The articles we read covered several different topics, many of which apply to other Shakespeare plays as well as Elizabethan England in general.  Cirillo is interested in the pastoral elements in the play and suggests that the pastoral presentation is the underlying substance of the real world.  He also states that the court and Arden merely different from each other and that one is not more ideal or perfect that the other.  Beckman on the other hand is interested in Rosalind and states that she is a character mixed with opposites.  Using a New Historicist perspective, Beckman suggests that Rosalind fulfills opposite roles in regards to gender identity and social class for she is able to play “the man's part” in her ability to control Orlando. Montrose and Barnaby explore the central conflicts in the play regarding sibling rivalry, aristocracy, and primogeniture.  Both authors look at the ways in which Shakespeare uses the relationship between Orlando and Oliver to comment on the political and economic system of Elizabethan England and social classes of the time.

Barnaby, Andrew. “The Political Conscious of Shakespeare's As You Like It.”  Studies in English Literature 36:2 (Spring 1996): 373-397. Annotated by Katherine Penick.

Barber is interested in the struggle between aristocracy, the laboring class, and sibling conflict in Renaissance England.  He focuses on the relationship between Orlando and Oliver and suggests that Orlando's alientation from his status as a landowner serves to “intensify the differences between the eldest son and his siblings, and to identify the sibling conflict with the major division in the Elizabethan social fabric: that between the landed and the unlanded, the gentle and the base.” Keeping the problem of aristocracy in mind, Barber then goes on to ask the question: by what markings is it possible to identify the true aristocrat?  This subject appears early in the play when Orlando complains against his inablility to be trained as a gentleman, and instead goes on to state that he has in fact, been trained to be a peasant.

In looking at the sibling conflict between Orlando and Oliver in depth, Barber points to the biblical story of the “Prodigal Son.”  He suggests that Orlando is to an extent, Shakepeare's prodigal son, even though he neither squandered his inheritance nor even received it.  However, Barber believes that because Orlando lives amongst the hogs and eating with them, he thus appears to be the dutiful son.  However, Barber is also quick to point out that due to the fact that Orlando is not responsible for his fallen circumstances, his situation therefore ceases to represent moral failure and instead “comes to mark a political and economic  awareness of the social mechanisms that lead one into such penury.”

Beckman, Margaret Boerner. “The Figure of Rosalind In As You Like It.” Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Winter, 1978), pp. 44-51. Annotated by Brett Erickson.

In her article, Beckman asserts that Rosalind is essentially a reconciliation of opposites.  She takes a New Historist perspective and goes further than other scholars (like C. L. Barber, whom she also critiques) in analyzing the play's protagonist, Rosalind.  In Rosalind, there lies a concordia dscors, which implies that opposite identies are influencing Rosalind and therefore the entire play throughout its course. For instance, in the late 16th century, men were considered the thinkers who relied on their brains, while women were the emotional gender who allowed their heart and emotions to interfere with reality. However, as Beckman points out, it's Rosalind (disguised as a man) who controls the flow of the plot while Orlando acts like the woman by professing he would rather die than be withoug Rosalind's love. He even goes as far as to nail a bunch of poems on trees.

Cirillo, Albert.  “As You Like It: Pastoralism Gone Awry.” ELH 38.1(March 1971): 19-39.  Annotated by Rochelle Mackey.

Albert Cirillo's article points out the shifting perspective between the  actual and the ideal, the real world and the pastoral. Shakespeare, he says, does not shrink from a simultaneously down-to-earth attitude toward the facts of real life [such as the human condition of appetite shown in the character of Duke Frederick] as they continually undercut the polite fictions of pastoral convention. Shakespeare suggests the ideal of the pastoral should be the underlying substance of the real. The world of the possible should inform the actual, but not be an end unto itself, states Cirillo. Shakespeare gives the Forest of Arden in As You Like It an added dimension to the transitory retreat showing pastoralism awry of “away from the expected or proper direction.” That dimension explores the fallacy of accepting the pastoral as an end in itself, just as much as it points to the foibles of life in the world. The forest of Arden, though a temporary refuge, is a place where sanity is restored, where the possibility of order exists, where love finds a testing ground in a realm that is distinct from the world of Machiavellian politics. Ironically, the “real world” is a fusion of Arden and the court. Real people cannot live in a fictive Arden though they can carry it back with them as an informative ideal of life. One place, Arden or Court, is not necessarily more ideal that the other; it is simply different, and the differences are established as homely and realistic. The Forest of Arden then is a moral landscape which needs what is provided by the world outside of the forest for completion. Pure pastoralism would be idyllic, rustic, having to do with shepherds, but As You Like It show a pastoralism not separate from but inculcating, ironically, the very world from which its ideals suggest escape.

