SOURCE: “Myth and Type in As You Like It,” in ELH, Vol. 33, No. 1, March, 1966, pp. 1-22.

In the following essay, Knowles highlights a number of mythological allusions in As You Like It, specifically studying references to the classical hero Hercules and the Christian mythology associated with him.

If many a careful scholar still hesitates to accept mythical readings of Shakespeare, it is largely because up to now there have been few studies in the middle range between theoretical interpretations on the one hand and historical fact on the other. One has had to be content with the best of either world but seldom of both. Drawing on anthropological and psychological theories, Northrop Frye makes illuminating, even dazzling analogies between certain archetypal patterns and the structure of the plays and poems, but he offers no full explanation of how such analogous forms got into the Shakespeare canon;¹ Douglas Bush...