Resumo de As You Like It - William Shakespeare

In the year 1599, Queen Elizabeth sat on the throne of England. One of
the most brilliant political minds of her century, she had presided
over nearly fifty years of change and struggle, and brought her country
to a position of global power where it would remain for centuries.The
last half of the sixteenth century had been, as they say, pretty busy.
England had become irrevocably Protestant, with Elizabeth's
excommunication by the Pope in 1570; English explorers had reached the
New World, and English armies had bloodily subjugated their Irish
neighbors; England's warships (and bad weather) had defeated the
Spanish Armada in 1588, cementing the country's position as ruler of
the seas and confirming, in the minds of its people, that they had been
chosen by God to forge ahead in the new century. On the cultural front,
the printing press, invented about a hundred years before, was
fundamentally changing the way literature reached ordinary people. The
city of London had seen its population double in the decades following
1563, to top 200,000 people for the first time, and a massive new
middle class was influencing the economic, cultural, and literary
development of the nation. The Renaissance Humanistic movement,
spilling in from Europe, had ushered in a new era of interest in
learning and the classics; and in the past half century, English
writers and poets had, for the first time, begun to try to create
literature in their native tongue that could stand up to the greatest
works written in Latin, French, or Italian.And in 1599, a
thirty-five-year-old playwright named William Shakespeare was enjoying
his prosperity as one of the most successful people working in the
London theatre. His acting company, called The Lord Chamberlain's Men,
had great favor with the Queen, and that very year the troupe was in
the process of building its own theatre on the south shore of London's
Thames River; the theatre would be called the Globe.As You Like It
was written in this year, just after Much Ado About Nothing, Henry V,
and Julius Caesar, and just before the writing of Hamlet in 1600.
Unlike many of Shakespeare's plays, As You Like It seems to contain few
references to the world outside the theatre; unlike the political
history Shakespeare reworked in his history plays, or the
commentaries on kingship and power that pervade his tragedies,
Shakespeare's comedy plays generally seem to be light-hearted works,
meant to entertain and amuse, but not to provoke thought about anything
more politically sensitive than the nature of love or poetry. To be
sure, As You Like It contains good and bad rulers - Duke Frederick and
Oliver are tyrannous siblings, who usurp the rights of their nobler
kin, Duke Senior and Orlando - but their wickedness comes straight out
of fairy tales, and, the nature of their badness left unexplored, it is
easy to create a happy ending by simply letting them reform.
Shakespeare seems to be more interested in developing characters like
Rosalind, Orlando, Touchstone and Jacques, through whom he can explore
questions of identity, semiotics, self-knowledge and (of course) love.Some
basic historical details are useful for a richer understanding of the
play. For instance, modern readers should remember that all roles in
Renaissance drama were played by men and boys, so that Rosalind and
Celia (as well as Phoebe and Audrey) would really have been played by
youths in women's clothing; this puts the theme of cross-dressing in a
whole new light. And the mode in which As You Like It is written - in
which noble people flee the court to a simpler life as shepherds and
woodsmen - is part of an allegorical literary genre called the pastoral, which was based on classical writings and was extremely
popular in Shakespeare's day; well-known contemporaries like Edmund
Spenser, Christopher Marlowe and Sir Philip Sidney also wrote pastoral
works. (You can read more about these issues in tu Know? and Points to Ponder sections, if you're really interested.)There are
a few references in As You Like It to potentially controversial points
of Renaissance law. For instance, Oliver is legally allowed to
tyrannize Orlando because oldest sons inherited all their fathers' land
under ancient English property laws - which some people thought was a
bad idea. And Duke Senior's men are technically violating the law by
shooting deer in Arden Forest: all the deer legally belonged to the
current ruler (as you'll know if you've read the even older stories of
Robin Hood!) However these themes are not pursued very strongly in As
You Like It, and, after all, everything comes out well in the end; the
play seems to be intended to entertain and stimulate, rather than to
bear any political message.

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