Actor Packet

Please note that this actor packet has been created for the cast and production team of SDSU's Fall 2012 production of As You Like It. The packet is for educational purposes only, and all sources are cited where necessary. Please re-use with permission; contact Jessica Ordon at ordon [dot] jess [at] gmail [dot] com.

As You Like It

The dramaturgical run-down!

An Overview

As You Like It is one of Shakespeare’s most well known comedies, unique in that it features a spicy leading lady (who has the most lines of any woman in a Shakespeare play). It is also possibly the least plot-based of Shakespeare’s commonly performed plays. As the introduction to the Riverside version notes, AYLI contains two small explosions of actual events. One is at the beginning of the play, when the characters are forced to flee court for various reasons, and one is at the end, right before the play culminates in not one, but four weddings. In between these spurts of action, “Shakespeare seems to go out of his way to avoid generating suspense” (Barton 399).

Pastoral-themed plays and poems, concerned with nature,
the "great outdoors," etc., were popular in Shakespeare's
day. There are references to fellow pastoral poets in AYLI,
including Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson. Pastoral
pieces were typically performed for, or dedicated to, Queen
Elizabeth, who would travel the countryside during
summertime “for a taste of carefully orchestrated rustic
living” and to meet the common people (Dusinberre 6). More
relaxed, “common” behavior was allowed of Elizabeth and
her court during this time, hence the idea of the pastoral—
or countryside— as freeing, open, outdoor space.

So, how can a play that doesn’t have a driving plot be such a successful piece of

theatre? The answer to this question lies in the rich characters and ideas, as well as the beautiful, open pastoral setting*, of AYLI. In a sense, the form of the play fits the content: the characters have left behind the fast-paced tension of civilized life at court for the slower, simpler beauties of the outdoors. A sense of play— both play-acting like we create in the theatre, as well as playfulness— lends AYLI an endless appeal for audiences and theatre-makers.

As we delve into AYLI in the coming weeks of rehearsal, consider how the characters play: both in the “outdoor” setting of the piece as well as in the theatre space; both in terms of who they are able to be when they are outside of the court, and how you, the actor, choose to portray them. If you could get away from the everyday, who would you decide to be and how would you live? There are no wrong answers, only endless possibilities.

“Life is a continual process of fool-making.”

 – Orrin E. Klapp, “The Fool as Social Type.”

“The human mind.  The human mind does play. The human mind. Plays because it plays.”  

– Gertrude Stein, Identity

About Will Shakespeare

• Born April 23rd, 1564 (based on the baptismal date, April 26th, 1564) in Stratford-upon-Avon, England 
• Died April 23rd, 1616 at 52 years old 
• Son of glover, John Shakespeare, and Mary Arden 
• Was educated in Stratford, arrived in London around 1580 
• Married Anne Hathaway in 1582— Shakespeare was 18, and Anne was 26, and pregnant. “Emergency” wedding! 
• Had three children, Susanna, Judith, and Hamnet, who remained in Stratford with Anne, even though Shakespeare’s career was in London

Have one of Will’s Shakes at the As You Like It Café, in 

modern Stratford-Upon-Avon, England.

• His complete works encompass 38 plays, 158 sonnets, two narrative poems, and other poetry. 

• Well over half of Shakespeare’s sonnets were written for a young man of unverifiable identity, while the others were written for a “Dark Lady,” a mistress of Shakespeare’s. 

• Most scholars believe the young man the sonnets are dedicated to was Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton. Many argue that the love expressed in the sonnets is of a romantic nature. Others claim that the sonnets are written in the spirit of close friendship. 

This plaque marks the original site of the Globe theatre 

in London, now obscured by a housing development.

Check out this 1989 New York Times article about the 

excavation of the original Globe theatre.

• Shakespeare was also an actor, albeit not as successful an actor as he was a playwright. It is speculated that he played Adam in As You Like It, and the ghost in Hamlet. 

• He was also a shareholder in the first Globe theatre, built in 1599, burned down in 1613. A second globe theatre was built in 1614, and closed in 1642. Shakespeare’s Globe was reconstructed in London in 1997, and stands 750 feet from the site of the original Globe.

The site of Shakespeare’s grave, Holy Trinity Church in 

Stratford-Upon-Avon. The marker on the grave threatens a 

curse should the bones be removed– to date, no one has 

ever done so.

• Shakespeare was a known borrower of plots and characters. More than once, he borrowed and subsequently sensationalized his fellow writers’ work, provoking playwright Robin Greene to attack him as an “upstart crow, beautified with our feathers” (qtd. Shapiro 208). 

• AYLI is based on Thomas Lodge’s 1590 novella Rosalynde or Euphues’ Golden Legacy, which came from a fourteenth- century poem, The Tale of Gamelyn. The original poem was a masculine, war-themed story, but Lodge turned it into a pastoral romance. Though it was Lodge’s idea to have Rosalind disguise herself as a boy named Ganymede, Shakespeare invented all of the secondary characters (Jacques, Touchstone, Silvius and Phoebe, etc.), jazzed up the poetry, and added a fourth wedding to Lodge’s original three weddings at the end of the play.

A Brief Production History 

Written between 1598 and 1599, AYLI was likely performed for the first time not in the public theatre, but before the court of Queen Elizabeth at Richmond Palace in 1599. Richmond Palace was situated across from Westminster Palace on the south side of the Thames in London (see map: the red star marks the approximate location of the Globe, and the yellow star marks where Richmond 
stood). The play would have been performed in one of the palace’s halls.

AYLI would have been a popular choice of play in Restoration England, when women were first allowed to act onstage and it was considered sexy (if not licentious) for a woman to appear onstage dressed in men’s clothes. Charles Johnson wrote an adaptation of AYLI called Love in a Forest in 1723; it was performed at the Drury Lane theatre in 1740.