Montrose, Louis Adrian. “Of Gentlemen And Shepherds: The Politics of Elizabethan Pastoral Form.” ELH 50.3 (1983): 415-59. Annotated by Eric Sloan.

Every once in a while we’re surprised in life, like when our ruby-cheeked ex-president deftly rebuked sexual misconduct allegations with the question, “What exactly is the meaning of the term “is?” Unfortunately, life’s surprises are not always so amusing. Take Louis Montrose’s article about the historical implications, and dramatic effects, of the disparity between Elizabethan rural life and Elizabethan pastoral literary forms. Montrose’s article makes you go “huh?” but in a much more thought provoking and refreshing way.  Montrose is intrigued by the literary form known as “pastoralism.” Armed with facts about Elizabethan court and rural life he clearly shows that sixteenth century artists had reasons for keeping these literary “wild areas,” or “poems about shepherds,” less rather than more realistic. Montrose explores the effects of fictionalizing Elizabethan rural life in his characteristically long-winded, but easily accessible, prose. There’s a reason that Louis Montrose is considered one of the founders of The New Historicism movement. The man has a way with words.

Montrose, Louis A. “ ‘The Place of a Brother’ in As You Like It: Social Process and Comic Form.” Shakespeare Quarterly 32: 1 (Spring 1981): 28-54. Annotated by Tony Friedhoff.

Montrose views the central conflicts of the play as fraternal in nature. He explores the themes of primogeniture and rivalry between brothers as the defining tensions of As You Like It, and the marital unions that occur at the end of the play as serving largely to alleviate those tensions. According to Montrose, “The atonement of earthly things celebrated in Hymen’s wedding song incorporates man and woman within a process that reunites man with man” (29).

Daley, A. Stuart.  “The Dispraise of the Country in As You Like It.”  Shakespeare Quarterly 36.3 (Autumn, 1985): 300-314.  Annotated by Stephanie McKeeman.

The vast majority of critics tend to view As You Like It as a play that portrays life in the country as superior to life in the city and court.  In his article, “The Dispraise of the Country in As You Like It,” Daley argues quite the opposite.  He views the Forest of Arden as less than the perfect fantasy world that many of his colleagues believe it to be.  Daley mentions the various examples of the “perils and hardships” that are experienced in Arden.  He focuses on the specific language Shakespeare uses to describe the repetitive allusions to cold, hunger, sharing food, hunting and wounds, and the idea of flight and pursuit to show that Arden leaves much to be desired.

Fendt, Gene. “Resolution, Catharsis, Culture: As You Like It.” Philosophy and Literature. 19.2 (1995): 248-260. Online. The Johns Hopkins University Press. Internet. Available WWW: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/philosophy_and_literature/v019/19.2fendt.html Annotated by Johnny Jansson.

In issue 19.2 of Philosophy and Literature, Gene Fendt argues that As You Like It offers every type of comic resolution and catharsis. He shows that the audience parallels themselves with the characters of the play by investing in their desires and by feeling sympathy for them until those desires are fulfilled. For instance, the audience takes part in and identifies with the lives of the characters as they are in the forest of Arden because that world is closer to the heart’s desire than is the more realistic world of the duke’s court. In identifying with the differences between desire and reality, the audience is forced to ask itself, “Is desired existence (pastoral Arden) actually beneficial?” Fendt concludes by stating “in order to answer that question you would have to live in that culture of normative commitments, you would have to put yourself into such commitments; and the quality of those commitments would be your answer.”