text (though there are some surprising comic turns.) Turning every play into a circus is not the only alternative to flat and lifeless recitations. OSF often finds a happy medium, as they do in this production.

What I hope I suggested in my column is that this play can be seen as championing the role of the imagination--of identifying, experiencing vicariously, which can lead to empathy and understanding of others, as well as more accurate self-examination. Theatre must always consider how to spark the imagination of the audience, so practical ways of doing so are important. Theatre is not theoretical.