One famous AYLI production of the 20th century was the Old Vic rendition (London), which featured Michael Redgrave as Orlando and Edith Evans as Rosalind (pictured above right). The two actors had a passionate love affair during the production, and interestingly, Michael Redgrave is now known to have been bisexual (Dusinberre 17). 

The 1936 film, As You Like It, features Laurence Olivier as Orlando, while a 1950 Broadway production of AYLI featured Katharine Hepburn as Rosalind (below, left).

The Royal Shakespeare Company recently produced AYLI in 2011 (pictured below), and both The Old Globe in San Diego and Shakespeare’s Globe in London are featuring the play in their seasons this year.

Additionally, The Public Theatre is celebrating its 50^th anniversary season of Shakespeare in the Park with AYLI.

 

A Boy, Pretending to Be a Girl, Pretending to Be a Boy 

In Shakespeare’s theatre, where women were not allowed onstage, boys or younger men played female characters. Thus, Rosalind would have been played by a young man, who pretended to be a woman, who then disguises herself as a man. (Victor/Victoria with Julie Andrews, anyone?)

The Abduction of Ganymede, Eustache Le Sueur

Of course, in the Elizabethan age there were many opponents of the theatre who cited cross-dressed boys as one source of theatre’s immorality. “Cross-dressing excited homoerotic feeling both in the actors on stage and in the audience,” anti-theatricalists believed (Dusinberre 9). There are, in fact, very obvious homoerotic overtones in AYLI, since Rosalind woos Orlando by pretending to be a man. Although she tells him to imagine that she is Rosalind, Orlando’s unquestioning compliance with her scheme entails an acceptance on his part that he is flirting with a “man.” Also, the name “Ganymede” is a mythological reference to the beautiful mortal young man that served as the Roman god Jupiter’s cupbearer. The mythical Ganymede is a poetic symbol of homoerotic desire.    

In any case, the character Rosalind demonstrates a remarkable awareness of the performativity of gender. In other words, Shakespeare wrote a character that was in many ways ahead of her time; Rosalind acknowledges herself as “playing” the boy Ganymede, and moreover characterizes the feminine wiles of a fantasized version of herself to her lover, Orlando. Her consciousness of putting on a male outside but retaining her female, “inner” self is one of the traits that makes Rosalind fascinating and exciting to both actors and audiences even today.

Contemporary gender and sexuality discussions recognize that a person’s gender identity is not dictated by the individual’s physical sex. Gender is something that can be learned and “performed.” Moreover, there is an understanding that male heterosexuality is considered the “norm,” but sexualities take many different forms. Especially relevant to today’s discussions is the idea that our society constructs binaries— male/female, homosexual/heterosexual— that don’t actually encompass the many possibilities of gender and sexual identity. Unfixing these binaries can help promote acceptance of those who don’t simply fall into one category or the other. Hence, it can be eye opening and beneficial to us to re-explore theatre like AYLI that experiments with gender and our notions of how it operates. (See this webpage for more information about biological sex, gender, and the "gender spectrum.")

What Theatre Was Like in Shakespeare’s Day

Before 1567, theatre spaces that existed solely for theatre did not exist in London. Instead, actors performed privately in palace halls, private homes, and mobile stages. Puritans and other moralists decried theatre and public performance, as well as the many other unsavory entertainment forms that existed in London— bearbaiting, cock-fights, public punishments and executions, and “houses of resort,” or whorehouses. The first public theatre space constructed exclusively for the purpose of staging plays and housing audiences was called the Theatre, constructed in 1576. Amongst other theatres of Shakespeare’s time were Blackfriars, the Rose, the Swan, and the Cockpit, to name a few (see image above, “Shakespeare’s London”).    

The Globe, which Shakespeare is most associated with, opened in 1599. Like many other theatres and entertainment venues, it was situated on the south side of the Thames River, slightly removed, on the outskirts of the city. The Globe stage was a rectangle encircled by elevated seats. The space between the edge of the stage and the first raised seat, the pit, was reserved for audience members referred to as groundlings, who paid the cheapest fare for standing space at the theatre.

Anyone who could scrape together a penny could attend the theatre. It was a gathering space for the common public, as well as richer patrons who supported theatre (Queen Elizabeth amongst them). A flag raised above the Globe indicated that a play was showing that day; a white flag signaled a comedy, black, a tragedy, and red, a history. Two pennies granted a covered, elevated seat, and three purchased a cushioned seat in the galleries where spectators would be socially visible.

Ale could be purchased and consumed inside the theatre— it was likely a very noisy place. Audiences responded vocally to events on the stage and were not expected to remain quiet during performances. Shakespeare’s actors, though costumed, used no set except the existing space of the theatre, and typically acted in up to six different plays a week. As Elizabethan culture was highly oratory, line memorization was not an issue for the actors.

Rather than being the type of culturally respectable event we associate with an evening of Shakespearean theatre (see the Old Globe Theatre, San Diego, right), a trip to the theatre in Shakespeare’s day was a far earthier, bawdier experience. Theatre was pure entertainment, for any citizen of London who could find his way into the space; a ripping good time!

Sources 

• Blakemore Evans, G. and J.J.M. Tobin, eds. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2^nd Edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997.
• Dusinberre, Juliet As You Like It. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2006.
• Greenblatt, Stephen. Will in the World. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005.
• Barton, Anne. “As You Like It.” The Oxford Shakeaspeare: Complete Works. 2^nd Edition. John Jowett, William Montgomery, Gary Taylor and Stanley Wells, eds. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005. 399-402.
• Larque, Thomas. “A Lecture on Elizabethan Theatre.” Shakespeare and His Critics. 2001. Web. 10 May 2012.
• Shapiro, James. 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. New York: HarperCollins, 2005.