As You Like It Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Martha Ronk

Critical Essay by Martha Ronk

SOURCE: Ronk, Martha. “Locating the Visual in As You Like It.” Shakespeare Quarterly 52, no. 2 (summer 2001): 255-76.

In the following essay, Ronk considers the relationship between the verbal and visual in As You Like It, evaluating the thematic and structural significance of visual metaphor, emblem, and theatricality in the drama.

The Forest of Arden seems in one's memory to dominate As You Like It. Yet the first picture of Arden is given by Charles the wrestler only as distant hearsay. Although one might expect a pastoral play to be replete with visual staging and visual effects (as in the sheepshearing celebration in The Winter's Tale), in As You Like It whatever “pastoral” might be is hedged round and inadequate from the outset. The most vivid pictures come in words, words already set forth, both by another speaker and by convention. The forest, not visual, is emblem: “They say...
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